Serpents and Souls
Dream
by Gratian Summerland
I am a man.
I dreamt that I was a woman with beautiful eyes, in my dream I fell asleep and had a dream within a dream and in that innermost dream I had the same beautiful eyes but they were in the face of a man, my hair was shoulder length and unkempt, my beard, days unshaven. I was driving in a pick up truck with another man, we spoke of the crimes we had committed when we were women and how we were different now. Now we were men and in the eyes of our world--we had committed no crimes. We were safe.
As we drove a woman pulled up along side of us, she was very feminine, very young and pretty. I felt some brief memory of...knowing her or...being her...then it occurred to me that when I fall asleep I create a second self and if that second self can also fall asleep a third self is created and that third self has the unique ability to peer into the waking world and if it happens to peer into the waking world and into the eyes of the waking self all of the truth of its own soul will be revealed. And I knew this to be the truest of all truths and I was elated to have discovered this divine knowledge-- except...as it rolled over in my mind I realized that it could never happen because in order for the third self to be able to peer into the eyes of the waking self, the first self would have to be awake, thus dissolving the 2nd and 3rd selves.
I shuddered and drove on until I was driving along side a wall, beyond the wall I could see the sea and the sea was writhing with serpents. My companion told me to pull over quickly as one of the serpents had gotten into the back of the truck. I pulled over and I was relieved to see that it was only a child's toy, an old fashioned stick pony but with the head of a serpent.
As I stood by the side of the road the woman I had seen earlier passed us and I was grateful that she had not seen me, for if she had seen me she would have seen right through me, my soul would have been naked in front of her in the bright blue light of day and she would have known me again for all that I was...and wasn't, and that was a terrible thought.
Then I woke up.
Serpents and Souls© COPYRIGHT 2005 Gratian Summerland. Reproduction prohibited without permission from the author. 06/25/05
