The Bejeweled Pachyderm (Juliet's dream)

[This was inspired by a dream Juliet had before watching Episode 22.]

adam: that's like when you try and describe a dream and every time you try and describe a part of it you're like - no, it wasn't like that actually, it was more like this - and then you've already kind of bastardised your dream by tryna say oh, i was at, i think it was... school, or something? and then you just think, no wait i wasn't, there were complex attributes, some bits of it have made me think of that, but...

matt: the thing starts off as this multi-dimensional, impossible to describe form, but every time you say more words of explanation it collapses down into this crude approximation of itself until it really isn't that at all, you've just ended up with this kind of vague narrative that's got something to do with it...

as though the conversation they were having had not been strange enough already – and then, out of nowhere, they end on precisely this note! throughout the report i had been marvelling at the course of matt and adam's conversation, hearing it chart its way across so much of the terrain matt and i rode horseback in my dream last night. just as they said, a dream is not a thing that can be told like a story or explained like a theory. the world is communicated to us in a different way, when dreaming. things and events carry meanings and play roles entirely other to the meanings and roles they have in the waking world. "the human imagination is a world with its own integrity, and rules, and topography - and inhabitants..."…as matt pointed out earlier in the conversation. but the imagery was all there - and the raw structural materials –

a narrative could probably be dragged out of this dream, in the retelling most likely will be dragged unwilling from it, as much as i'd like not to bastardise what was undoubtedly far more spectacular a piece of unconscious art (involuntary theatre) in its one-and-only unravelling for my solitary sleeping enjoyment. the sparkling jewels, the expanse of sand and stone, the intrigue and the bouncing aborigine breasts (?!)....

if i had not woken with such a clear-cut impression of it still within reach, if i hadn't lain longer after waking than is generally advisable on the sofa i'd slept on, trying to keep ahold of the blurrier corners of the dream and pin them down to the more tangible elements, that i might fold the whole thing together into the beautiful painting it had suggested to me - if i had been startled awake by an alarm clock and forced straight into a more pressing reality, i would probably have listened to matt and adam's video (assuming that i had found time for them at all in the busy schedule of this hypothetical day) and found myself thinking throughout, 'oh! wasn't there something like that in my dream?...and something like that?....come to think of it, wasn't matt in the dream?...' - and the volume of coincidences would have lead me to think that perhaps it was just some deja-vu-esque psychological phenomenon and that in fact none, or maybe just one, of these things were a part of my dream, that perhaps there was a similar atmosphere to my dream as there was to something in the video, and so my mind was playing a trick of associating all the subject matter i presented it with to the dream, in order to give this half-remembered atmosphere a bit of physical substance. that experience and the subsequent rationalisation crop up on a fairly regular basis; in light of this episode, i wonder if i am doing the psychic power of the dream-state an injustice when i ascribe apparent coincidences to this (perfectly plausible-sounding, but you'll admit less magical) mechanism of the mind…

there have been other times where something i experience in the day precisely mirrors something from the dream of the night before, and no question about it, so basic and almost unimaginative it is in its representation; and other more typically prophetic dreams, vivid dreams that cling to my mind for hours, days, that are not actualised in waking life for weeks, and which generally take a more symbolic approach to their message-bearing. it has happened to me often enough to be the basis of a loose theory: that in the same exact way the unconscious gathers up the sensory information we strip off of our experiences, and communicates it back to us in dreams - faces, places, questions and answers - so our secret sensory antenna collect up data from the future, distant and immediate, and communicate that back to us in dreams too*. though it evidently hasn’t happened to me often enough that i’ve ceased to be shocked and elated when it does.

and the dream?

i had been chilling originally in the present day, but after reading from an enormous gold-leafed and minutely illustrated bible to my little brothers and sisters and nephews, i was (what else could one expect, in a dream?) very soon seated on a horse and riding in a procession through ancient jerusalem; marvelling at magnificent architectural structures, a temple laying half in ruins at the centre, and all set surprisingly small in the midst of a great desert encircling our field of vision. the place is teeming; there are circus performers leaping over limestone steps, dancers draped in swirling fabrics, conjurers and street magicians bothering busy citizens, merchants heckling in classic market-square fashion, ragged street animals and beggar children lacing in and out of the hubbub, beggar yogis sprawled on the temple steps, and whirling dervishes with skirts undulating and hats sculpted by the spinning motion of their wearers into narrow pointed peaks...

i was riding alongside jesus, and a little cluster of marys (well, i suppose them to be marys - i know every girl in the group by other names in real life, but they belonged to that time, and not mine. i was consciously a time-traveller in that place). we had been having a lovely conversation, i bending their ears with my delight at the scene before us - but with mr. popular in our crew we were soon overcome by strangers wanting a word with the big man, waving palm fronds in everybody’s faces, and i and my horse fell back to ride instead alongside matt watkins, whose presence amongst us i am sure i had already noted and earmarked for later exploitation. (sometimes i wonder if everything in a dream doesn't happen simultaneously, so often are dream events accompanied by a feeling of having already known; so often are they underlaid with a heavy history of what feels like pre-learned information on subjects only existing in the dream; certainly there is something strange that goes on with time and memory, both in the dream, and in our later examination of it - )

