As the Moon progressed through the early degrees of Gemini, transiting my first house, I would on taking to bed slip up past the folds of restfulness.  There I would awaken into the most lucid dream experiences had in long ages.

It was Saturday, July 25, 1992 – long after Merlin’s passing.  

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The first dream was set, at night time, in Sandy Point, St. Kitts where I had spent my childhood.  I was playing in the street, well past midnight, with three local youths.

All Rastafarians, too, they were all in their twenties.  I was my present age – thirty-one.  They were younger.

Everything about them was very real.  There was a direct focussed tenor to their gaze; they looked into you.  I felt very edgy with all this probity.

We had been acrobatically playing, in the street in front of the church, in The Alley, Sandy Point, St. Kitts.  Of course, that same church Harella had built twenty-two years prior in the waking state.

I tried not to outshine them, with my leaping tumbles, for fear of escalating the tension in the air.  There was an edge to our interactions.  It was a tension born of my having been so long off-island and their being suspicious, I thought, of my outré sexuality.

Just then, I noticed a light streaking across the star-punctured sky.  In a bid to diffuse the tension between us, I drew their attention to it.  However, I soon noticed that its progress was unusual.

There was also something distinctly different about this light.  It caused me to recall similar icons in dreams past – each had presaged rather momentous visions.

Like all those before it, this streaking light seemed a silent observant probe.  Immediately, I became open to what this comet-like streaking star could later reveal.

I began to explain to the youngest Rastafarian who was an impish, sexually-dynamic beauty – he was not the least bit self-conscious of his missing front teeth – that it was no doubt a very high geostationary satellite that had bombed and was now crashing to Earth.

Further, I speculated that it was no doubt an orbiting space shuttle presently reflecting Sol’s intense light.  As I spoke, I knew that I did not really believe either explanation but I thought that the ideas were a good way to ameliorate my position in the dynamic.

The ruse failed to have done the trick.  On returning my attention to the group, I was sent bolting – the leader was menacingly lunging through the air towards me, with a raptor’s ease, in eager flight.

Soon I also was in flight being chased through the streets of a Sandy Point, St. Kitts which quickly morphed and shifted becoming, more and more populous, like parts of old Havana.  I was not certain which city this was but I was definitely still in the Caribbean.

I managed to escape into a house where I very energetically fought off their advance, securing the locks to the front door, thereby shutting them out.  I climbed up the narrow and steep flight of stairs, in near-darkness, to the safety of the second storey.

Winded and more enraged than stunned, at their behaviour, I took the time to gather my breath.  I briefly visited with my aunt Pilar do Aragão† and Pandora – the latter whom Merlin favoured the most of my siblings.

They were unaware of the tumult that I had just endured.

I took refuge in the darkened front of the house’s second storey.  Next I found myself, in one of those rare dream moments, actually falling asleep whilst lucidly dreaming.

I nodded… on recovering, I found that I had come to in an apartment.  It was one more opulent than the one in which I had just grown suddenly drowsy.

On a red antique chaise longue, in the most beautifully dark, wood-panelled, high-ceilinged digs that I had ever seen, I was now seated.  Across the room was an open door that led out to a veranda.

A dark awning provided ample shade and allowed just the cool tropical breezes to laze in satiating the spirit.  To have awakened into this new dreamspace had left my awareness more sensitised… more absorbing.

The dream became more lucid and any sense of time dissolved.  This left every moment infused with a sense of mysticism – magic even.  It definitely felt like the West Indies here, perhaps, old-money Haïti or Guadeloupe if not Cuba.

Slowly, I drank in every detail of the stately furnished room.  There were, on both walls to my left and right, floor-to-ceiling shelves which were not untidily crammed with old leather-bound volumes – some red, some brown, most were black.

Slowly, from where I reclined, I pinpointed my vision to check the titles of some of the books.  Thus I was able to see and read them, as intimately, as if I had gotten up and gone to stand before them closely peering.

They were mostly ancient volumes.  However, the script was not vaguely recognisable like any of the innumerable ones on the other, more familiar side of the dreamtime.

My spirit soared, as I felt fully relaxed, in this most bucolic of dreams.  Strangely, though not unusual for the realm of the dreamtime, I felt that for having looked at these laden bookshelves my mind had absorbed the library’s voluminous wealth.

Just then there was movement, to my right, across the room.  I saw a cat that looked much like Whoopi.  It appeared from behind one of three sofas, skulking towards another, situated opposite across the room.

Each sofa, like the chaise longue on which I reclined, had beside it a small round table.  Each table was covered in either rich, dark earthy damask or actual rugs in deep though muted red.  I was immediately reminded of the round table, across which sat the sibylline woman from Merlin and I, in the dreams of September 4, 1988.

