Midnight in the Garden

It wasn’t diabetes rearing its ugly head. My BS was at 90 last night when I checked. Just a plain old, violent headache brought about by… possibly some kind of cleanser I smelled in a customer’s home.

Due to her reawakening spirituality, Bethany now has the random strangers walking up to her and telling her they have a message for her: "Jesus Christ told me to give you this message. This is important." I didn’t think it happened in America; only India and abroad. It was easier for me to quantify it in my head when it was another culture pursuing her insight, messages, commentary. But Murcan strangers talking to her as if she’s somehow radiating enlightenment? … Not surprised, though.

I’ve seen it all along. And it reinforces why she wants to leave me. She needs to travel. She needs to help people. She needs to not be with me. It makes more sense. She’s taught me a lot.

I dreamed last night. One of those dreams I’ve had several times in the past. I told Bethany it felt… ancestral. All this could be just, I don’t know, synapses on the basest level. It could be what my parents have always called an "overactive imagination." Too much makes sense for it to be that, in my opinion. I’ve picked too much insight, I’ve been around Bethany too long to simply state, "it’s florid, poetic, symbolic bullshit." Jung and Nietzsche agree, so there.

It’s ancestral. Meaning, a shared memory. It’s something wholly outside my experience, my understanding, any stimuli I’ve had throughout my life.

It was about boats. Ships. Old things. Relics. Treasure. It was about tunnels deep underground, being a tour guide to the Hall of the Mountain King, as if I walked a great labyrinthine graveyard. A great room, filled with ancient lumber, where others like me were reconstructing an Italian merchant ship, piece by piece. Bronzed boars’ heads on sandstone walls. Pottery so numerous it’s impossible to describe. All lit by torches and candles. Dank, damp, cool to the touch. And half-hidden boats. Eight of them. Belonging to who, I didn’t know, but it was a collection of ancient things. And above that, on the surface, where the sun shone, entrances to these caves were covered by derelict mansions all old wood and 1800’s styles, or earlier, all seemingly connected to each other by corridors overrun by plants or drowned in sand, room after room engorged in more relics, wood furniture, engraved and carved with such dedication and care to be breathtaking.

And it was haunted by the dead and forgotten. We were told to stay out of corridors. I was given an ancient map and told to find the cave where the treasures lay. Most of all, find the ninth boat.

I never found it. I traveled with a female friend, perhaps a guide, perhaps Bethany–same shape and feel of the previous dream I had with her, though she’s currently unaware of ever dreamwalking with me. Perhaps not her; someone else, then. I don’t know.

I’ll be flat-out honest this isn’t the kind of dream I can pick apart. No single aspect of this dream came from my waking hours: I install UVerse for ten hours a day, drink a beer at home and play Minecraft until I’m too tired to do anything. My inspiration is limited to the people I touch and the things that follow me home.

The dream ended with the two of us watching a procession of the dead, robed in white, as it walked down the cave corridor. They talked to each other as if they were alive, but their skin glowed and they didn’t dress like anyone modern. I startled them by being in the corridor and not leaving, and they were angered. I was supposed to be seen and not heard. It was their place. Because of that, last night, I would not find the room with the ninth boat.

If I were to be candid to a friend (none of my friends are close enough, or spiritual enough, or openminded enough for me to say this to, save Bethany) I would say: I was a shipbuilder in another life. And a pottery-maker in another. I was wealthy in the 1800’s, and I’ve always been a collector. I’ve owned nine boats in total. I’ve amassed a lot of spiritual wealth. I’m still missing keys to the answers of questions in previous lives.

But that’s crazytalk. Normal people don’t talk like that. They talk about Angels and Satan and Jesus at war with Evil people like the Muslims. They talk about the poor like they’re scum, vermin themselves away with whatever ill-gotten pennies they’ve managed to steal off the stock market or insider trading. Normal people walk around and work two jobs (at least) and fight for every moment of downtime. Most people forget their dreams because, fuck, dreams aren’t important. They don’t get you money. They don’t amass wealth. They don’t get the plastic trophy wife. They don’t secure a future with a strong-chinned, cheating CEO.

Normal people protest other normal people. Our culture’s dead. Whatever.

This country would do well to dream again. This country would do well to fucking stop and listen to whatever the hell’s going on inside themselves. At the very least this country would do well to look at Russia, and where it went after the Cold War, at the least.

The future of stability is spirituality. For everyone. We now have the technology to create a perfect world. We don’t have the training to wield it. And that’s a fact.

I was a traveler in a past life. What the hell am I doing in this one?