blue velvet
three recent dreams, collisions, and angels on trial. (september 25th, 2023)
September 19, 2023.
Between our waking consciousness and the type of sentience we become in sleep, there’s a transition period. Dream TSA. Purgatory. Usually, halfway to sleep, we slip right through the transition into dormancy— the hallway becomes a single doorway to step through— but there are a few lucky occasions where you accompany yourself through that long hallway on the way to sleep. You feel the corporeal body and the mind separate like old friends; you retreat into yourself, holding your own hand. In the hallway, there is a brief moment where you get both the physical sensations, the blankets and air and how your lungs move up and down, and the mental awareness preceding a dream— this is a true treat. How delightful to get this spiritual mitosis! How lovely!
I find myself in this hallway one night. It smells like jasmine and frankincense— my room smells like jasmine and frankincense, and it has followed me into the hallway. The bungee cord tying me to the waking world stretches further and further as I walk. My physical connection begins to fade. The sensation of walking curls up into my mind; the jasmine drifts away as softly as it came. I have reached the other door.
When the door is stepped through, all recollection of the hallway dissolves. As far as my brain is concerned, I’ve been here dreaming my entire life, and as far as I’m concerned, it might be right. I’m in the night sky. My hands, in front of me and alien, devoid of the little scars and hangnails and ugly nail beds that make them identifiable to me, scoop through the air. It is something tangible— maybe sand, maybe silk. They haven’t invented this fabric yet. It’s one dimensional. It’s dry water. Most importantly, it’s a blue so blue it transcends our weak mortal understanding of the color blue. Violently blue. I mean visceral— the sky is blue the same way teeth and bone is white, which is white the same way crowbars are black and barbed wire is silver. Great, godly blue. I say godly because I think that the greater something's potential for good is, the greater its potential for evil, and God is very good indeed. And the sky, which I am floating in like a paragon of ascension, is very blue.
It smells of ozone and Bobby Vinton is playing in the back of my head, making the same fuzzes and skips that it did on the old phonograph my grandmother had when I was little. I could just die. It occurs to me, this separate dream-self, that maybe I am dead, in which case this must be Heaven, because Hell likely doesn’t contain such wonders. Biblical logic still applies in my head— I make an experimental attempt at sadness to crosscheck my surroundings against Revelation 21:4 (And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away). I remember that I don’t actually trust my sadness, so I take one of my smooth hands and pinch my leg as hard as I can. It hurts— I am not in Heaven, thankfully. I don’t like the sound of Heaven.
I am swimming without moving through this one dimensional satin. In my hand there is a beeswax candle, and I light it on a star and continue to drift through the impossible world. Below me is only more blue.
There’s a sick sense of satisfaction when that nagging feeling of something must go wrong is proven correct. Tragic, but satisfactory. So when I feel the pull of gravity on my ankles and see the vibrance of the blue start to fade, I am not surprised. Ah. There it is. Of course, I say, hurtling downwards through layers of clouds and cold air, the candle in my hand extinguished. Everything goes black and white. Maybe if I didn’t have that vindictive little beast of a feeling, I could’ve stayed in the sky, but it’s out of my control at this point, so I just try not to look down when I feel the ground approaching.
I wake up in the dark of my bedroom. The entire world is monochrome in the midnight non-light. On the chair to my right sits a pair of jeans, turned gray by the shadows. I know they’re blue. It’s enough.
September 21, 2023.
This one is quite simple— I wake into the driver’s seat of a car idling on some fire road. My foot presses the gas pedal until I feel it touch the carpeted floor. I get closer and closer to the car coming towards me, hurtling at each other like lovers at an airport, hair halfway in my eyes. I know that, like me, the driver in the other car also doesn’t have a seatbelt on.
The crash is glorious, glass going everywhere like glitter. My neck whips against the headrest. The hood crumples, snapping my tibia and fibula in one clean crunch, blood and oil slicking the metal. I shove open the door and crawl out of the car. I don’t feel the pain. Limping over to the other car, I wrench the dead body of the other driver from the seat by the antlers— antlers? Antlers, it has antlers— and haul it into the dark forest surrounding us.
The grave has already been dug. I put the other driver inside it neatly, and then, with all the gusto and glamor of Frank-N-Furter in the swimming pool, I hop right in after it, and that’s the end of that.
September 22, 2023.
