A dream fragment: I am in the corridor of a military spaceship. I seem to be a female officer. While chaos and red lights and klaxxons surround me, I calmly crouch to access an ancient-looking computer terminal in the floor. At the command line I type in “Contact Adama”. Apparently I’ve just had my first Battlestar Galactica dream.

Another dream took place at a really lame high school party. Looked like it was in a YMCA or something. I sat down on a computer and visited my friend Bill’s site. I clicked on a link and a video started to play. It seemed like a strange personal ad, only it wasn’t for a dating service but for readers of Soldier of Fortune magazine or something similar. Like if you needed another commando for your team, you’d check out these ads. Anyhow, there was Bill, only it was this super-buff Rambo version of him. He had shaved his head and had tattoos around each now muscular arm. The video was a rapid-fire montage. He was doing all these funny poses, changing hats from this bike Nazi helmet to one of those hats you wear while exploring the Australian outback. He had a paintball gun in some of the shots. It was funny because it still looked like Bill, with his perpetually-quizzical expression only with a shaved head.

Doug lives a few blocks from the small kingdom I have been exiled from, namely our house. He has an arcade and a surveillance system. I meet a bunch of people and immediately forget their names. One couple is divorced, but they are trying to date each other again. This is meant to give me hope. Part of me is already waking up. Part of me is insane with glee that I am free again. I don’t want that kind of hope. Not anymore.

We go to this dive called “Misty’s Hideaway” and I can tell it’s somewhere I would never have decided to venture into on my own. I decide that if I have a beer and a pack of cigarettes, I’ll be fine. I’ll have something to do with my hands and something to put in my mouth when the inevitable uncomfortable silence arrives. I sit with them at a back table and begin to study the crowd. So it’s come to this, I think.

But then I see you talking to this guy who looks like he walked out of an article in Rolling Stone, circa 1986, during the hair metal era. I have no idea who you are, but I’m transfixed. I’m already jealous of this guy. I’m already hoping you’ll blow him off. Impossibly, you eventually stop listening to him tell you about a dream and you walk over to our table, into my dream.

Somehow you know the people I am with. You start talking to me. I have no idea what was said. I decide that you’re out of my league and don’t try to impress you and instead just talk to you like a normal person. I may have bummed a few cigarettes from you. I can’t believe how beautiful your eyes are, so I look at my drink or the ashtray or a mark on the table instead of staring.

I watch you dance and it is the most terrifying sight I have ever seen. I am not ready to move through a world that shimmers in a heat haze generated by your gyrations. My heart is gathering itself from a hundred blasted bits and it cannot deal with such beauty.

Doug is having an after hours party and I make sure you know you’re invited. I fear that you won’t come. I fear that you will come. Doug notices my interest and wonders aloud if he should tell you that I want to “take you home and fuck your brains out.” I decide not to tear his throat out.

You do show up at his house. You remember me from the bar. You mingle about the crowded house as though you know everyone. I listen to everything you say. You talk about white water rafting on the Colorado River. Everything you say is an adventure.
When you leave I mutter something about hoping to run into you again. You hand me your phone number. I couldn’t believe it. It was like someone handed me a map to Narnia.

I will always be mindful of the interconnectedness of things. I will always see you for the first time.

We meet for lunch for the first time at Woody’s, some café a short distance from where I work. On the phone I am so excited and nervous that all the street names rearrange themselves on my map and fictitious intersections spill out of my babbling mouth.

As we talk at lunch, I wonder if I should say anything about the divorce and potentially ruin my chances with you. I decide not to put any spin on my answers and answer your questions completely and honestly.

I will always tell you the truth.

I am at a barbeque with the other members of my church small group, talking to Pastor Alan as he grills burgers. This man once had a demon attached to him while he was still a pastor. He was asked to leave our church because he believed in demons and the supernatural and all sorts of “crazy” things. He left to start his own church and I followed him.

I tell him about you and he warns me not to become involved with you. He fears that because of my compassionate heart I will become entangled in your life and try to rescue you somehow.