I sat up calling her name,

“Whoopi!  Whoopi!” at which moment, the cat shimmered and became Julio – our black cat at 20 Amelia Street in Cabbagetown who, like Whitney before him, was killed in a hit-and-run as he ran across Amelia Street on New Year’s Eve, 1987.

As I watched the cat disappear behind one of the three sofas, which accompanied my chaise longue, my mouth froze open in amazement.  Whilst I assimilated that one and thought to myself that this certainly was a most unusual and lucid dream, there was utter stillness.

The cat’s metamorphosis had discernibly shifted the vibration of the dream.  Now time seemed considerably measured as compared to its usual frenetic rhythm.

The door in the far right corner then opened… into the room walked Merlin.

*I can’t here relay the rapture I felt on seeing him but the ecstatic descriptive of dream audio-cassette recording, for that day, comes fairly close.  END.

Overwhelmed with emotion, my body quivered throughout.  I tried to rouse from my reclining position.  My arms outstretched to him, I greeted him squealing with delight.

He stood, just in the entrance, raising his brows with the left familiarly arched higher.  Staying me with the index and middle fingers of his raised right hand,

“No, don’t get up…” I heard Merlin direct me with the quiet familiarity that our intimacy knew.

This directive I telepathically experienced as though we were squinging up in bed, in the dark, at 20 Amelia Street in Toronto’s Cabbagetown.  Our souls tickled, at such times, as we listened to some glorious thunderstorm drowning out the dog days of a too-hot-and-humid, Toronto summer.

I obliged, sitting upright on the edge of the plush chaise longue, for the first time placing my feet on the beautifully designed and predominantly red rug.  His face warmed towards me in a smile.

At once my mind expanded, simultaneously processing on multiple levels, becoming even more awakened.  Rapture… pure rapture – I was enthralled.

Here again, Merlin wore all the evolved energies that he had in that first dream encounter – that dream, of course, set in a Pacific west coast rainforest that was not unlike Vancouver Island’s Cathedral Grove in July 1978.  A dream, of course, which occurred four years before I would physically meet him in the waking state.

Slowly, he walked the short distance of the room towards me.  A breeze coming from the veranda not only cooled the place but it shifted the ambiance and made the place grow dimmer.

The dimness highlighted the definite soft yellow glow that girdled his entire form.  I sat there thinking,

‘My god, I can actually see your aura Merlin.’

He smiled and I was reminded that everything that I thought was instantly being telepathically shared.

I was passive… moreover I was ripened as though I had just experienced an Alfred Brendel recital.  I felt so lightheaded that I firmly pressed down both my palms, into the chaise longue’s plush red velvet, bracing myself.

Merlin came and stood before me.  He was casually dressed in loose, earthen woollen clothing.  A cloak he wore stylishly draped about his narrow shoulders with its cowl removed.

As I looked up into his face, besotted by the beauty of his soul’s magic, he slowly arched his left brow in the way he had always affected when he wanted to be intimate.  Merlin’s magical expression was exactly as it was, that gibbous-Moon October night, when we met in Babylon – which now for him was truly a lifetime removed.

My face liquidly melted away in a smile.  I was warmed by the knowledge that I was dreaming and that here before me was a man, Merlin, with whom I had shared such wonderful fortune. He had shared his grace, along with his beauty and his intellect, in the most magical combination with me.

As we made eye contact, still never having said a word, he slowly knelt into the bay of my open legs.  Enthralled, my eyes slowly and unflinchingly shifted to look down into his as now he knelt before me.

He wore his glasses, his beard cropped close, his hair styled in a leonine full-bodied mane.

Moreover, I was moved by just how much this pose reflected the last night we had spent together – November 17, 1989.  With an acuity rarely achieved in the waking state, my mind lucidly assimilated this rapturous encounter.

Here before me knelt Merlin.  Merlin was the very embodiment of wholesome health, healing my spirit, releasing me from so much of the pain that I had endured.

Like that last night of his life, before dying of AIDS, I was overcome with emotion.  However, owing to the healing that this moment affected, now I wanted to melt in tears of joy.

More than that, the moment’s poignancy rose from how uncannily it mirrored our final encounter.

About his slender long neck, Merlin wore a necklace of thick, copper-coloured coil that looked not the least bit malleable.  The coil was half an inch in diameter and set with beautiful large crystals of various colours.

The coil moved through each stone’s centre and each stone was deeply etched with golden hieroglyphs.  Although Mayan hieroglyphs bore the closest resemblance, the inscriptions resembled none in this planet’s long history.

The effect of the bronze-coloured coil and crystals was grounding.  The crystals gave off a low rumbling hum that was felt.  It was akin to the definite effect of my pyramid, in the waking state, but easily thrice as intense.

There were seven crystals in all.  Principally, there was the large, smoky rough-hued quartz set at the bottom of the circular coil.