“But Mr. Owl,” I say, entering the dream in media res and putting a lump of sugar into my tea, “There is no technical difference between an angel and a monster except our own moral impositions on the creature’s existence.”
Mr. Owl is sitting at the opposite end of the table, dressed neatly in a bow tie, a tweed jacket— my brain has not bothered with the exact mechanisms of how his wings have gotten through the sleeves, but they’re in there nonetheless— and a silver monocle. He peers down his beak at me and takes a sip of his tea. “Maybe so,” he says, “but we cannot prove the existence of anything, including the world around us and ourselves, so we can only rely on what we have faith in— our individual morals are one of the ways we put order around chaos. Without imposing our order on the external observed world, we sacrifice ourselves to nothingness.” Mr. Rabbit, sitting to his left in a lovely navy suit and white hat, sniffs and takes another cookie from the platter.
The five of us— me, Mr. Owl, Mr. Rabbit, Ms. Bear, and the glowing behemoth of THE ANGEL, bound in chains just loosely enough to reach for its teacup or a cookie, should it want one— are in a grassy clearing, sitting at a round table covered in small sandwiches, teapots, and sweets. The breeze moving the forest around us is warm, despite how the leaves on the trees are turning gold and red. Afternoon sunlight dapples the table and butters the bread. The dress my subconscious has put me in is green corduroy with buttons down the front in a neat row, trimmed in white. All the animals are dressed similarly. I don’t know if we can call THE ANGEL an animal, but it remained a multi-headed ball of light, no dapper clothes to speak of. The way all dream-knowledge is inherent, I know that we are in the Garden of Eden and THE ANGEL is on trial for helping Adam and Eve.
“Why is nothingness something we sacrifice ourselves to? We came from nothingness, we have a right to nurture it.” A disgruntled Ms. Bear, previously too preoccupied with the jam and scones to speak, puts down the butter knife. “Return to it, too. Might as well take care of it.”
I take a biscuit. “If we nurture nothing, we have to nurture everything in return to maintain the balance. THE ANGEL taketh away, and so it was within it’s grounds to giveth in return.”
“But THE ANGEL taketh away under orders, and so proceeding to giveth would be in direct defiance of those orders. Orders from God, nonetheless,” Mr. Owl says.
“I do have to agree,” Mr. Rabbit butts in. “The legislative aspect of the case is largely what is at debate here. It’s a matter of if THE ANGEL had the right to go against orders, and considering the orders were from God, well.”
“Angels are supposed to love mankind, though. And THE ANGEL didn’t technically disobey orders— Adam and Eve didn’t enter the Garden— but it did give them some hints so they wouldn’t die,” I say.
“And a couple plums,” Ms. Bear adds.
“And a couple plums. I would actually argue that God was particularly mean in casting out two people who had no idea about how to survive, and THE ANGEL was just rectifying that mistake. They knew nothing about how to get food or purify water. It was criminal negligence.”
“But it’s God,” says Mr. Rabbit. “To imply that God made a mistake is blasphemy.”
“Well,” says Mr. Owl thoughtfully. “God is always a self-portrait in every form He takes. Saying God made a mistake is actually a great kindness to the self— it shows that you are capable of acknowledging your faults and forgiving them, as long as we are forgiving towards God. He’s terribly busy. It might have just been an oversight.”
“Very true. I would also like to add two important factors,” says Ms. Bear. “One, God is omniscient and if God didn’t want THE ANGEL to tell Adam and Eve how to hunt and farm, it wouldn’t have happened. Two, God could’ve just punished Adam and Eve by killing them, but he didn’t, so clearly their survival was intended.”
“He’s very busy,” I add. There’s a pause— I take a sip of my tea, miraculously still at the perfect temperature, and watch as Mr. Owl and Mr. Rabbit do their internal hemming and hawing. Ms. Bear, already having moved on, reaches for a sandwich.
IF I MAY? asks THE ANGEL, breaking the silence.
“Yes?”
WOULD ONE OF YOU MIND PASSING ME A SCONE? THEY’RE JUST OUT OF MY REACH. WITH RASPBERRY JAM, PLEASE. Ms. Bear hums and goes about fixing THE ANGEL a scone.
In the distance church bells chime, and the trees around us take a collective breath in, beginning to sing. Trial forgotten, our fairytale troop stops to listen as the light fades.