I nod and completely ignore his advice.

I will try to follow my heart, even if it contradicts the wisdom of men.

You’re stretched across the couch in my apartment in the heights, intoxicatingly beautiful. We’re having a wonderful discussion/argument. You’re saying things that part of me has always known to be true, yet I am arguing against you. It has been a long time since I’ve had such a stimulating conversation. Cathy would always get mad whenever we had a “debate.” She thought I was trying to prove that I was smarter than she. I was just exploring a topic, trying to understand it from different angles. This method rarely goes over well with most people, including you. Everyone always thinks I am advocating a point of view when I am actually exploring a line of reasoning objectively.

You’re trying to convince me that the people in my stories are real, existing in another dimension of possibility. I insist this is quite impossible. I am forgetting the long conversations I used to have with imaginary mice and dragons in my bedroom growing up. The group of very ordinary children I would visit in a completely invented thoughtspace. The wispy dark creatures with glowing eyes, uncoiling from the ceiling, skittering about the furniture. I invited them into my house and they never left.

Your opinions, thoughts and beliefs are precious to me.
The fact that you speak what is true is more important than whether or not I agree.

You have invited me to come over to have brunch with you and your children. I am nervous about meeting them. What if they don’t like me? What if they think I am an intruder? What if they generation gap me and make me feel old? I enter your house for the first time and they are all looking at me. I forget their names and who is older than whom.

You show me your artwork and I am very impressed and at a loss for words. I feel like anything I say would be stupid and ignorant. I try to convey my lack of understanding and un-connectedness with your artwork, but it comes out all wrong.

I get the tour of the house and see your bedroom. It is one of the most inviting and sensual places I had ever been in. I guess that I would probably never see it again.

I love your family and your home and I know that they are not mine.

I will always be grateful to you for sharing them with me, though there is nothing I could do to deserve them.

We are at an event out in the desert where they have the 3-sided hole. Aaron is with us. I am dating Amy and our relationship is at its platonic zenith. I see you as a beautiful woman who am friends with, someone I care deeply about. I look forward to our cigarettes and glasses of wine out on your porch. This is who we are. A week ago I was talking to Jodi on the phone and talking about going to this event. She teased me about maybe you and I could snuggle together in a sleeping blanket. I explained that it wasn’t like that; we were just friends. Besides, there was Amy.

I faced the evening with a bit of guardedness. This gathering had all the trappings of some kind of pagan shenanigans and I wasn’t sure what to think about it. But by end of the evening I was covered in glitter, my feet washed, my head anointed with frankincense, I was wearing a sarong and tripping on mushrooms.

And you were dancing, dancing, spinning and bending. A flame, a dream, a shadow, a reed, the invisible flow of life energy.

I want to know and love each of your changing shapes.

A tale from folklore:

A boy began to climb a mountain.
Halfway up, he encountered a snake coiled in the shadows of a rock.
“Little boy,” hissed the snake. “Winter is coming and if I do not make it over to the other side of the mountain, I will freeze to death. Please put me in your pack and carry me with you to the other side.”
The boy immediately replied,
“But you are a snake. Snakes bite little boys.”
“No,” said the snake, “I will not bite you. If I did, you would die and then there would be no one to carry me over the mountain.”
The boy considered this and it seemed like wisdom. Warily he agreed and slipped the snake into the pack on his back. Together they journeyed up and over the mountain.
When they reached the other side, the boy took the snake out and said, “There, on this side you will be safe from the winter.”
“Thank you,” said the snake and bit the boy.
“Why did you do that?” the boy cried,
feeling the poison flowing into his body.
“It is in my nature,” said the snake.
“You knew what I was before you picked me up.”

Another I met in an afternoon vision, folded note slipped sideways past my ribs,
Warning me of a red fire boiling in from the east.
My men barely had time to lash me to the mast
The last knot snug just as the golden voice rained aching over my heart.
I remained ever an island to her, she a sunset strangely settling in the east again.
A span of time and circumstances cut between us and I fear I cannot Bridge it.

