Last February as I made my way by subway to the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing arts, the season’s latest opera was on that night – of course, what I then did not know, was that the rest of the opera season would eventually be cancelled – the most jarring thing occurred. A young Amerindian male with the glossiest black mane, took two steps back on the TTC train platform and dropped his black gym bag. “Are you fucking talking to me? No bitch, I’m talking to you! Did I invite you into my country?” The rage and the booming power of his voice was arresting. The tall effete Caucasian male tried brushing him off as though he were so much raped and abandoned non-whitedom. Before I knew what next, The five-foot-nothing, proud Amerindian punched his adversary square in his girly man face. Crying out like a right candy-arsed sissy, the Caucasian weakly protested, all whilst rushing backwards. My proud Amerindian brother was just getting started. Of course, I, who have grown soft for making peace with being a black male in this racially suffocating society, cried out when the first punch landed. Bam, another punch to the face as the much shorter warrior defended his land, his people, pride and history. “Yeah you, did I fucking invite you to my country?” and another blow. Bloodied and cowering, the all-mouth, cowardly closet cocksucker was resoundingly handed his arse and put in his rightful place.
The opera, Hansel & Gretel, was beautifully staged – set in the stark isolation of Toronto condo living. I was, though, never fully engaged as I spent the next several days readjusting to having had that young warrior shaman heal my spirit by his very proud actions and the conviction of his words. The next several days, I kept returning to the incident with the proud Amerindian. My reaction at the time had stunned me and in hindsight, I kept revisiting why I chose to be so upset at the attack on the arrogant male, who was being pummelled. He had taunted and dismissed the Amerindian male – a socially aggressive behaviour from whites with which one was long familiar. I realised that so many times in situations as then, we as blacks are programmed to sublimate and ‘take it’ rather than defending oneself from the hideous ugliness of the spiritually stunted.
Then something quite remarkable happened, the murderous lynching of George Floyd in callously stark veracity that cell phone ubiquity has afforded in the modern age. The event was seismic; the raw brutality of the racial predator on the hunt was so glaring, so jarring that it set ablaze protests across the planet. Indeed, the cell phone, like the beating of Rodney King, has been able to capture the ugliness that is whiteness which prior to, meant that one could lie away and grin away with exquisite triumphant glee, fucking with the enemy – an enemy on whom one preys never having been preyed on by that enemy. Slowly, the exoskeleton with which one straitjackets oneself in order to make peace and to be a black man peacefully making it through one day to the next, began losing its grip.
Scenes like in the early days of lockdown 2020, I was in line at Pusateri’s at Yorkville Avenue and Bay Street to pick up a couple of bottles of VOSS water. Old, ugly as fuck, the woman in line ahead of me turned around and began screaming at the top of her hateful lungs in a scene that could easily have been played by her in South Africa. She demanded that I get the hell away from her because I was clearly not practising proper social distancing and remaining more than two metres apart. Of course, this had nothing to do with the coronavirus pandemic but everything to do with her seizing an opportunity to be a hate-filled racist boor. As much as I wanted to readily turn rapaciously vituperative and tell her to try 2 metres below ground; instead, I took two operatic steps back and coolly and eloquently boomed with scathing condescension, “Look at you! On your hind legs and everything! Seriously though…” With that, after having laughed a vulgar dismissive breath, I impatiently strode to the back of the line to be rid of the fugly parvenu boor. Everyone, staff and clients, froze. She, of course, squawked and grumbled as I focussed my discriminating attention to a conversation via Whatsapp video about dinner with my transitioning spouse at our art-filled home, who on the eve of Bob Marley’s birthday, two decades earlier, I wedded at Montréal’s Palais de Justice both decked in gold-threaded, crisp white linen Yoruba agbada with her a matching gele. As can be expected of cowardly fare, the anaemic-looking young couple now two metres in front of me, simply ignored the social dustup by hungrily face-fucking in their best escapist Bonobo turn.Naturally, the old harpy got from the line to kvetch to whomsofuckingever and when the cashier asked if I wanted a bag, I declined, telling her that I would rather be kind on the environment. Turning to leave the tightly spaced store, I paused and shot down her evil glare by raising both VOSS waters, one in each hand, and shouted, L’Chaim! That ought to have left her pissy knickers smelling louder on leaving the store.
Soon enough, the acts of racially predatory social aggression became more frequent and pronounced. There was the incident one cool morning where a hirsute covering of blond furred redhead stopped jogging in front of me, grabbed a hold of my bike’s handlebar and began screaming as though I were both blind and deaf as he demanded that I keep the hell off the sidewalk. It wasn’t enough that cell phones had exposed their murderous ugliness but as though to protest, whites have grown more emboldened with the affront of blacks and Black Lives Matter movement to demonstrate and demand change.
