So here then a most jarring dream had, on Thursday, January 11, 1990.  This truly disturbing dream occurred whilst the Moon transited both my second house and Cancer.  Of the ones lived that day, it was the fourth dream recalled.

This dream was had less than two months after Merlin’s passing of AIDS and to have found him in a dream, rather unexpectedly, the revivification of life, health and boisterousness was stunningly jarring an experience.  Certainly, when last I had seen him he was within either side of 70lbs.  

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I would then be moving on as if going along the main road of The Alley, Sandy Point, St. Kitts.  There were some persons who were coming out of a large house that was much like Lara Wellesley’s.  However, it was white… it was an off-white, whitewashed, large stone house.

Everyone coming out of there was talking and laughing.  They were getting ready to go to a church somewhere.  They were piling into a minivan that was also white.

I had gone past them.  When coming back from Mount Idle, on the east side of the road by the old bank of the ground floor of Eustace Milne’s childhood home, from behind the minivan coming around between it and the bank building was Merlin.

He was wearing his light blue bandana – bought for him by Noëll, when he was in the hospital towards the end of his life.  He wore very ordinary clothing like he always did.  It was Merlin and he was very healthy.

He saw me at the same time that I saw him.

I was stunned.  I stood there catatonic.  I did not know what to do, and I thought,

‘What are you doing here?’

I was so happy to see him.  I hadn’t dreamt of him in so long.  I simply froze in my tracks.  I just couldn’t bring myself to talk… I just did not know what to say.

I wanted to scream my way out of being paralysed.  There was Merlin the embodiment of renewed vitality, I just couldn’t get over the fact.

He saw me and was momentarily surprised but instinctively he neurotically went into action.  Merlin simply began energetically walking and went up these stairs.

I bolted after him after getting over the added shock of his response.  I was surprised to see him in Sandy Point, St. Kitts.  I was so surprised to see him up and about.

I got up onto this landing after having lost sight of him.  When I got there, on my immediate left was a Chinese woman.  She was just on the cusp of her twenties.

She was wearing what Merlin had been wearing except that she had no pants on.  It was now a dress and the colour of the bandana… she no longer wore the bandana.

I felt so betrayed by this development.  Merlin had camouflaged himself, by shapeshifting, to become a woman.  He had shapeshifted becoming another race and another sex.

Merlin knew that I wouldn’t be able to relate to him thus.  Transformed, he wasn’t the Merlin with whom I was excited to interact.

Thus he became female, a counterpart of his totality, to create the distance between him and the Arvin that he had known.  I did not even look at her/him overlong.

The woman who was in charge of everything, organising the church outing, was not unlike Pannonica Kertész.  I said to her, “I came to get Merlin… to get his things, his bandana…”

“Well you can’t.  You can’t see him.  You have to make a deposit and then you wouldn’t be able to see him until giving the ring deposit back.” or something to that effect.

She had replied very matter-of-factly.  It was as though there had been a pact and somebody had reneged or something to that effect.  I found it most upsetting.

I was completely flabbergasted.

*Of course, Merlin chose to shapeshift in this dream because he wanted to have some distance between the raw emotionalism of the attachments associated with his just completed life.  I thought it interesting that though he had never travelled to the Caribbean of my upbringing, one of the earliest dreams of him on becoming an astral planet habitué found him there and of all places in Sandy Point, St. Kitts – a place he much wanted to visit.  END.

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Photo: Chinese model in A-line dress.

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