FROM: heron74@...
TO: alt.oneirology.entheogens
SUB: Rain

I dreamed last night.

I haven't "dreamed," in the normal sense of the word, for about four years now. Usually, I just drift on the fringe of Aserinsky, and that's deep enough. When I need to sleep, I take Rozerem—which, surprisingly, works pretty well for me. But dreams? Not for me anymore.

Which is what makes last night so unusual. More so by the impression that it wasn't my dream. It didn't seem like a Bleak Zero hallucination; I'm not exhibiting any of the other symptoms that have been charted. It was just . . . a vision? I've done some research today on visionary experiences—real accounts, mind you, not some of that crap that fills the Pop Occulture shelves at the mega-bookstores—and I'm, well . . . on the off-chance that I'm completely paranoid, I want to tell the rest of you about this dream before . . . well, anyway, here's the dream.

I'm in my trailer, and its raining outside. I can hear it, like steel ball bearings, on the roof. Big heavy drops. The kind we don't see until late in the spring. I look out the window and the whole world is covered with white fog. The rain drops are heavy and hot, like bright cinders falling from a distant volcanic eruption. In each of their wakes, the clouds are gone, and I can see blue and green and red. It's like each drop takes away a little more of the dense cloud cover.

I put on my heavy boots, and a thick wool coat. It gets pretty cold here in the mountains. The winter winds sneak down early. Geared up, I step out of my trailer, and the landscape is completely different.

I like where I live. I like the isolation, and the view. I like the fact that my neighbors are just as eccentric as I am. I like the fact that, other than a half-conversation struck up one afternoon out by the communal mailboxes, I don't known anything about them.

But, now, I'm even more isolated. As the rain continues to wash away the fog, I see that my trailer is the only manmade object for miles and miles. The ground is flat, much flatter than it should be, and there's nothing but yellow wheat all the way to the horizon. My trailer is in a tiny clearing, an irregular patch of white sand where the grain can't grow.

The rain starts up again. It's coming down really hard, as if each drop were trying to brain me, and I duck back inside the trailer. The last of the fog goes quickly, and the rain becomes a spectacular light show—lots of rainbows, scattering sheets of color, stars fall like the firework show they'd throw at the end of the world. It's really amazing, and much more vivid than anything I can remember.

And then, it's over. Each stalk of wheat is left holding aloft one or more rain drops, and with the sun shining on these drops, the whole field becomes a sea of shimmering scales. Like I'm riding on a giant fish.

I go back outside again, and the air smells so clean and pure. I've been out of the city for some time now, breathing the mountain air quite regularly, but this is something else. Something like you'd imagine the air smelled before man showed up. And I'm standing on my front step, breathing in, when the scarecrow sneaks out of the wheat.

He tip-toes across the open space around my trailer, and when he notices that I've seen him, he puts a finger to his lips. When I nod, acknowledging his request for silence, he looks over his shoulder and waves to someone still hiding in the wheat. He continues to creep slowly across the yard, as if he still thinks he's invisible by stint of being so quiet, but he is quickly surrounded by a flood of other scarecrows that come tearing out of the grain field.

I heard them coming, really, but hadn't copped to what the noise was. I had thought it was thunder, you know, the distant rumble of a storm that's an hour away still. But it was getting louder, and after he gave them the all-clear sign, it got really noisy very quickly.

The first one is the odd one, dressed more like a businessman than a simple farmer, and the others wear simplified versions of that same outfit: white shirt, gray slacks, but no tie or jacket. Some of the scarecrows are bigger, some are smaller; some wear floppy straw hats, some wear beanies and berets, a few are in jester caps with bells and ribbons. All them, however, wear the red and yellow gloves. I couldn't count them: the trickle turned into a flood, which exploded into a deluge. There were so many at one point that they seemed to be like the wheat—a full field, swaying in the wind. Eventually, they began to thin, trickling down to a few stranglers.

The last one limped. And he was the only one with a crown instead of a hat.

The miming one waited on the edge of the wheat, and when the crippled one had limped into the stalks, he raised his finger to his lips again. It was a peculiar motion, I realized: index finger extended, other fingers wrapped around something in his hand. Whatever it was, he dropped it there on the ground before he went into the wheat field.

I stepped out onto the white sand to retrieve it, and the rains came back. Not like before, this was a deluge of black water. In a second, the field around my trailer was a swamp of tarry sludge, visibility was about six inches, and it was cold. Really cold. I dashed back into my trailer, and as the rain blew the door shut behind me, I woke up.

Maybe one of you guys can unpack the symbols there, or give me an idea how I managed to slip into someone else's dream without knowing them. I'm going to see if I can scare up some K out here in the wilderness. It always gave me better control. I need to be ready tonight, in case the dream comes back.

-(pk)

"We'd all be taken more seriously if we had black halos."
-Jerry McElholn