By early June last year, 2020, I had had enough, each morning on the ride to work through tony Rosedale, I was being accosted by various burghers of the beautifully tree-lined streets – then again, which Toronto residential neighbourhood street is not beautifully tree-lined. There was one Jew in particular, who caused me to go out and get the above bodycam. Each morning, as I am a creature of habit, he was in the habit of leaving the sidewalk to come into the middle of the street, approach as I bike-ride to pepper me with hideous racial slurs and demand that I keep the hell out of the neighbourhood. Good morning, Shithead! Good morning you black piece of shit. Get out of here! Finally, one morning, having quite had enough of him and his special brand of ugliness of spirit, I told him to go fuck himself to which he incredulously demanded at the top of his lungs, unlike his usually sotto voce delivered insults as he approached the bike, “Get back here! Get back here now! I’m talking to you. Come back here now!” The nerve of some people. That last incident occurred on a Friday and thank god for Jeff Bezos, by Monday, I had me a bodycam. So as my special kind of fugly, hairy back and arsed nuisance came bopping off the sidewalk, ready to be racial predatory white male asshole number 1 billion, 500 million and 99, he caught sight of my bodycam, lights on and all, and like the bipedal, über poilu Rottweiler-hybrid that he is, he readily retreated for the cover of the sidewalk. I have never seen him since and, of course, I had ignored everyone’s advice to take another route to work. What the fuck for? As I am born in the year of the Rat, I am no different to any other rat; we live firmly self-aware that rats fear no one.
A few months back in between spells of too much snow, I abandoned my bike and elected to take a ride. On the way home, as I go from job A to job B, I told the unibrowed, wild-eyed driver that I was in a bit of a hurry and would show him a shortcut to my place. He again said nothing, just as he hadn’t as I got into his ride and said hello. Though, I wore a colourful silk mask over the daily disposable N-95 mask, his shitty ride I swear, smelt like what no doubt just-fucked camel pussy does. Told to take a left off Yonge onto Roxborough, finally not surprised was I when he proved a short-tempered fuck whose pointy fingers on that wheel had me dismissing him as so much forgettable small-cocked fare. He barked rather than spoke that he followed the GPS, which had called out to make a left onto Crescent so many metres ahead south down Yonge Street. Thus, we ventured, clearly grudgingly for him, along Roxborough and as we approached, I announced that I wanted him to make a right turn onto Wrentham to Crescent. Immediately, the über-poilu beast, which made me think Ursa hybrid, stepped on the gas drove east past Wrentham, down the hill and pulled onto Mount Pleasant without so much as having looked left in the process. As it was rush hour, there would be no left turns south of Bloor along Jarvis which Mount Pleasant becomes before Gerrard Street East or possibly Shuter Street East. To be sure, I was more than a little bit pissed off when telling the inbred, short-fused jackass to turn off of Mount Pleasant, onto Elm and turn right at Sherbourne North as had been intended. “You fucking idiots, who the hell are you people to talk to anybody like you own something?” Then he violently broke the car, just north of South Drive and demanded that I get out of his car. Coolly, I got out and left the door open and when he swore at me and demanded I shut his fucking door now, I told him I thought I would do him a favour and air it out, seeing as how it stunk of camel… the camel-fucker did not, of course, get the insult. Readily, I pulled out my camera and told him, ‘yeah come out here and get some of this.’ He got out of his shitty little car, cut the beady eyes at me, slammed the door shut, told me and my people to go fuck ourselves to which I replied, “happy black history month to you, too…” By the time I got onto Sherbourne North, my Samsung S20 had died. Naturally, thanks to coronavirus, I had no cash and there was no way to call a cab or Uber. In this neck of the woods, a random taxi was a nonstarter.
Foreground Bloor & Parliament in St. James Town, to right distance, Yorkville, Centre distance, One Bloor East currently tallest condo at 76 storeys, at Yonge & Bloor, Centre mid-distance Sherbourne to Church (east to west) Upper Gay Village or more pretentiously south Yorkville (ha!).
Doggedly, I decided to simply walk it home, just as I got unto the Sherbourne Street bridge, I began experiencing an anxiety attack. Years earlier, I had witnessed someone leap from the Jacques Cartier bridge that spans the St. Lawrence in Montréal. Suddenly, out of nowhere as anxiety attacks tend to function, I was in the grips of crippling fear. I knew that there was no way that I could cross the bridge, even to try and make it back seemed a feat, there was a sudden desire to start running, which I knew that I could not do. A young Amerindian couple in the city, for the first time it turned out, crossed the bridged, going south on the west side – same as me. I explained my dilemma and asked if they would call me a cab. The proud warrior-looking man, barely into his 20s insisted that I simply conquer my fear by walking beside him and his beautiful girlfriend. I tried…. I wanted to. I could not, though, as I began shaking… just the sheer weight of why I was there in the first place simply for being black and asking the driver to take a preferred route – it all seemed so absurd, yet it is an indignity that one endures at every turn in a million ways every frigging day in this society. The warmest eyes winked at me as he smiled and the Beck taxi came up the bridge made a U-turn and the young warrior closed the door on me, wishing me well. Eventually, I got home late and when I was done job B where I fundraise in the arts and remain unrivalled, I wrote a detailed account of my ride with the bigot who kicked me from his car and was summarily refunded. As if Jazz the blasted motherfuck were invented by unibrowed, camel-fucking, hairy back-and-arsed dreck.