Its design slowly shifted from within but its glow seemingly originating elsewhere.  It was huge and by far the most powerful.

One quarter the way around the circle, which was duplicated on the opposite side, there were three crystals.  The crystal in the middle was like nothing imaginable in the waking state.  It was a coppery-bronzed colour with hints of blue-lapis lazuli dust throughout which actually glistened.

With any slight movement, the dust shifted becoming copper-coloured.  When the colour shifted, I experienced a correspondingly subtle shift in the serenity that I felt.

The unusual central crystal was flanked by two small and perfectly clear crystals.  They were more radiant and powerful than any multiple-carat diamond yet found in the waking state.

It was actually difficult to sustain my focus on their exquisite beauty overlong.  They were dynamic and seemingly made of the heaviest element imaginable.

I was so pleased to see Merlin.  The necklace he wore was like a grounding conductor.  Seemingly, in order to manifest from his dimension to this dimensional dreamspace, he needed the energies of the crystals to join me.

He wore an argyle sweater that was not unlike one of the pastel ones I had bought him one Christmas.  This one though was an earthy brown which he had, years earlier, interestingly claimed to have preferred.

He effortlessly removed the crystal necklace placing it at my feet.  The humming abruptly ceased.  The crystals’ effect immediately shifted.  I actually felt a cool energy, from the crystals, buzz through my entire body travelling from my feet to the crown of my head.

I watched as he detached the different crystals and made sure to leave the central one on the coil.  Somehow, he was able to remove the six crystals from the coil though the coil remained a perfectly whole circle.

As he kept placing the crystals, in different circular formations at my feet, he kept looking up at me with the warmest direct stare.  Each formation affected a different temporal lobe and corresponding area of my body.

I was experiencing crystals with a potency that never before had I known in the waking state.  I felt splayed by the experience.

There were times that I felt as though my body and head were being stretched – elastically elongated with an ease nowhere else possible except the astral plane in the dreamtime.

I thought then how absolutely incredible this man Merlin was – how truly fortunate I was to have met him, to have known him, to love him.

The lights noticeably further dimmed in the room.  Next, the central large crystal grew black changing into the most unusual design.  There had been an incredible energetic drain from me – energy which I suppose was collected in the now-transformed crystal which had remained about the coil.

From his left breast pocket, Merlin retrieved a little black pouch.  As he looked down at it, I said to him,

“Oh my god Merlin, you are so beautiful…”

I knew that I was dreaming and I was thinking at the time,

‘…I will never be able to meet you, again.  I’ll never see you again.  You’ll never be that perfect mélange of bloodlines that created the magic that was your every idiosyncrasy.’

He looked up and smiled making me again realise that everything, we said without speaking, was so very clearly, readily known to the other.

As he opened the little black pouch, my lips trembled.  I looked at those utterly gentle fingers that, I thought in passing, were now ashes in the earth at Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery,

‘Oh yes… those fingers, those beautiful delicate fingers.

‘Oh my god, yes…’ I simultaneously thought,

‘…These fingers, I will never see; they’ll never touch me again in the waking state – they’ll never exist again.’

Then, as if to eclipse my melancholy, he gently took my right hand in his.  Merlin’s still-sensual hands purposefully began pouring the little, black pouch’s contents into mine.

The touch of him was as intimate and as gentle, an evocative memory, as absent waves heard distantly lapping ashore on the beach in Pump Bay during childhood.  How, as in the still of the night, my mind would race wondering of what new vistas I was yet to dream – when I was a child in St. Kitts.

All along, I had restrained the desire to touch him for he seemed so much more evolved.  Truth be told, I was afraid that to physically reach out to touch him would only dissolve the dream.

Naturally, for becoming emotionally overwhelmed, the fear was that I would undoubtedly whiteout.  However, his touch was so real and so very familiar that I let out a heavy familiar sigh.

Into my palm spilled a dozen, perhaps more, of the most beautiful tiny crystals that were quite powerful.  The touch of them actually made my mind further expand.

My head seemed to contort, once again, with an élan that matched the lightning speed with which I assimilated the intense energies from the clutch of crystals into me.

They were more leaden, easily by ten times, than their small size betrayed.  They glowed and they were decidedly hypnotic.  They emitted a sense of music that was more experienced than heard.

In spite of the fact that they glowed, I brushed aside the beauty of them and chose instead the real magic.  I took his free hand with mine and began holding it, rubbing it, squeezing it.

Even more intently, I looked overjoyed into his arrestingly soulful eyes.  I began groaning, moaning, I was overcome with intense emotion.

This was, by far, the most alive and most lucid dream with Merlin since his passing some three years ago.  I wanted more… I wanted no moment of this great intimacy to stop.