My soulmate stirred beside me in sleep when our names were the alternating beats on a drumskin stretched between the teeth of gods hunkered in secret parley until one sneezed and one laughed and the skin snapped, a canvas whipping in the wind, paint crying over the map of all the child-smudged continents from where they would send for our varied parts only to scatter them over and over from the cliffs of the moon down to clay-slick river valleys where red monkeys sift the water for the syllables of the incantation that will make us whole.
Her voice is the sea foam call Beckoning Again from the cave where fire children raise pinky fingers to write messages in mercury. For her I will always answer, will always fly and fall, shudder and be still.

The three will never weave me a skein of promises, a blanket under which I can sleep untroubled
The three will never confer and trade secrets
The three will never compare their familiar bruises
But when they cry out from each horizon they are a chorus and their song finds a common center
They are the Sisters of the Storm and my oceans boil when they draw near.

1. Get a piece of paper.  This paper represents a reality of which you are the Supreme Master.  Anything you write or illustrate on the paper is absolutely true and real.  Write down a few things that are true of your reality.  Now, create a character (human or not) and name it.  Have your character take issue with one of your truths and disagree with it.  Which one of you is correct in this matter?  Why?  Is it enough to say that your rules are valid simply because you say so?  To whom are you justifying your decisions?  Is it possible for this scenario to take place somewhere other than your sheet of paper?  In a lab, perhaps?  Or within a computer program?

2. Given the vast number of planets in the universe, does it seem likely that there is another planet inhabited with life?  Is it reasonable for us to assume that we are more intelligent or advanced than every other possible form of life?  Is it possible that there exists a race of beings to which we would be comparable to the dogs of their world?  Imagine that we ARE that race of advanced beings and we are having this same discussion.  Could there be yet another race of beings more advanced than we are?  How many permutations of this scenario could there be?  As the permutations increase, how would you describe these aliens?  What sorts of abilities would a race that is many steps removed from us have?

3.  List three things that were true before you knew about them.  Name something that was true in 600 BC but no one knew about it because they lacked the experience/technology.  How about something in 1900?  Name some things that may be true right now but we lack the experience/technology to really know for sure.  What is the difference between understanding supernatural or magical phenomena and possessing highly advanced technology and/or evolution?

4.  Describe a situation in which you could have prevented something bad from happening, yet for some reason, you didn’t.  Is inaction that causes unpleasantness the same thing as Evil? Why or why not?  Is your definition of unpleasantness good enough to apply to most people or does it only apply to you?  What frame of reference are you using when you decide that certain outcomes are disagreeable to you?  Do people have a right to complain about anything?

5. Imagine this experiment:  You stand on the side of a moderately busy road.  On the opposite side of the road are two hamsters.  One is an extremely intelligent flesh and blood hamster and the other is a robot hamster that has been programmed to expertly dodge traffic and cross the road to where you are standing.  You tell both hamsters that, if they choose, they could cross the road and become your friend.  But only if they wanted to.

   List some things that may invalidate the results of this experiment.  If the robot hamster made it to your side of the road, would that mean that it wanted to be your friend?

6. Now go to another part of the road.  The posted speed limit is 55 MPH.  In this cruel country, the penalty for going even one mile over the speed limit is death by vivisection.  Let’s say that you are caught speeding on this road.  Regardless of whether you knew the law or not, would it be fair for you to be vivisected?  Why?  Why doesn’t your mere displeasure with the law simply change the nature of the speed limit or make it disappear entirely?  Doesn’t your opinion count in this matter?

7. Describe why it would be impossible for an all-powerful being to wear tennis shoes.  Describe why it would be impossible for it to turn invisible.  To lift 1000 pounds.  To be in three places at the same time.  To invent a new color.  To create a square circle.  To enforce a speed limit.  To stop time.  To have emotions.  To be smarter than you.  To assemble a planet.  To invent laws of physics.  To invent any kind of rules.

I enter the poetry scene at a slam at R.B. Winning Coffee Co.
Encounter Don McIver, Bob Reeves and Amy Mullin, but they don’t know who I am yet.