Days later, and still black history month, I was riding my bike through the wet streets of Rosedale where the snow melted fast after the latest snowfall. As I emerged onto Crescent Road from the footpath which Scrath becomes, to cross the bridge that spans Mount Pleasant Road, a white female in a black, skin-tight, jogging suit was way in back of a group of jogging white males whom I had seen with fair regularity. She was clearly not part of their group. Jogging in the street as she was, she moved to the side as I approached and then with the arrogance of the truly somnambulant, aggressively called after me in a tone that was both accusatory and possessive as I moved past, “Excuse me, where are you going?” That morning, I happened not to be wearing my bodycam as when I got downstairs, realised that the snow had sufficiently melted such that I could actually ride my bike rather than take a cab. Without so much as missing a beat, I broke hard and stood straddling my bike when reaching into the shallow depths of her sphinctered psyche, “I’m going to your house to fuck your man!” She stood there arrested, catatonic as my use of language was both vulgar, rapacious. “That’s right, I’m gonna hog-tie that fucking cocksucker of yours and fuck him good… Yeah, you wanna come watch? Come on!” Arrested in place, her eyes welled up as mine remained unflinchingly enraged, her lizard-thin upper lip actually trembling. With that, I resumed riding my bike to job A to which I was already running late. In this the age of Trump, some whites at every chance, turn racially predatory at the drop of a hat.
Then there are the casket fugitives; these blasted tiresome, overstayed boomers, who simply will not stop showing off and just crawl the fuck in their caskets. What other generation but boomers would find a new way to show-off in their smelly diapers and drug-wasted dotage? They, these lost souls forever hurrying about way off-piste, are ever bitching and at times raising their silly poles at me, demanding that I not ride on pathways but dismount and walk. Once confronted by a turkey-necked mannish boor, I leaned in and asked near-inaudibly, “Don’t you tire of breathing? Go on, go chill the fuck out in your casket”
And then November 3, 2020 turned into January 6, 2021 as that porcine pathological compulsive liar – America’s biggest loser and racist swine, finally left the stage with crooked tail between his fat thighs with the Eurotrash escort cum parvenu snob in tow. The cold-blooded murder of George Floyd, staged or simply instinctual racially predatory behaviour, like the big fat coward that he is, having miserably failed at leading and taking command of the pandemic, Trump latched on to the murder of George Floyd to win the vote. That’s right, it was all about not haemorrhaging the white vote; thus it became all about cops and law and order – all code language for white privilege and racist white supremacy. Well, it did not fucking work! Fuck you!
Not only did Trump fail to steal the vote by declaring Marshall law and leading an insurrection on the Capitol, he and his racist ilk’s poster boy for racially predatory murderous scum was convicted on all three counts. George Floyd’s murder occurred at the Pluto opposition in Capricorn and thus the past four hundred years of murderous racially predatory blood sport of blacks finally led to George being anointed as the One. That’s right, for the first time in 400 years, a cop has been found guilty of the murder of a black male. For blacks, America the past 400 years has been nothing but a giant game reserve where they are hunted with the arrogant impunity of police getting off time and again when murdering blacks. Let that sink in for a moment. America the land where whites can murder whilst dressed up in the hunting gear of the police uniform – all the while, other whites the world over perpetually on holiday having predatory sex with minors whilst everyone looks the other way. Thanks to his murder, and trophy-hunting racial predator Chauvin having been found guilty of murder, George Floyd became a martyr who has broken the long 400 year tradition of the justice system in America condoning the racially predatory murder of blacks at the hands of police. Pluto in Capricorn indeed. The hijacked American justice system where blacks are corralled to spike the profit margins for BlackRock shareholders… talk about genius, indeed.
Always… with every breath… it is quintessentially Jazz!
Recent ride through Rosedale because of whose venal classist/racist aggression, I have taken to wearing the bodycam. As ever, Jazz permeates my every breath; how could it not when my father’s first cousin, the recently deceased actor Cicely Tyson was wife of Jazz genius Miles Davis? A new friend with lots of past-life history, asked why I am always singing the same Jazz tune when cycling; it is a form of meditation, I shared, as I move from job A to job B. By vocalesing and singing a favourite Jazz tune, I am getting refocussed to the task next in hand – fundraising in the arts… at which I am damn good. In the above clip, at the 06:24 mark, one can clearly see the septuagenarian white female with bags in hand, walking north in the southbound bike lane. Likely she chose to do so to avoid being too close to persons on the kerb. Either way, her choice and no business of mine. Minutes as I got further down Sherbourne Street, at which point, I had stopped recording, as I was now going south in the northbound bike lane a total of 3 white female passing, violently yelled and called me every kind of asshole imaginable. White females are ten times more likely than white males to be verbally abusive in such situations; however, non-white, non-black males and females almost never engage in such predatory social aggression. The idea that I am going to time-waste by yelling at someone for simply going in the opposite direction of the usual flow of bike traffic in a given lane is beyond absurd. So fucking what? Last winter before getting the bodycam, there was a white male in early forties with about 4% body fat running north in the northbound bike lane along the Sherbourne Street bridge. As I approached at a leisurely pace, I could tell that he was wearing air buds and not wanting to surprise him simply rode pass saying and doing nothing. Shocked, though not surprised, was I when he upped his jogging pace and began running alongside on my right. Yelling as though a drill sergeant, he began calling me an asshole and demanded to know why I had not used my fucking bell when passing him. Not jogging on the kerb was he, nor was he jogging towards oncoming bike and vehicular traffic; yet, he and his perceptions had perceived me as being at fault for riding alongside and passing him without having given him warning of my approach. This world is overrun by truly blind assholes, very well-armed, truly blind assholes.
