In Japanese culture, one's dreams on the night of the first day of the new year (that's a mouthful) can hold important omens for the new year and oneself. I haven't gone into a whole lot of overanalyzing of the dreams I had, but I wrote them down as soon as I could after waking. They're here for anyone who's interested, until I get the rest of what I want to write into blog form...
壱
Two small dragons barely escape beyond a hidden door in the wall of a severely flooded house. Arrows strike the door where they swam just moments before. Outside the door, the two begin to quarrel.
“There’s no hope. It’s over. The country will soon go to ruins.”
“It’s not over yet,” the older one says. “There is still hope. I have something to show you.”
The two press together under a jingasa hat that surfaces just above the water and make for the other end of the house. Beyond the porch under which they hide, archers continue to shoot at and ransack the house. As the two of them swim slowly out from beneath the porch, they see a small drop, now a small waterfall from the flood, toward the east extension of the house. Under the water shines the light of a single room. The older dragon moves them toward it.
A group of children are pretending to be soldiers on just this side of the porch, and they playfully shoot their smaller versions of arrows at the hat as the approach. A couple of them, unlike the adults, immediately recognize that something is swimming beneath the seemingly lost floating hat. A robust child takes one of his arrows and ducks it into the water beneath the hat to strike at the victims from below. The arrow pierces the breast of the older dragon, who cries and sinks away. The other takes an arrow the child has dropped and strikes from the water up into the child’s neck. The arrow misses all vitals but visibly wounds the child, who attempts to cry out, finds himself unable to voice anything, and immediately scrambles away from the scene. The dragon turns to help his senior, only to find him sunk, dead, at the bottom of the drop.
弐
There is a grand stage with no curtains, that opens to no audience. The strong air of countless deaths hangs here. In a past age, we see men come here - willingly or forcibly we cannot be sure. They stand almost naked with their hands tied behind them, but they do not struggle or fight to flee. An unseen presence watches from the impenetrable darkness back stage; but it shows no signs of controlling or urging them forward.
One of the men onstage looks upward as something too fast to be seen descends upon him, snatching him up before drawing back to its invisible overhead origin in a flash of light. The man begins to shout something before he disappears, but it is indecipherable.
A second man goes and stands waiting on a one-board plank above a hole in the stage. From the underwater depths below, a shapeless red mass rises and rapidly changes shape to encapsulate the man, like a large deranged mouth that twists shut to incarcerate its victim. A face like that of an ancient dragon mask appears painted on its outside, its eyes glaring hauntingly forward at nothing. As suddenly as it appeared, the mass drops into the water and sinks to the bottom. As it buries itself in the sand, a voice inside can be heard crying, “This is it! This is the last chance!” It then disappears forever into the sandy bed.
Another man hangs perilously from his ankles by a rope dangling above the waters. It dips him down to about his midriff. We watch from his eyes, gazing down into the merky blue darkness, as another dark maroon shape begins growing larger in approaching him. It looks like a bloated twelve-armed starfish, spinning something shiny from its center. It stops a few meters away and shoots its central appendage forward, seemingly past the man’s line of sight. Then, the pain of the neck being severed from one’s shoulders dawns on him, and we see ourselves drifting slowly downward as the head falls away from the body, toward the gaping, featureless creature. We hear the man’s final thoughts, “It’s the last chance. Before its all over...”
From the darkness of the backstage, something seems to bow its figureless head. thousands of men continue to come onstage in this manner.
参
The stage is bare. It appears old and mostly unused; however, there is still something eery about it that reminds one of what it was before.
A black foreigner in a mustard-color kimono stands below where the audience is supposed to be, waiting. On the stage appears five or six other people: a Japanese man, a white curly-haired blonde, and several younger adults who appear to be their children. They peer down over the man in a heavy solidarity.
“All have come to us,” says the woman.
“All has come to us,” says the man.
They are the family of Manketsu (万決 - ‘a thousand decisions’). Their children are theirs more by adoption than by bloodline. Many appear ready to kill themselves, or kill the foreigner below if given the order to do so.
“Why do you choose us?” the man quietly demands.
The foreigner lowers his eyes for a moment, thinking of an appropriate answer. He finally thinks of something to say just as the woman breaks the silence.
“Perhaps you’ve heard of us without knowing it. After all, you surely don’t know the origins of such Westernized poetry as the child’s ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider,’ now do you?”
Confused, the foreigner looks up to see them all staring heavenward as the woman begins to rehearse what could only be the commonly silly rhyme hideously warped by an ancient Japanese tongue. Devoid of its familiar light and playful English rhythm, it falls into a deeper and deeper mystic frequency, like a mantra sung by a thousand hermit monks. A clearer sense of the poem’s true meaning begins to flash in his mind, beckoning images of things forgotten and things never meant to be understood.
The family onstage seems to wait for something to descend upon them, surrounded in an air of life-threatening urgency by the words, filled with an unbearable weight in dread of whatever is to come. The foreigner falls back, perplexed by the scene before him, as the earth all around him slowly shifts into a violent quaking.
>>><<<
All is black except for the bright white lines of a two-dimensional grid that lights up beneath my feet. I stand on one of the thicker jagged lines apart from and above the grid by a small distance. The grid bears a resemblance to a warped graph without value tags, and the line I stand on reminds me of a map’s train track depiction, though one without a beginning or end in sight.
I look out over the horizon of lines to just barely see a large dot connected by another thick formless line that runs somewhat in my direction. I travel effortlessly at great speeds over the one I am on, to eventually find the 45 degree-angle junction I suspected existed. Taking the new route, I see blurry flashing images to my right, that each for an instant fill the black void beyond my path - images of familiar places and people.
Coming to a stop at the dot that has only barely room for standing, I wonder what I was supposed to find here. The images over the horizon have stopped, and I stand simply waiting.
In this place between sleep and wake, I quietly recall that everything, without exception, is meaningful; it is to one’s benefit to acknowledge that before continuing to anywhere. At that moment, the space beneath my feet rises, like a topographical map gone three-dimensional. I am lifted higher and higher into the air on the peak of a giant land mass, whose sides are lined with more presently shapeless symmetry toward its base. The white dot extends out, seeming to melt toward the downward-sloped sides, into an elaborate snow cap. As it comes to rest in its growth, I find myself looking down from the crest of Fuji-san into the expanse below.
All around the mountain, against the deep green of trees at its base, thousands of tiny grey buildings form, sweeping outward, as though a light is dilating from the mountain’s center to show what lays beyond. I watch the progression of buildings move farther into the distance in all directions, occasionally running up against much smaller dead hillsides and shore lines. The mountain’s sides begin to steam and turn to bellowing smoke.
“This is what I’m meant to see,” I think as I become dissolved in the clouds of steam and am blown up into the invisible heavens above.
No comments:
Post a Comment