Dream Memory Sketches

Finale by Albin Egger-Lienz

These past few nights, coincidental with the emotional upswing of my transitioning back home, I dream vividly.

Remembered involuntarily, these sketches remain in mind with strong complexities, imprinted with such lucidity as to verify my waking experience of intense questioning.

1

Amid the desert, as drab and steaming with insidious fire as the genocidal, pioneer days of the Australian outback. There is a clamping furor in the air, a dream that dreams in images not only frozen in mind, but in heart, a climbing pull up the mountain of the soul in a delirium of ruthless passion. I wander haphazardly throughout an endless desert at high noon it seems, at high season, unprotected from the ferocious heat. The sun is a deathless predator. I hallucinate the presence of serpents into swords, and I am tunneled into an crime-ridden espionage heatwave in the middle of the Maghrebian deserts of Morocco. In the waving perception, a spackled host of armed thieves rush through my body in and out as if I was one with this burning, naked desert. A snake slithers and at once I am gashed, run through and impaled simultaneously at the sound of a hiss with thin swords resembling how I would imagine heroes of the Arabia to duel. A mental fog is lifted, and I am embedded in a cinematic Casablanca-effect, North African environment. I clamber with hopeless futility in sand-erected surroundings dense with trouble and quick death.

2

A bespectacled retired astronaut, mathematician at NASA and managerial sort of government space programs, clarifies into my vision, a full, bald head with rimless, perfectly circular lenses, covers one eye still with another ocular instrument held by his right hand. He tells me I am to travel to Olympus.

The next moment, I am shot at an immeasurable speed through the atmosphere and far into space through the solar system. I arrive at the destination without hesitation. Time is of no matter.

Arriving on Olympus, which seems to be a lunar satellite of some kind, I enter what appears to be my Grandmother's house in Upstate New York. This is troubling and fascinationg, as I look out of her windows and see the great void of space, smattered with stars over a horizon without an atmosphere.

3

I am walking my bike along a highway in my current city where I currently call home. There behind me, stepping on my shoes, is a homeless man bent on being an obnoxious follower. No matter how hard I try to get onto the bike and continue on my way, I am nearly trampled over by his mysterious presence.

At night, down a dark sidestreet, I suddenly lose my bike, find myself in a scuffle in some suburban bushes and begin to run. There is a great steed, mounted by a medieval knight following my with lance pressed into the windless eve in my direction. Running as fast as I can, I devise a plan while I turn a bend and end up in a backyard which resembles a fortified castle's outer court. Sophisticated narratives of children's stories and escape plots churn wildly inside my mind in the twilight hours of the morning.