Notes On A Dream

The first I remember was working in a warehouse. Reminded me of Clyde A. Short’s Kings Mountain warehouse. Wide, open spaces. Hardwood floors. Here and there, small piles of products where orders were being staged. I was disoriented, since I haven’t been in a warehouse in a decade, much less one similar to Clyde A. Short’s K.M. facility (20 years or so on that on). But I made the most of it, staging product on a skid and acting like I belonged there. Wound up in the office with someone looking for stickers (colored dots that the order checkers put on each box to note that it had been checked – a different color for each checker), most specifically the roll of gold stickers that no one else knew about and this particular checker decided to use for his own color.
The next thing I remember is being at a fast-food restaurant. It was like a McDonalds, but it was more like one of the old burger stands, where you had to walk up to the window in front to place an order, and people were milling about. It was some kind of company-sponsored outing – a holiday of some sort. That’s about when it started getting weird.
I can’t remember specifics of the next part, but I recall impressions of deserts and black rock and magma. Not a lava flow of any sort, but the kind of landscape in which you know that there’s lava beneath the steaming surface. This somehow tied into some kind of battle between good and evil, which I can’t remember, except for the last part, where I was incorporeal. I was hovering over the kitchen in this fast-food restaurant, devouring a cheeseburger, and with each bite I was consigning the evil one to some sort of banishment or binding (consuming the cheeseburger was only symbolic, something that I was using as a spell of binding to take away the power of my enemy – this will make sense to Pagans and Wiccans).
The next part was apparently on the other side of the equation. A woman’s form was disintigrating, and her followers were scrambling to keep her from disappearing altogether. This was in a massive cave of some sort, with lava and ice in close proximity. I don’t remember the specifics, but the woman’s essence was saved before her body completely discorporated, with much panic and frenzied activity. This resulted in her essence being captured in a massive block of ice elsewhere in the cave, with everyone rushing down to see if all went well. I remember approaching the ice, marveling at the shriveled form encased in the ice. It was a body, but it looked like it had been burned beyond recognition and had shrunken in upon itself.
The priestess ordered us to gather around to allow the goddess to draw our energy, and we did so. The ice began to melt. As it did so, parts of the body became exposed to the air. As that happened, a mist-like green plasma began to flow from us into the body, breathing life back into the flesh. The ice continued to rapidly melt away, exposing more and more of the body that was coming back to life, until eventually the goddess, still trapped in the ice, was able to look at us and smile. But the moment of re-constitution was critical, and the priestess chose some of us to give ourselves to the goddess. Those who stepped forward, gladly accepting their fates, had their life energy drained from their body into the her, helping her to cross the threshold back into the corporeal.
The next thing I remember is from the perspective of the goddess, now human, or at least in human form, lying in a bed and weak as a kitten, feeling the breeze blow through open windows upon bare skin, listening to the music of wind-chimes, and feeling grateful for being alive, knowing that long, hard convalescence was ahead and that it would take some time before her power was restored. She was already plotting her revenge, but was all too aware that in her present form she was vulnerable and could easily be destroyed. But they’d have to find her first, and that wasn’t very likely. Not where she was now. Not under the protection of those most loyal to her; those who would see the city destroyed before giving her up.
That’s when I slipped out of the dreams and sat up on the side of the bed, listening to the wind chimes outside. Looking out the window, for just a moment, I could sense the lava flowing beneath the mantle of the Earth. On the wind blowing through the trees, I could feel the laughter of the goddess, and the veil between the worlds felt thin and immaterial. Somewhere, far in the distance and a hundred years away, I could hear distant voices chanting “Hello, this is triple A. Do you need road service?”