A Bizarre Chain of Dreams.
I dreamt I was in the back of my old building in Yonkers, except the entrances to the garages were replaced by Gothic arches. Out of one of the arches hopped a bizarre creature. She had a woman’s head, a shriveled torso and abdomen and one limb stretching to the ground that splayed out into five sturdy digits.
She noticed me looking at her and she said with a hint of annoyance, “I am a uniped.” She leapt or hopped away.
An older, well fed man watched her leave and said to me, “She’s a saint, you know. She was sanctified when the clergy noticed she had no genitalia. They think having genitalia is a bad thing.”
“Don’t they have genitalia?” I asked.
“Yes,” the man replied, “But theirs are male genitalia and therefore perfect.”
I rolled my eyes and he laughed. “It is simply something they believe. It truly is bizarre.”
Then, a man in a tweed jacket told me a different story. “She travels in some contraption that has one limb because she has none. She found the One Ring of Sauron, which is why she is so worn away. Someone must take it away from her and destroy it.”
“It was thrown into Mount Doom,” I pointed out. “How do they(?) intend to destroy it this time?”
The man in the tweed jacket replied, “Someone must bring it across the sundering sea to the Western Lands and cast it into an ocean of molten gold.”
I said, “I thought the lands to the West were forbidden to the peoples of Middle Earth to travel.”
“There are lands to the west and south that are not the land of the Valar. They are occupied by Men who populated it in the First Age by traveling East instead of West.”
“If you say so,” I said.
I found myself in the lobby of a hotel where men, women, and hobbits were waiting. I saw Samwise Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings. I approached him and asked, “Why is everyone here?”
He looked at me with suspicion and said, “They’re waiting for tickets to go to the Undying Lands.” He brought a finger to his lip and continued, “I stole a ticket because I want to see Mister Frodo again.”
Suddenly Elrond Half-Elven arrived without introduction. He looked like Hugo Weaving in the movies. He stood tall over Sam and asked, “So what have we here, young Hobbit?”
Samwise stammered, “Why nothing, Master Elrond. Just seeing off this fellow to…”
He looked at me with pleading eyes.
“All well and good,” said Elrond. “Well, I must be going. By the way,” he smiled at Sam. “There’s a ticket missing from the vendor. A ticket to the Undying Lands. You wouldn’t know anything about it, would you Sam?”
“N-no Master Elrond.”
“Yes, well, Things wouldn’t look good for the person who took it without permission. No, it wouldn’t look good at all. At allllllll. At ALLLLLLLLL…” Elrond smiled a silly smile and left us.
Samwise presented the ticket to me, “Could you return this to the vendor for me?”
Before I could say anything, he shoved it in my hand and ran off.
I brought the ticket with me to a Metro North ticket machine and exchanged it for a pass back home to Yonkers. I waited at a gate to the train. An older man looked at my ticket and said, “Whoooooo, if you enter this gate you won’t wind up where you’re supposed to go. Your gate’s over there.” He pointed across the large waiting area of Grand Central Station to another gate.
I wind up in a club in Queens. It has a ground floor and a stage in the basement. There is a staircase leading to the lower floor. Along the wall, there are posters encased in glass. The posters are of musicians who played there in the past. A friend of mine, Melanie Gentile, defiles the posters with a glass cutter.
In the basement of the club, I see a room full of computers and VCR players. A man inside asks me, “Can I help you?” I’m at a loss of words at first, and then I say, “There is an audiocassette tape stuck in my laptop and there is a weird icon that appears on my phone. I don’t know what it is. Can you fix it?” He agrees to do it, provided I help him put together a planetarium show.
When I complete a diorama of the Milky Way, I find myself on the stage set of a Star Wars film. I meet Temuera Morrison, the actor who plays Boba Fett. I am glad to meet him and we have a long conversation about canoes. Temuera says, “If you want to meet a real hero, he’s waiting outside.”
I exit the soundstage and meet a man with red hair, a red beard, and blue eyes. “How do you do?” I ask politely. I introduce myself and I ask his name. He is humble and pleasant, and he says, “I am a hero. Not the kind of hero who slays monsters or pardons the world from sin. No, I protect people through practical methods.
“See here, the village down the hill is suffering from a plague of crows with toucan beaks that are eating away at the grain.” He picks up what looks like a sling, only it has a short, hollow ceramic tube at the end. He spins it around and around until it makes a hollow, musical sound. The crows take flight and leave the grain fields.
Suddenly, the grain field is gone, along with the hero. I find myself in a dark series of chambers which are dimly lit.. The chambers are partitioned by gauzy curtains. I hear familiar music: Echoes, One of These Days, Breathe… I realized I am in an exhibit dedicated to the music of Pink Floyd.
The music fades and I meet a live band in a room with a curtain partition. They resemble REM. The drummer in the band is a fan of heavy metal. They put together a power pop song called, “I Love Metal.”
As of writing this, I can’t remember the lyrics. When I woke up, the time was 4:50 am. Now I’m at a writing desk with a dim light in the 1850 House, wearing my Blu Blockers as complete this entry about a bizarre chain of dreams. The Blu Blockers protect my eyes so the glare doesn’t overstimulate me. I suspect I will grow tired again and return to sleep. This is not one of my more coherent entries, but I’m not working with an editor or publisher.
Happy New Year!
- JJB
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