A few days ago as I hopped off my bike with time to kill between jobs A & B, I slipped into the reconstituted shrine to Canadian ice hockey which became the flagship store of Loblaws, another of the Weston family’s retail gems. On entering, there was a police officer just inside – a new pandemic feature. Tall, handsome and of South Pacific heritage, the male officer engagingly greeted me, willingly, I ambled over and he commended me on the bodycam. Said he, every person of colour ought to be wearing one; indeed, I agreed, it amazingly affords one peace of mind and a harassment free ride about town. He laughed when told of how hostile the burghers of Rosedale can be, adding that he was not surprised in the least at the account of in-your-face open bigotry.
With nimble vivacity me and my paniers whisked through the place, emerging minutes later with organic ginger, beautifully pungent organic turmeric, Ocean Spray’s Cran-Grape drink – this drink screams sugar is the drug y’all – and of course, the most exquisite cheddar cheese. Whether at tea, with pâté or dark chocolate, the President’s Choice (Loblaws house brand) aged 5 years crumbly cheddar cheese is as musky and satisfying as a full Moon night spent indulging rugged mansex in the moss-saturated bois of Vancouver’s Stanley Park. Slipping outside, as I loaded up my paniers on my trusty brown Schwinn Gateway, the four bottles of VOSS water made the paniers hard to close shut – larger than the VOSS available in Yorkville, who needs Pusateri’s and Yorkville’s parvenu pretentious bullshit anyway?
As ever, life is like a flying dream; if you look down, you’re fucked. Enjoy the ride and fear no one!
Almost instantaneously, as the Moon transited Leo in my third house, my lungs besottedly drank the warm and dank, dark air. Thus I effortlessly drowned into sleep. Whilst wintry winds howled outside the window, this cold early Saturday morning – November 18, 1989 – my lucid focus seamlessly shifted into the dreamtime.
I readily knew that I was dreaming.
Here, just as moments earlier whilst awake and meditating, Merlin was uppermost in my thoughts. I could sense his presence. The shift from one dimension to the other was seamless. Lucidly self-aware, I was immediately come to in a dream that was set in the bedroom where I slept.
I was in bed with the artist Olaf Nordstrom – a source of loving support at present in the waking state. I was lying in bed, leaning on his bony chest, as he sat up in bed. It was obvious from his body language that he did not want to be in bed with me. I felt a still and quiet vibration to this dream. The moment was truly serene and peaceful. This was not a sexual or post-sexual interlude. We were both reflective. It was obvious that we were on the cusp of something momentous. It was the sort of vibration that signalled that something extraordinary was about to unfold.
Olaf behaved as if he was uncomfortable being there – it was a grave moment. He wanted to be there, however, to merely lend his support. It was obvious that he was wary of my clinging. Clinging, however, was not my intention. The moment together was brief – just a preparation for things to come. With that we parted. It was time to get up and participate in the events of whatever was to unfold.
This dream was possessed of inordinate lucidity; its every detail and nuance my faculties absorbed with acuity beyond the norm.
In the second dream, this cold Saturday morning, I found myself in the familiar territory of the Cabbagetown streets where we lived. I went into a store which does not exist in the waking state. It sat just south of the Pet Menagerie store, on the east side of Parliament Street, between Amelia and Winchester Streets.
It was a tailor’s shop that carried rather high-end fabrics. I was there to pick out some fabric because I had a definite idea of what I wanted to wear to Merlin’s funeral. I knew that the only way, to get the look that I wanted, was to make the outfit myself. The kindly, gracious salesman was trying to get me interested in a rather conservative plaid fabric but it simply was not to my liking. My aversion was not because it was plaid; rather, the tone was too sombre.
He was not insistent but let me know that it was appropriate. However, I would have none of it; I simply did not like the fabric or the colours. I simply was not going to have it. Unable to make up my mind and not wanting to make a decision about fabric, as there were so many ramifications to what it all meant, I left the store stepping into the light of day. It had been a very dimly lit, nicely wood-panelled, stately shop.
Once outside, I became acutely aware of Merlin. I was now returned to the yard of Cabbagetown’s 20 Amelia Street, where we lived, and Merlin was present with me. Thoughts of Merlin, on leaving the store, had me immediately posited in the front yard of 20 Amelia Street where I happily joined him. We were watering the lawn even though it was wintertime. Next door at 18 Amelia Street, where at this point Club Monaco designer Alfred Sung no longer lived, there were lots of potted plants hanging from the lone, purple-leaved, sugar maple tree.
Merlin was telling me to water the plants. He then began telling me, rather matter-of-factly, that I had to start taking care of the apartment – I had to make it a home again. Merlin asked me to start preparing things. He meant that this was not the time for procrastination. Of course, moments earlier in the prior dream, I had been procrastinating when down on Parliament Street to pick out fabrics to wear to his funeral. By avoiding the matter altogether, I had chosen instead to forego the purchase. As Merlin spoke to me, I became so aware of him that I completely became self-aware – both in the dream and in my sleep whilst in bed at 20 Amelia Street.
I was standing there very intently looking at Merlin. He, too, was very intently looking at me. Whilst we were unflinchingly looking into each other, I thought aloud with quiet resignation, ‘Merlin has died.’
I knew, too, that Merlin had heard my thoughts in the dream.
At that moment my sister Pandora da Braga, with whom Merlin enjoyed the best relations of anyone else in my life, suddenly became a presence in the dream. She never fully became physically manifested but her energies became overwhelmingly strong. Her energies were just to my rear as she played a loving and supportive role.