matt was riding beside a black man in purple robes. this guy kind of resembles malcolm x, but he’s not (that’d be too much). i presume him initially to be some joseph or yusuf or generic jerusalem john, but the conversation i have back-trotted into soon reveals him to be another time-traveller. he is drawing our attention to some gorgeous women standing on their heads and balanced on their shoulders, long hair laying on the limestone blocks, boobs upended between the necklines of their clothes and their sharp collarbones (in dream consciousness i am as much a lech as i am when awake, if not worse, and when i recall this dream, the image of these women is the first thing to come to mind) - all wrapped in clinging costumes of soft white fabric embroidered with glittering diamonds outlining geometric patterns. their eyes meet ours as we ride past and they are smiling up at us. our friend informs us that these women are aborigines, like him. "when you return to your own time, read a bible, and tell me half those names are not clearly aborigine names." (and i am somewhere leafing through my enormous encyclopaedic bible: "and jampijinpa did speak thus to the children of israel..."..."and david did lay down his sword at the feet of apirirrlu, and they gave thanks to the LORD..."...my astonishment is profound and righteous - while back in jerusalem) matt and i are educated about the conspiracy which conceals the ubiquity of aborigines throughout all the major moments of history, and how all the nations of the earth were in fact made out of mud by the early aborigines (not entirely unlike what we might have learned had he been malcolm x) and sent out into the world to be happy and do good – a plan that has been disrupted at length by a small group of otherworldly time-travellers, manifesting as the elite families who our companion tells us "built these temples and later laid waste to them, command the armies which control the city and the opposing armies who will end their reign, set against each other the factions who currently make up the peaceful populace before you and reconfigured history to give precedent to the disputes manufactured for them – while all those at their mercy read from a dark and supernatural script..." (elsewhere i am poring through magazines about how to expand your business and maximise your profits; leering up at me from their pages, stuffed into suits and ties, are the same red-faced men who on the yellow streets of jerusalem take money from furtive customers in exchange for the women standing on their heads on the temple steps) - and he motions us to stop our horses and let them fall back a little from the gathering crowd; he explains to us the aborigine mission, revealed to he and his brethren through the dreaming - that's right, the DREAMING - the mythology which draws the map of meaning over the australia of the aborigines, and postulated by these time-travellers as a blueprint for the new jerusalem; "the template has manifested in many ways throughout history; in architecture, in dance, in song, in events of resonating magical significance - "; of great import to the mission is the recapturing of a stolen baby belonging to one of those beautiful aborigine acrobats; she is here again, all boobs and white diamond-encrusted linen; the baby's name is dusty; she is hid in a secret chamber of the ruined temple; there are others riding with us now, information of all kinds is flowing thick and fast; i am in the present day, tearing pages out of the massive bible, now more encyclopaedia; filing a lithograph of the baby and accompanying legend alongside careful diagrams of the temple layout, a plan of the city, and lists of town planning directives; hunting with magnifying glass and a suddenly very specific knowledge for entries on major past events which may be false insertions into the accepted historical narrative; the name apirirrlu crops up again; i am producing these pages for matt and our riding buddy, matt is offering up now & delicately for our consideration the idea that our involvement in this strange business will not bring it to any sort of conclusion but only add to the rate of time-tangling going on; the man in purple robes is fervent against this; i have nothing of worth to bring to the discussion, only lewd jokes about those damn breasts again; i am awakening; i cling to the image of long female bodies upturned on the limestone and the notion of history confused and bending, spread around us like a labyrinth;...

truly, a dream is an unpreservable thing! who dares to capture it in something as pale and thin as a story? it is not what it was, when it was uncatalogued and multidimensional; and had it been left in that state, it would soon be nothing but the vision of upside-down diamond-outlined titties. adam and matt's explication of the problem proves ever more pertinent punctuation, at the end of this endeavour. and then i woke up, and a little while later, in need of a thing to listen to as i did the washing up, matt sprang to my mind, fresh from our adventure of the early morning - i had heard of his reality reports only a little while ago, i had been meaning to listen to them ever since, so of course now was the time - and what a startling and magical thing, to find he and adam exploring the same territory, in the language of a different type of consciousness! but is it truly such a coincidence? i was delighted, but not surprised, by the subject matter of my dream, not until i heard it unfurling again in their video. it is all perfectly reasonable stuff for my sleeping mind to spurt out. and none of what i heard in the reality report is anything it would be unusual to hear matt expounding on, either. in fact, a million and one people make videos about and have visions about an underlying order at work in history, be it one deliberately plotted out by omnipotent aliens or something more natural of which we are a part. why, in fact, matt suggests in this very video that the best test of the veracity of the imaginal realm, and the inhabitants proposed by, oh, all sorts of folks, to reside there, is to see if everyone who explores that world finds the same stuff when they get there. well, his own undirected map-building and conversation-having have indeed yielded in a very self-reflexive way, precisely that - and here i go dredging the classic formula up from my own depths (and such a comedically unsubtle shape it takes!); ah, the strange symmetry of it! i can only assume both mr. watkins and i are experiencing a time of high psychic potency - and haven't i been muttering for simply ages now, that i'd love someone to set me an essay? ;-)

*(some sort of hasty preparation for what lies ahead? a provision of the tools to prepare ourselves less hastily, if we so wish? or are we reading the script already coded into our dna, or encoding the present with our own script for the future?)