Monday, January 30, 2012
Pointless trip to Kansas
The problem is when I'm having a lucid dream & sort of know it but I'm not yet fully aware it's a dream. Unless you know it's a dream, it's even more difficult to manipulate it. It's hard to get dream beings to pay attention to you,.You know they know you're there, but they ignore you. If you can get them to talk to you, they speak perfectly fine English but what they say often makes little sense. They don't like to give you straight answers & explanations; or more likely, they enjoy giving confusing & evasive ones.
Someone was arrested in Kansas using my identity. I'm curious. So I go to Kansas, some small ugly city. I ask where the county jail is. Outside of town. I see a rental car agency across the street. Next thing I'm pulling into the jail parking lot in a rented pickup.
Some jive ass punks get out of a car next to me, joking around. Maybe this a juvie jail.
I go inside. A large echoey room, two rows of wooden benches down one side, people sitting in them, fidgeting, some children. At the far end is a reception counter of some kind. I walk over. I can't seem to get anyone's attention. Finally, a guy walks over, looking through some papers, looks up at me, "Yeah?"
"You have someone here named Robert Rixon. I want to see him."
"Why do you want to see him? Are you a relative?"
I answer, evasively, "The Elizabeth NJ police Dept called & said he was here."
That seemed reasonable, so the guy said, "Then give your name." & he walked away, Give my name to whom? Someone in a uniform was sitting down tapping away at computer. Two other staffers were behind the counter doing some other work. Clearly, the prisoners were beyond a door on the left. People walking in & out of there. Around this point I'm beginning to understand the game, why I'm there. I want to find out if this person using my name name is me, or not me. If me, at what age. If not me, what my impostor looks like & why this faker wants to see me, enticing me all the way to dream Kansas, I've been to real Kansas twice & disliked it both times.The first time I got caught in massive swarm of locusts & stayed in a hotel downwind from stockyards. The second time I rode a bus west to east across the entire damned state.
At this point the dream ended. I somehow became aware I was napping, & my interior mental alarm clock had gone off at anout the 30 minute mark, which is the max length I want for naps.
Futile anyway. I wasn't going to see this person using my name. I know these dream characters. Maybe I invent them, maybe they are, as poet Jim Cohn suggested, Bodhisattvas. He said I should try to talk with them. But either way I give them form, & personality, & they behave with the same, succinctly cryptic talk that I use when I'm avoiding expressing a direct opinion or emotion. They toy with me & mock me, partly, I think, because I act in the dream world as if it were the waking world. Oh, these people are in charge here & I need their permission to go in the back room & find person using my name. Once, I ought to try saying, "Look, this is my dream. I came here for a reason, get out my way."
***
4/12
This dream was, I believe, an unclear premonition of the the news I received on Feb. 3. I went away to a college in Kansas in Sept. '66. I hated the college, the town, & my roommate. I was homesick & I missed my new girlfriend back home. Without the girlfriend - I was still falling in love, & I'd never felt anything like it before, I probably wouldn't have had the nerve to bail on the college after two weeks, knowing how pissed off my dad would be, but chosen to stick it out through one semester. Trying to make sense of my strong reaction to Karen's death, I had to go back & find the young man from this dream, because now I know he was me at age 17, not an impostor. Where did the dream come from? I don't know. But the characters in the dream couldn't tell me why I was really there. Maybe they didn't know.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Someone was arrested in Kansas using my identity. I'm curious. So I go to Kansas, some small ugly city. I ask where the county jail is. Outside of town. I see a rental car agency across the street. Next thing I'm pulling into the jail parking lot in a rented pickup.
Some jive ass punks get out of a car next to me, joking around. Maybe this a juvie jail.
I go inside. A large echoey room, two rows of wooden benches down one side, people sitting in them, fidgeting, some children. At the far end is a reception counter of some kind. I walk over. I can't seem to get anyone's attention. Finally, a guy walks over, looking through some papers, looks up at me, "Yeah?"
"You have someone here named Robert Rixon. I want to see him."
"Why do you want to see him? Are you a relative?"
I answer, evasively, "The Elizabeth NJ police Dept called & said he was here."
That seemed reasonable, so the guy said, "Then give your name." & he walked away, Give my name to whom? Someone in a uniform was sitting down tapping away at computer. Two other staffers were behind the counter doing some other work. Clearly, the prisoners were beyond a door on the left. People walking in & out of there. Around this point I'm beginning to understand the game, why I'm there. I want to find out if this person using my name name is me, or not me. If me, at what age. If not me, what my impostor looks like & why this faker wants to see me, enticing me all the way to dream Kansas, I've been to real Kansas twice & disliked it both times.The first time I got caught in massive swarm of locusts & stayed in a hotel downwind from stockyards. The second time I rode a bus west to east across the entire damned state.
At this point the dream ended. I somehow became aware I was napping, & my interior mental alarm clock had gone off at anout the 30 minute mark, which is the max length I want for naps.
Futile anyway. I wasn't going to see this person using my name. I know these dream characters. Maybe I invent them, maybe they are, as poet Jim Cohn suggested, Bodhisattvas. He said I should try to talk with them. But either way I give them form, & personality, & they behave with the same, succinctly cryptic talk that I use when I'm avoiding expressing a direct opinion or emotion. They toy with me & mock me, partly, I think, because I act in the dream world as if it were the waking world. Oh, these people are in charge here & I need their permission to go in the back room & find person using my name. Once, I ought to try saying, "Look, this is my dream. I came here for a reason, get out my way."
***
4/12
This dream was, I believe, an unclear premonition of the the news I received on Feb. 3. I went away to a college in Kansas in Sept. '66. I hated the college, the town, & my roommate. I was homesick & I missed my new girlfriend back home. Without the girlfriend - I was still falling in love, & I'd never felt anything like it before, I probably wouldn't have had the nerve to bail on the college after two weeks, knowing how pissed off my dad would be, but chosen to stick it out through one semester. Trying to make sense of my strong reaction to Karen's death, I had to go back & find the young man from this dream, because now I know he was me at age 17, not an impostor. Where did the dream come from? I don't know. But the characters in the dream couldn't tell me why I was really there. Maybe they didn't know.
Labels: dreams, Karen Battell