Suddenly, introspectively, I recalled a dream which I had had earlier in the week. With everything moving so quickly, in the waking state – with little time to collect my thoughts, let alone overlong time to record any dreams- it had slipped by unrecalled on awakening. However, now it was not merely being recalled, it was being relived in its entirety. I stood there and as I recalled the dream, rather seamlessly, I actually entered the dream which was being reanimated as it was being holographically recalled.
Within the reanimated dream being recalled and relived, I was again on the lawn at 20 Amelia Street in the warmth of the Sun’s rays. Just as in today’s dream, I was on the front lawn facing due north and the house with 18 Amelia Street on the left to the west. As Merlin and I were visiting in the outer dream of today, I had turned my body. Being in the same physical position had triggered the recall and reanimation of the dream from the past week.
To my left, I saw an incredibly ancient-looking, wise being who progressed across the lawn. The slowness of his progression was so measured that one’s experience of time, in the reanimated and recalled dream, progressed outside of time itself. It was simply magical to experience the progression of the very ancient and mystical being. The millennia-ancient figure progressed across the lawn, of 18 Amelia Street, heading towards our home at 20 Amelia Street. The being was male and small in stature; he was hobbit-like. His head was large, disproportionately large, compared to his tiny, frail-bodied frame.
He could not have been more than four feet tall. His head was absolutely massive. His forehead arched up and was high like an African’s. Too, his head was elongated in the back, reminiscent of Pharaoh Akhenaten’s skull. More striking than the majesty with which the august being progressed outdoors, towards our home at 20 Amelia Street, was the look of his face.
It was simply magical. From beneath the translucent skin, soft yellow-white light escaped revealing his very visible aura. Nothing but pure love, along with the same nonjudgmental look that ever peered back from Merlin’s eyes to mine, radiated from this being. The love radiating from the being towards me was awesome, immense – intense. The great being’s progress was purposeful. He was on a mission; he was unstoppable. The process had begun.
I was struck by the uncanny resemblance, which the face of this being bore, to the planet-being in the skies of Sandy Point, St. Kitts in a momentous dream during September 1983. It was a dream whose potency and beauty would lay unfathomable for years to come. The being progressed as though levitating mere millimetres above the rather zingy, extra-green grass of the lawns at both 18 and 20 Amelia Street. Though he did not pause as he progressed, the radiant being did turn and look at me. As though he was familiar with me, he acknowledged me by slightly nodding. However, he continued on towards our home.
He moved past me as I stood there, still and silent, drinking in the majesty of the experience. At soul-centre we were familiar to each other. I knew him. He knew me. I stood, alone and awestruck, in the front yard being refamiliarised by the vibration of his beauty as the effect of his potent powers spatially affected the dream. As he moved past, I was reminded of the film The Dark Crystal, by Jim Henson – with whom Merlin had worked, directing two episodes of the Fraggle Rock television series in its inaugural season. This movie would for several months, after we saw it together in New York City, be our favourite film.
Thereafter for several weeks, whenever we looked at each other – even when not being intimate, we had hummed at each other as the rival beings in the film did when communicating. The being here was much like the good beings in the Jim Henson film The Dark Crystal. The being progressed up the few stone steps, to the wooden veranda at 20 Amelia Street, and began making his way inside the house. As I watched him ascend, from the lawn to the veranda, it was clear to me that he was levitating. Though it was a dream and I too could have levitated and flown, he though had a power which surpassed mine.
This august-souled, mystical being clearly originated from a dimension which vibrationally and spiritually was of a higher plane than the astral, where the dream occurred, and the physical in which I am incarnate. Indeed, the same physical plane from which Merlin was rapidly taking his leave – it was that discernible. The moment the mystical being entered our home, being lost to view, I came to from the inner holographic dream which was a recall and reanimation of a dream that I had experienced within the last week. As I came to, I was about to go indoors to see what had become of the being that had clearly entered our home.
It was then, having returned to being fully focussed in the outer ‘shell’ dream of today November 18, 1989, that I saw Merlin anew. He was standing at the front door looking out at me. I stood there, in the front yard, transfixed whilst the bright daylight bathed my body throughout. The look on Merlin’s face was purely transcendent. He was perfectly still and perfectly radiant. Merlin stood in the midst of a nimbus of dazzling, blue-white light. As he lovingly glowed out at me, this splendid light only intensified.
Merlin was transformed and as his face lovingly lit up, at me, the light grew to more completely envelop his body. Whilst lovingly glowing at me with the warmest, most familiar knowing smile, Merlin slowly brought his right hand up with the palm facing me and more completely smiled. The radiance of his smile soon became lost in the glow of his aura’s light. The nimbus, enveloping his transformed body, radiated even more intensely at that point.
I was blown away. Arrested, I readily knew what I was experiencing; I could feel it. I knew that across dimensions, in the waking state, Merlin had just died.
However, as is my wont, I protested. I dropped the hose which was still bleeding its nurturing water onto the frozen, wintry lawn at my feet. I stood – paralysed. Determinedly, I then bolted for Merlin. I headed up to the veranda as my lover, as my mentor, as my friend stood transcendent in the doorway to what had been the most beautiful sense of home ever experienced. “Merlin!” shrieking in protest, I yelled out his name.
(Detail of oil on canvas by my sister Pandora of Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery where Merlin is buried.)