I asked him to remove his glasses so that I could really look at his eyes.  He obliged and when he removed them his eyes weren’t their smoky grey-hazel-faded blue.

They were brown, in fact, but they were his eyes and I thought,

‘My god, you’ve got brown eyes,’ to which he slightly blushed.

He wore a beard; it was the usual bushy affair.  His lips were so moist, I said,

“My darling, kiss me.”

Taking the lead, as I had when we met, I held the bottom of his ticklish beard and reached up his face to mine as I bent down.  We kissed each other.

It readily became a wonderfully slow and timeless dance high up our entwined greenhouses.  My spirits soared to even greater heights.  It was the greatest pleasure.

It was quite simply a sensory whiteout.  We did not use tongue.  We just kissed each other on the mouth.  Throughout, until it was no longer possible, our eyes remained perfectly glued to each other’s.

I turned my head to the right to kiss him, again.  It was a soft lingering kiss; it was a kiss of complete surrender in which was communicated so much.

As though he and I were two leviathan creatures swimming together in a sensual medium of liquid blue light, our intimacy was pure movement.  This aqueous light medium was immensely heavy and inhibited our progression to a slow-motioned crawl.

Progressing playfully, as though so many nanoseconds were deleted from each time-stretched moment, we effortlessly danced alone.  We were together and enraptured in a universe just for two – Merlin and me.

It was such great pleasure that, in its shared intimacy, it reflected the idiosyncrasies that we had known so well.  It was a continuation of the dance we familiarly had always intimately known.

It was such incredible intimacy that when the kiss was concluded the dream dissolved…

I sighed, on a deep sustained breath, besotted with the beauty of Merlin’s spirit.  This was a most rare dream, a most soulful of dreams, with the dream magus.

The sound of my breath was so loud that I actually felt the weight of my high-dreamer self as I crashed back into my body from, being astral-projected, high up the astral plane.

I felt fatigued, I felt spent, as is customary with such dream travel.  Whilst remaining still, I kept my lids shut.

Focussing on my weary breath, I allowed myself to drift upwards again.  This time, I melted into true sleep where I could rest and recoup my energies.

I awoke, about an hour later, in the nearly dark room of my tiny Queen Street West apartment in Toronto.  Rested, I was truly rejuvenated after all that astral projection in the first sleep cycle.

As is customary with reparatory sleep, there were no dreams recalled of the second sleep cycle.  I cried…  I cried for joy.

The realness of Merlin was so intense that after crying, for the first time since his passing, I grew aroused after dream contact.  I savoured the beauty of this man, Merlin, my elfin-dream magus.

Pulling the black, satin blindfold back over my eyes, I slipped onto my stomach between the red satin bedding.  Tightly holding on to a pillow, my left cheek pressed into it and the bedding drawn up over my head, I withdrew into a sweat lodge where I could continue communing with Merlin’s very soul.

My right knee drawn up, I allowed my rock-hard cock to ride up against the bedding and away from my tummy.  Slowly, kneadingly, I ground my winding pelvis into the luxury of the bedding.

Ploughing away, beyond its wet folds, I massaged my lusty thoughts deep and high up into the magical greenhouse.  Whispering his name, my lips, my abs and body quivered.

From time to time, I managed my way up onto my toes.  This allowed the exquisite play of cock and bedding to draw out greater pleasure.

My abs ached.  Whilst sweat sheened throughout my shivering body, I shuddered as the inside of my thighs violently tremoured.  Merlin still knew how to work his magic on me.

Losing myself, my breath collapsed in repeated noisy, exhausted, shuddered grunts and groans.  I whispered his name proclaiming my love to that point.

In no other way could I have celebrated this truly profound astral plane encounter with Merlin in the dreamtime.  As ever, hands-free auto-eroticism resulted in a most profuse and exquisitely pleasurable orgasm.

So richly deserving was I to have lost myself this way – beyond the usual daily auto-erotic ritual.  I needed to savour this momentous dream encounter by making a solemn ritual of pleasurable thanksgiving.

I had been moved anew by Merlin’s magic.

*Regardless your combination, there is no greater gift to receive than the love of another whom one has chosen to completely give of self.  There is no greater validation of love’s superiority than to experience love from another, who has transitioned onto the next octave in that soul’s maturation, in a lucidly awakened dream as this shared between Merlin and me. 

We have all loved and been loved and may you dear dreamer, by opening yourself up, experience your own moments of rapture as I did in this rhapsodic astral plane encounter with the one, the man, the elfin, the fuck-all fabulous, the ganja-smoking, groovy shaman from Babylon, Merlin! 

The mark of a truly great love affair is the fruit it bears… dreams. 

Sweet dreams you, I love you more!  END.

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Photo: Merlin & Arvin Niagara-on-the-Lake, autumn ’87, photo by actor, Wayne Robson.

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