All content © 2004 by Michael J DeLuca
I went to sleep facing to the right, with one leg bent, and one arm curled around the other. I had no music on, and I had been reading Plutarch.
A brief, fast-shifting dream. Or else I remember so little of it that it seems that way. It's impossible to determine now between fogginess of memory and fogginess of dream perception.
I was in a 19th century city at night. The sky was overcast, but the moonlight was bright, made lurid by the fog. I was involved in a monologue, one which began before I went to sleep. I had been thinking about the ability to control one's dreams. The monologue had been internal when I was awake. In the dream I was no longer certain whether I was talking to someone else, or just thinking to myself. Also, my intentions for the dream had changed. While I was awake, I planned to dream about practicing the bass. In the dream, what I hoped to find, somewhere in this city, was a great horned owl. I knew, without wondering why I knew, that this owl was not just an animal, but a being, wise, mysterious, and bearing a message of some kind. It was as if I sought my spirit animal, in the tradition of the Indians, or my power animal, in Fight Club's mockery of the new-age, east-west fusion meditation tradition. Both ideas occurred briefly to me in the dream. In the dream, I think I felt as if there were something else familiar about this owl, but I couldn't place it. Now I do: I was thinking of Link's owl mentor from Zelda 64, who is quite portentious when not speaking, and incredibly annoying otherwise.
In the first scene, I actually said, or thought, to myself, the words "Great Horned Owl", and I pictured one, perched, looking at me.
There may have been another scene where I explained my quest to a room full of young men who looked rather like alternative musicians. Skinny, with bright eyes and bleached-blond hair. The room was some kind of myst-looking laboratory, with many windows. It was still night outside, and the weather was still bad. The roof was peaked, and the room was polygonal. I think the room was at the top of a tower, though not a very high one. perhaps the second or third floor. There were tables in the room, and equipment made of glass. There was no light except for the strange blue moonlight from the windows. There was a statue of a Great Horned Owl, made of metal.
In the next scene I was on the street again. I looked up into the sky and there it was. "There it is!" I exuberated, either in my head or out loud. It was a thrilling moment. The owl descended out of the fog, passed over me on huge, silent wings, and dematerialized again. It had perhaps a 12 foot wingspan. I could see its horns clearly silhouetted against the sky.
Finally I found myself back in the laboratory. I told them I had seen it, and the owl statue suddenly took on a much greater significance, though its appearance had not changed. The alternative musicians brought me two large spheres of glass or crystal, like those used to generate power in Myst III. They were larger than grapefruits, smaller than bowling balls. These were set on the table, or perhaps on pedestals, and somehow, I now knew exactly how to make them flood the room with a blinding white light shot with filaments of blue. This light spread across the tower room in shapes like lightning, like discharges from a Tesla coil, but rather more slowly, and everything in the room was obscured by the light.
All content © 2004 by Michael J DeLuca