Suddenly, the thunder of my protesting breath abruptly drew me from sleep. I sat upright in bed, my arms outstretched and beyond, after having crashed back into my body and no longer astral-projected. From the foot of the bed both cats – Zora and Whoopi – knowingly, silently looked up. I was arrested by the frozen horror-struck face staring at me from the mirrored closet doors across the room.
In the near-darkness of the bedroom, a few rays of early morning light made it past the blood-red, velvet drapes heavily hung at the windows. Those rays starkly cast light on how horribly desolate my life now was. Merlin was gone. His spirit had taken leave from this world. It was that discernible as my world, my very universe, had experienced a massive vibrational shift.
I had been abruptly displaced from the astral plane. I had been lucidly dreaming a dream within a dream. I was being told so long as Merlin, transitioned from incarnate to astral plane habitué, bade farewell to our magically glorious union on the physical plane. I was heartened by the peace and knowingness in his transcendent face because I knew that it was a, “See you soon…” parting, for now.
I knew that there would be dreams aplenty up ahead. Just as he had pledged, he would magically weave in his indelible promise to me, before departing from the physical plane. There was such a cold silence, a stinging finality to the moment, as I sat there in bed. After having looked back at myself, silently waiting, I placed a call to the eighth storey nursing station at Wellesley Hospital.
I was immediately aware that the tone of the nurses, with whom I was by now long-familiar, had changed. In very little time, it was official… Merlin had indeed passed. Truth be told, it was not a surprise; I could sense it on awaking. He simply was not there. As always, I had reached out to sense him on awaking – his energies – just blocks away at Wellesley Hospital. Now, there was nothing.
Then, as if needing further proof, I thought about Merlin calling each morning. He would do so, to lovingly say hello and thereby, to lovingly wake me up. Merlin would then lovingly ask for a call-back, after I had audio-recorded the dreams. Merlin had, thus far, not called. Once again, I saw the stillness of my reflection across the room. I knew then, really knew… Merlin was gone.
On this the eve of what would have proven Merlin’s 72nd birthday, I share these rather totemic dreams. This November 18, 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of Merlin’s passing of full-blown AIDS, on a cold November Saturday morning when icy snowflakes aimlessly drifted across the city streets. Whilst at dinner recently, a dear friend asked if I am never saddened at the loss of Merlin and if I ever do miss him. Of course, as I write this blog, I am warmed by the fact that on December 2, 2006 – almost 13 years ago, Merlin was reincarnated in a canalled northern European city. Merlin is now female and the third of three children – two older brothers.
What’s more, Merlin reborn has eyes that would now be even more phenomenal than when last I gazed besotted and rhapsodic into those large, soulful hazel eyes. Whereas Merlin was on his sixth life as a seventh level mature scholar soul, now reincarnated and female that soul is now living its first incarnation as a first level old scholar. These next dreams were dreamt in May, 1989 when Merlin was then still incarnate and at that point, he daily listened to the audiocassette recording of my dreams. This he did because they fascinated him; more than that, he did so because ever the director, he was keen to give insight and direction.
“Come on, Arvin, you have to be more descriptive. I have no idea if the car was blue, green, for that matter a convertible and was it a tan or white leather interior?”
Certainly, it can never be underestimated the pivotal role that Merlin played in the depth and thoroughness of the audiocassette recorded dreams. He was ever a loving but tough taskmaster and happy am I to have had his loving input and direction. After having listened to the recorded dream being now shared herein, Merlin came to dinner at our 20 Amelia Street home and declared, “Well, let’s not get too caught up in trying to interpret and figure out the symbolism of those dreams.” After, he winked, we softly kissed; his lips as ever warm and full as internally an unrelenting disease determinedly consumed his body… but never alas his spirit.
These were potent, lucid astral plane dreams. To say that they were totemic would be understating fact. The dreams were a glimpse beyond the veil as Merlin shamanically wound down another incarnation and got ready to put to rest another life. Ever focussed on my spiritual maturation, I am immensely proud to have survived so long after Merlin’s passing. Had anyone wagered that I would be still in the game 30 years later, I would have said, “You are reading the wrong tea leaves.”
Well, here I am still shaking arse and the Rathore to the core. These totemic dreams were dreamt on Monday, May 22, 1989, audiocassette recorded on tape IX of the 250 audiocassette recording of my dreams and yet to be found in Volume one the 25 Volume dream opus. Too, at the time, the Moon then transited both Sagittarius and my seventh house – wherein my natal Moon is posited. Truly few are they who are brave enough to drink from the chalice that is life.
Your support and choice to be focussed herein are both humbling and a source of inordinate pride. I am immensely grateful. Sweet dreams and as ever do remember, death is just a shift in focus; one is merely focussed at a different frequency. Besides, as one rather beguiling astral plane habituée put it, “Trust me, death is not wasted on the living.”
Dreams serve as the most expedient conduit for sustaining the bonds and communion of souls between persons who are no longer focussed in the physical plane but refocussed on the astral plane between lives as astral plane habitués whilst resting, reviewing and weaving the tapestry of future incarnations. So, drink and live in the moment. Take a deep breath, open your eyes within – don’t be afraid – and there within the silken folds of self is the massive beauty which is spirit.. go on explore and discover the true you. I love you more.
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The first dream found me posited on a hilltop looking down into a valley which then rose up into a lower hill. From the vantage of the mountains in Sandy Point, St. Kitts or Nevis, the view was of being down towards the ocean. Topographically, it seemed more like St. Kitts – however, this was definitely set in Nevis. I looked out and what did I see but a house on this hill; it was a very huge and lovely house.
