About as soon as I finished the last batch of blog entries and handed the Ibook to Davey for editing and uploading, I caught this god awful flu (probably from him) and was totally out of it for two or three weeks; I don't even know.
When I didn't appear every day, Davey assumed that I had just gone into the sort hibernation I am infamous for, but it was something more like a coma.
Except for the dreams.
I was lost in some global city , not knowing the globe I was on, the language of the place, the way home, the car I had been driving, or where I had left it.
I didn't know even where the guitar case with the leg stilts and other stuff was, or where was Miss Kitty, who has been dead for forty years . It was my basic dream of trying to wake, from which I have never found my way out except by realizing in the dream that it was a dream, then giving up the geographic problem and rising to the surface.
But my brain was cooked, and I had forgotten all that.
Lucid dreaming - dreaming conscious of itself as dreaming, is a skill I half learned from the Carlos Casteneda book Pike sent up to me during my year of books, when I was living in the library attic.. It did take some time and intense concentration, but it was simple enough a process:
You start out by studying your hand: I would look at and draw my hand on fly leaves of library books several times a day. There are probably hundreds of books with my hand in them, still in the library system. Since the books were never checked out, the ubiquitous hand must still be a mystry there.
When still alert, and before burrowing into the insulation each night, I sat with eyes closed and concentrated on calling up the image of my hand, so the after image would be available in sleep.
In those attic nights, once I had called up the image during sleep, I was in control of the dream, and I could not only find my way about in dreams clearheadedly, and in an awareness that it was a dream, but the dream was lucid: meaning that it was not just as vivid as regular life experience, but more so, maybe like experience under the influence of L.S.D. , of which I know nothing personally, and with the important difference , that I had control. For Carlos Casteneda , and for me too, since one can choose to do anything at all, the immediate project was to to fly around, and view distant places.
I read by day and I flew by night. I flew and flew. It was great fun, to say the least - better than now days navigating Google Earth on the computer.
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For a while, the heightened reality of those experiences was sufficient in itself, but called for more personal power than I often had, to escape back into my real body, to wake, and act in the real world as life demands.
More often than not, before I had the wisdom to return to my attic, my consciousness and control slipped, and I got into dull scrapes and a low awareness from which I was not able to wake myself until my body became so agitated it woke me itself.
In the end I had to come back from each dream flight to exactly where I had started, and I could never return with the roll of quarters I spotted on the floor of the movie theater ( I often chose to go to movies in my dreams,because they were more vivid there than in the theater) and I had no effect on the places or people I visited.
But it seems to me now that learning tthe skill of waking from the dream, was the worthy goal - a skill with applications in the waking world.
Like I said, I was never a black belt at this, and in my recent flu delerium, it wasn't working at all.
I was so dehydrated and brain starved that I might never have surfaced had not Davey (who had been taking his own sweet time with the posting and editing) not finally put the IBook back into the Ark with me, plugged it in and left the door flap open, either because it was warming up a little, or he just forgot.....so some yellow light got in and that brought me a little closer to consciousness that day.
And even then I might still be under , if I had not been jarred and alarmed in the middle of the night by the sound of three roosters, one after the other, hitting the deck, then their squawking and, a minute later, the dogs barking as Davey let them out to chase off the coyote, the fox, the coon , the dog , the owl, or the Windigo that had pulled three of the six roosters off the deck rail by Davey's kitchen door.
But the disturbance so far only derailed dreaming and I was not completely moved to wake until the sun rose.
The four roosters on the deck were crying, which sounds more like the pack howl of the local coyotes, than the rooster's usual group crowing, singing, or alarms.
I rolled over, sat up, and took a swig off the water bottle, then remembered the shock in the night and, after another few slugs of water, managed to haul myself out.
.
I staggered around, a featherless biped - except I suppose, for a few Rusty feathers among the wood shavings stuck to my my long Johns.
I found a dark swath off feathers on the deck, and then enough feathers between Davey's and the chicken house to stuff a pillow, and a long pile of feathers toward the end of the driveway that I thought at first it was a whole dead rooster ; but it was only feathers.
One rooster was back up on the rail but minus tail feathers, and one was walking around on the ground, obviously stunned but not missing so many feathers, and one Partridge Rock, the one which was lowest in the uptown rooster hierarchry and so had been on the outside of the line up, I could not find.
What I did find that raw morning was the most awful March uglies: snow gone, ground surface thawed and oozing, but no greening up or new growth to cover again the several small farm implement dumps around the place, A littering of of blown feed sacks, and plastic tumble bags, bombing patterns of dog shit, fallen garden tools, as if Davey had had thrown them down and run into the house for the winter when the cold suddenly snapped months ago. And old boiler tank , partly burried in the long mound bulldozed in back when the farm house brunt back in the forties, , now thust further out of the ground by frost heaves.
Broken glass, especially bottle bottoms , which had been evil handedly pushed up from their scattered burial sites and left with sharp jags up to gash dog feet and people sneakers. I turned them over and stomped them down..
And then, thrust up near the old barn foundation, I found an old hand gun so rusted, and encrusted with mineral concretions that it is hard to tell if it had been a toy or the real thing. I picked it up n before a calcerous hand could reach out of the ground and pull it back in.
I checked the hen house, which I had not entered in how ever long it had been I was unconscious.
Davy had at least been letting the main flock of roosters out to roam and had taken over feeding the hens each day, but the hen house was, and still is, a mess.
Besides pulling the feathers off each others backs, the hens have eaten most of the curtians, the tarp that was over the open cell foam board that went half way up the walls, much of the foam board its self, the quilted aluminum and plastic space blanket stuff Davey had put over the foam board in the entry way, and in one spot had eaten right through the inner foam and then through the outer foam to the stucco itself, and soon enough would have broken through to the outside, even though they still, with the temperatures in the forties, will only dart out and then back in when I open the door for them. The hens radio was on; the robot weather man was a day behind, but the up to date news confirmed that the world beyond my borders was also a horrible mess.
I went to tell Davey what I found ....and found him still in bed, asleep with the news on the radio. Looked like petrified shit. He seems to have the flu himself.
Balls of dog hair and dust as big as puppies lagged in every corner and under every chair.
Piles of clothing on the bench, clean laundry in the hamper bag, piles of dishes on every surface in the kitchen, the smell of rotting mice from the tin mouse trap
I told him what all I had seen. I showed him the stone gun and left it on the table, He rolled it over and he said he would photograph it later.
I drank and half slept and staggered about for several days and am still just getting my strength and appetite back.
To my surprise, the missing rooster reappeared , though the others chase him like a stranger and he stays in the Ark with me at night.
And the Speckled Sussex Gus (whose spectacular tail I had featured on the Roostosterone Shampoo label) managed to be mostly upright and walking about, but he was having fits during which he would flop around like a fish on the bottom of a boat, and even when he acted more or less normally, the others kept chasing him away.
Last night I saw him running along the road from North to South, and he kept on going when I called so he could have been five miles down the road by morning.
He must have changed directions , because today the neighbor came over to say the rooster was by his house, sitting under his propane tank, so I went over to collect the bird and found only three piles of feathers, just about enough to cover a rooster, but no rooster. I have no idea what might have done that.
Davey photographed the gun, as you see, but now he says it has disappeared.
It must be somewhere..... or maybe not.
It is hard to see the likelihood of any connection between the disappeared stone gun and the raid on the roosters, but maybe there is.
I can suppose the gun must be somewhere , like they say...... but maybe it isn't. Oh, did I say that already?
I need to trot into the woods for a while and clear my head. Still not quite awake.
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