The start of a dream journal and the end of the worldThe apocalypse is nigh.
This morning I was driving
Logan and
Erin to work, and after a pleasant and laugh-filled discussion about our respective weekends, there was a lull. Erin broke the silence and prefaced the following with, "So I'm just going to throw this out there...":
She spoke with a Native American friend of hers over the weekend who, apparently, is "in tune" with the Earth's rhythms or what have you. In the past,he has accurately predicted small earthquakes, calling Erin in the morning before the quake and assuring her there would be minor tremors later in the day, which there were. Over the weekend, however, he predicted that within the next two or three weeks there will be a major earthquake that will hit California. He didn't explicitly state that it would be on the scale of what hit San Francisco and surrounding areas (including Los Angeles) in the early 90's, but what he
did imply was that it would be
big.
He further predicted this disaster: a
supervolcanic eruption from beneath
Yellowstone National Park that would cause such an upheaval in the Earth's tectonic plates that water off the American West Coast would displace in such quantity that the ocean would simply swallow up the entire state of California and parts of Nevada. The earthquake would be, in effect, just the beginning of a statewide extinction. The tidal wave, the Native American friend predicted, would occur within seven months. Imagine not just the coastline of Califonia decimated, but the entire state.
Needless to say the car ride following
that little piece just "thrown out there" pretty much killed the rest of the conversation until we got to work.
I wouldn't have been so freaked out by the prediction if 1) the gentleman hadn't accurately predicted smaller earthquakes in the past and 2) if I hadn't had a dream so unlike any other I'd ever had that I decided to start a dream journal because of it. It goes as follows just as I'd written it verbatim this past Saturday morning, September 17 (saving for corrections to possible grammatical errors [In addition, any deviation from the original text will be indicated by enclosure in brackets]):
"The zombie had not come to eat the humans [namely, me]. There would be time to fight later, during the great battle [There was a sense of an impending apocalypse]. The zombie knelt down and carressed the ancient coin and the first playing cards. Tears fell from his bowed head, dampening fifty-two military personnel. It had not come to devour minds. Rather, it came to mourn its own lost power, that of wielding symbolism."
I apologize for the poor writing and for having originally turned the dream in a fiction. The straightforward version frightens me much more. I'll give some more context.
The apocalypse has either just started or is imminent. Elders (don't know where they came from) are urging me to learn martial arts--to train the spirit more than the body--and to discover how to unlock the power of certain objects. Fetishes, I guess. The ones I remember are the coins and the cards. The cards, while obviously playing cards, have a tarot "feel" to them. As an old woman leans forward in a rocking chair and holds the cards out to me, I turn to see a zombie inches from me and staring. Instead of attacking, it kneels down at the woman's feet and strokes the cards. It begins to cry, and its teardrops fall on the cards.
The feeling I got was that the zombie mourned its former self and the ability to tap into whatever allows humans to tap into imagination/symbolism/abstraction. The situation impressed upon me that zombies don't kill for food. Not really. They follow a kind of cannibalistic principle that some cannibal groups follow; to eat the heart of an enemy gives the devourer the enemy's power. Similarly, zombies attack human and devour the brain because 1) they are furious and jealous that humans still possess the ability to create and extract a wealth of abstraction form simple objects or icons. By devouring the brain, zombies hope to once again possess and harness the power of symbolism.
Anyway, the zombie came to pay respects to its own loss. It didn't attack because the battle was imminent anyway. Blahdy-blahdy-blah.
It's bizarre because I'd never had a dream so overtly dealing with symbols before. The crying zombie was pretty freaky-deaky, too.
There are several reasons why I would've had such a dream now:
-
Promethea - deals in a world of imagination and fiction; even goes so far as lending power to coins (maybe cards, too)
-
Ong-bak and
Born to Fight - martial arts movies I recently watched
-I like zombie movies
-
American Gods - a novel about an apocalyptic battle whose battleground is a place between (or above or whatever other abitrary directional distiction) reality
Just goes to show you dream what you are, I guess. It
did feel different at the time, though. I guess we'll see what happens in two to three weeks after I become the new radical spiritual leader of an ultra-militant post-apocalyptic sect or samurai monks.
Required viewing:The Last Wave (Not only is The Last Wave a great film, it's topical.)
D