Down from the sky, before the house on the rolling plains, fell a column of white light that shimmered. The manifesting light had the power of a tornado and it was a force that moved… it undulated. Truth be told, this was a liquefied white light – not unlike a waterspout. As compared to the left and right sides of the shaft, it was as though the centre of the light was faded. The centre of the column of light seemed invisible but it wasn’t. As a matter of fact, it was sort of greyish-coloured.
*A very fleeting dream this was but it was one that was potent. The sky overhead was ominously dark as though the cloud cover was simply to mask something else. There was no getting around the fact that the light was used as some sort of transport or conveyance. The light was being used for the relay of energies between the house’s occupants, if there were any, and whatever was beyond the clouds.
The dream seemed to have abruptly collapsed because I had happened on the scene. There was no one else about. Too, it was the only house on the landscape. I felt as though I had been ejected, from the dream, for having been there and witnessed what I wasn’t supposed to have been privy to. The dream collapsed around me; I was deprived any further knowledge of what was going on. In light of the dream that would follow, it became fairly obvious that the light column was channelling.
Eventually, the astra-human soul quality of Merlin’s would quite potently manifest. Of course, just as in the dream of Thursday, July 7, 1988VI, again, there was a lone house on the landscape. As will become evident, in later moments of the dreams, Merlin’s soul quality would manifest. END.
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The next dream immediately found me in bed with Merlin. He got up and he looked very old. Looking very tired and old, he turned around to me then went out into the hallway. He turned around and asked me, “When are you going to start moving on because I’d like to die by the end of this year? When are you going to go back to school? I’m really tired of this; I’m tired of this illness… I just want to move on.”
He was terribly impatient. Indeed, Merlin here was very forceful. That was when he began shapeshifting; Merlin underwent a metamorphosis before my eyes. He became, as he spoke, more impatient. I watched spellbound as his physiology morphed into the very astral-looking faun – though elfin-looking, he was taller than his known humanoid self; Merlin became the archetypal Chiron. I started crying sounding real childlike and said, “No… no! Please, please don’t!”
His face then became part of the pink walls, thus his transformed face was flesh-toned. Here his face looked faunlike; his eyes were on the sides. He had the face of a faun and I only ever saw the right eye. The eye was black-within-black. The eye looked down at me because the head – which was the only thing visible when mounted – was up on the wall. Shapeshifted, Merlin’s was a very hard-looking eye.
Merlin’s eye rapaciously looked right into the soul. An ancient eye it was. I caressed the softness of the fur-like skin and pleaded with him and said, “Please, I can’t live without you. I couldn’t go on. Please don’t lose your strength and get ill,” I pleaded with the shapeshifted Merlin and cried. I was aware of being here in bed asleep whilst dreaming and that my body was going through the motions of crying and being pained. Merlin did not hear me, although, I thought that as I slept that I was talking aloud in my sleep.
*This was an intensely upsetting dream because it dramatised how Merlin wished to be allowed to move on. He no longer cared to be focussed in the life. Though it was obvious that he could have soldiered on for months more, he simply lost the desire to go on being focussed. Clearly, this was owing to the bilious discord created by Tytanikka and Oleg’s betrayal.
Though he never physiologically resembled the classic centaur, Merlin’s face not only further morphed becoming like a fawn’s, more accurately, his head and face did have the eventual shape of a young bison’s – very Taurean, strong and potent.
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On preparing for the video to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Merlin’s birth back in 2017, I decided then to head off to the costumer, Malabar on McCaul Street where artist and lover George Hawken lived in the late 80s to early 90s. Inspired by the first dream of Merlin had 41 years ago in July 1978, I decided to get a cowl as a tribute to the cowl Merlin wore in the inaugural dream encounter with him, four years before having met on Friday, October 1, 1982 in New York City. So, there was I at Mount Pleasant Cemetery on Saturday, July 15, 2017 in my cowl and the panama hat purchased at Versailles to escape the heat. I thought it fitting as Merlin always loved wearing panama hats.
My trusty friend, J.J. who happens to be an artisan entity mate whom I have known in 20 past lives –- which is a high incidence of contact -– was the director. Initially, I had hoped to throw a white party on the lawn to the southwest of the chapel at Mount Pleasant Cemetery and have a drone film the event where a gathering of friends would raise a glass to Merlin on the anniversary of his ennobled birth. Merlin always threw a white party each year for his birthday at his parents’ stunning backyard in north Toronto’s Servington Crescent.
The plan was not approved by the cemetery and thus, one had to improvise. I got my panama hat and my cowl and together, we proceeded with a dozen long-stem white roses to visit Merlin’s resting place. I had a pretty good idea what I was after. With the matching white cowl, I wanted to evoke the magic of meeting Merlin in that initial dream which is shared in volume one of the dream memoirs, which is already published: Merlin and Arvin: A Shamanic Dream Odyssey.
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In the hardcover edition of human civilisation’s first dream memoirs, the initial dream encounter with Merlin is shared. The dream begins on page 110 in the hardcover edition. I wanted the same sense of wonderment and magic that I felt for having met Merlin in that first dream four years prior to having met reflected in the video. In that dream, Merlin’s appearance was preceded by a white totemic creature which seemed, in its astral plane outréness, to be part Russian wolfhound, part alpaca, part dog.
