Garote's
Dream Asylum

I don't pretend to understand them.

24-may-96

The two of us were on the side of a temple made of a curving mosaic of stones. The temple was in the shape of a crude skull, buried halfway in the earth. The nose-hole of the skull was the entrance to the temple. The eyesockets were triangular gaps halfway up the wall that looked in to the temple, and I stood on a protrusion like a cheekbone, gripping the bottom of one eyehole with my hands to keep from falling.

To my side, a short distance away over the bridge of the very tall nose, stood a girl from my math class. Not the girl I've been ranting about before, but a different one, attractive for very different aspects.

We talked about the temple and why it could be here. Whether we did this consciously or not I do not know, but we shifted back in time and a little statue appeared in each of the face's eyesockets, near our clinging hands.

I asked her what the little statues meant. She said, matter-of-factly, "Those represent the two ways to solve problems. The white one represents forming a bridge between people, and the black one represents favorable circumstances."

We talked for a while about our problems. I can't remember the particulars. Looking at each other, we both trailed off. All of a sudden we knew what we both wanted.

Our faces moved closer together and we touched noses briefly. I looked at her eyes and the pupils were dark, ash-grey, a color I had never seen before. I thought they were beautiful. She tilted her head to the side, leaned forward, and we kissed.

At the contact I felt my body revving up like an engine and my control was weakening. I didn't want to fall off the wall, and I felt that I wanted to talk with her more. Besides, my lips were dry and she probably wasn't liking this as much as I wanted her to.

I tried to disengage. Around the kissing, I said "wait... wait..." breathlessley. I almost didn't want to stop. "It's too... too soon." When I finally broke away she appreared very distraught, and climbed quickly down the face to a van that had driven up to the entrance of the temple. "No! Wait! Please!!" I cried out. She didn't wait, or look back. She got into the backseat of the van, slid the door closed, and was gone.

After the dust had settled on the road, I looked back at the triangular eye-sockets of the face cut into the wall. The two statues were there. I pushed them and they fell into the temple, landing on a large unmade bed that was in the center of the room. I hoped they hadn't been broken by the impact. I needed them for something in the future.

Climbing down from my place on the temple was harder than I thought. I had to move to the roof and shift time forward again so that gaps appeared in the wall for me to use as handholds.

It was not until later, after I woke up, that I realized the obvious connection between the meanings of the statues and the situation I had just been in. What was the dream trying to tell me?