DREAM 1

My brothers and I were camping, hiking along the pass to Sunrise Lake in Yosemite. We passed through meadows and deep forest before we realized that we must have passed the lake without noticing. We stopped. I took a look around and noticed that one of my brothers wasn't present and so I asked every one. They said that he never came...that he didn't start off with us, he had to work. Somewhere in my mind I thought, "oh yeah, that right". We went on our way, trails of fern and pine, open and sunlit hill tops quietly chirped as we crinkled our way through the soft and feathery duff. I looked ahead and there was my brother sitting on a rock, picking something out of his shoes. His backpack snugly between him and a tree trunk. I asked him. "Where are the other boys? They ahead?" And he looked at me, sideways and befuddled. I turned around because there had been some annoying mosquito, or creature that kept popping out from my peripherals. Something that is expected while you traverse through the green arms of nature. I thought maybe my brother was seeing it too. I saw something black move behind a tree. It was soft and matte, like silk or felt. It sort of moved behind the tree and was out of sight. I turned to my brother who must have moved on out, because only the tree, the rock and the duff remained. "Hey!" I called out, moving around the bend to see where he had gone. This mosquito thing got worse. It buzzed along my face and ears like it was trying to kick my ass. I swiped at it a few times fruitlessly, but it continued to hanker at me, wildly swinging from one ear to the other. For a moment I thought of live jewelry, a living necklace, made out of these horrendous bugs, but soon dismissed the thought as useless and stupid. I continued on to the trail where I thought I might find my brothers, but after a long while I suspected that they might have been on another trail. I began to think about the brother who didn't come, and that I had distinctly saw him unloading his backpack from the trunk of the car. But, no, I guess that was another time. Soon the mosquito, or whatever it was stayed only on one side. To my left there was a straight line of pines, and behind them a lake, silver black, like a deep hole filled with clouds and sky, and upside down granite peaks. Something in me kept vigilant, like there was something to be remembered, like I was missing something. Behind one of these trees, near the bank of the lake, I saw, again, a fluttering black movement, like a kerchief waving in the wind, and then a coattail emerged, a tuxedo and a hand. I looked for my brothers, but none were there. I looked at the coat. It was a man, with other men carrying a coffin. They were all looking down, profile, except for one, who looked directly at me as if I were some creature, a mosquito, or mouse or something, that annoys and is feared. All in one sudden impact, I remembered who that man was, and that it was highly odd to have a funeral procession out here in the middle of Yosemite’s vast jungled backcountry. I remembered too that my brothers had not come, that there was no "trunk of the car", not even the car. I suddenly remembered that I couldn't remember shit, and soon I was spiraling into a confrontation with this asshole again. I was so apprehensive that I woke up in bed, unable to move and a nagging persistence on my back, which I couldn't turn to see or look at. I tried to shout, but it came out like cotton - too soft to be heard. My mouth mumbled silent screams and my arms were useless, like turnips in the road inevitably to be run over. I opened my eyes, and there was Irene’s hair swirling away from me, at the speed of light, like cosmic oceans of interstellar dust and macro planets of all kinds. They were moving away as if never to come back again. I was getting smaller and this thing on my back kept grabbing me in the rib, to the right side of the sternum, electrocuting me with these exotic shocks of discomfort and pain. I screamed and screamed because I knew I was asleep, I just couldn't get through the door. My mouth was like clay; I suddenly realized that I didn't know what it was I can do, I was caving in - succumbing. I would literally have to move my mouth with my hand if I could just move my hand. Empty, silent, laconic screams, while this devil had me in the back, in my rib and rendering me between being awake and being dead. I summoned every atom of my body to tell my mouth what to do, and one last desperate and deathblow time I shouted through lazy lips "BlrpBlpt!" It hardly came through. My mouth was not going to help me.