So, moving to the lawn, having descended the steps of the chapel, I began walking across the open lawn towards the statuesque lion-festooned mausoleum with the five remaining white long-stem white roses. Seven roses, of course, were left at Merlin’s grave -– one rose for each of our seven glorious years together. As I stepped onto the lawn, it seemed magical… timeless even. Slowly, confidently as I approached the filmmaker at the other end of the lawn, I thought of Merlin and that initial dream.
Just then, I very distinctly thought of Merlin greeting me by purring, “Hello Lambs.” As if right on cue, from off stage left, an adult deer came from behind the bushes and tombstones that line the far edges of the open lawn. Never before had I seen a deer at Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Indeed, the good burghers of Forest Hill who clearly regularly jogged in the park-like setting stopped and were overheard remarking that they had never seen a deer in the cemetery before. All that I could do was tear up and continue walking as the deer then bolted and ran from stage left to right as I continued my stride uninterrupted –- unfazed by the appearance of an adult deer on the grounds of the cemetery. What is more astounding, is that J.J. at the time was filming my walk; at the last minute, I decided against a run-through as I was concerned about the natural light possibly changing if we were to rehearse the shot.
Unbeknownst to me, the deer after having made it to stage right, then returned to the centre of the lawn and stood there perfectly still whilst observing my progression across the lawn. J.J. who was astounded by the occurrence remarked that he had just witnessed a miracle. There is no doubt in my mind as I tried to recapture the magic of that initial dream encounter that there was a subtle validation of that dream from the magical shaman himself on the other side by having had Merlin’s spirit step in as director emeritus and had the deer enter the shot as validation and a token of his appreciation of the love that we shared and my steadfast loyalty to him. After crossing the lawn and turning to watch the deer stand there, looking down the lawn at me, I felt such utter peacefulness and abandonment of spirit — just as when alone and intimate in the dark with Merlin.
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Yes, I believe in magic as did Merlin and as though an appreciation of having stridently done everything to fulfil his mandate to me, Merlin’s astral body conjure up the same magic here and now as he had in July 1978 –- four years before slipping inside a Hell’s Kitchen walk-up and readily winning me over with his sexy elfin charm, magic and sex that proved the most grounding shamanic passion… every time. Standing there, I was reminded, too, of that dream in 1989 before Merlin passed wherein he shape-shifted and became a fawn-like creature who morphed and became one with the wall in our Cabbagetown home.
All the music chosen for this 13-minute video is music that Merlin loved whilst incarnate and to which he returned time and again -– whether at Joe Morton’s tiny Upper West Side apartment in autumn of 1983, Toronto’s 20 Amelia Street in tony Cabbagetown. From Glenn Gould’s mastery of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, to Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Dionne Warwick singing That’s What Friends Are For –- in that segment of the video, I included friends whom Merlin valued: Kareem Benezra, myself, Wayne Robson and his oldest and most loyal friend, the ever-gracious, Maxime Gascoigne-de Montigny.
Of course, for Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely, I exclusively included photos of Merlin and his very handsome and gracious father, David Ben-Daniel. Whereas I favoured Sir Paul McCartney’s Hey Jude, Merlin ever loved George Harrison and especially My Sweet Lord. Of course, one Saturday, whilst staying at actor, Joe Morton’s Manhattan apartment, when Merlin and I secretly committed to being together, we slow-danced to Supertramp and Roger Hodgson’s unmatched magical vocals on Supertramp’s Breakfast In America.
Additionally, Jeffrey Osborne’s On the Wings of Love which was one of Merlin’s favourite ballads is also included. Merlin loved Black male soul singers: Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Jeffrey Osborne –- most especially –- George Benson, Al Green, Teddy Pendergrass, Donny Hathaway, Barry White. Most of all, I am especially proud of the video that J.J. and I have created; I think that it masterfully captures the depth of my love and fealty to the most fabulously magical shaman encountered on this incarnation’s spiritual odyssey.
Naturally, before having left for Mount Pleasant Cemetery, I had flooded my apartment with the music that appears in the video. Perhaps, unwittingly by so doing, I was invoking Merlin’s spirit, which later joined us when he played ultimate director and pulled off the most magical bit of stage direction –- an adult deer in the middle of a cemetery in the heart of mid-town Toronto. Lastly, I played the sublimely soulful Shirley Horn’s interpretation of, Here’s to Life! Whilst raising a glass of coconut water, I had forgotten to pick up some champagne the evening prior and it was too early in the morning to find champagne anywhere –- the lighting was way too good. Besides who knows if that magical deer would have been anywhere about.
Here’s to life… most of all, here’s to Merlin… here’s to dream shamans everywhere!
Merlin’s mandate to me ever remains:
“Please my darling, I want you to write about our lives together. I promise you, however possible, I am going to send you dreams to include in the story of our love… our lives together.”
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.
Regardless your combination, there is no greater gift to receive than the love of another to 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.
The first dream was set, at nighttime, 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.
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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.
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*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.
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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.
As ever, thanks for your ongoing support. Plié, push off and start flying whether awake or dreaming cause this dance called life is the most goddamn beautiful dream. I love you more.
Diana, Princess of Wales & HRH Prince Henry, Duke of Sussex.
On the eve of what would have been her 58th birthday, I share a dream encounter with Diana, Princess of Wales. At the time of the dream, July, 1996, Diana was then incarnate and would be dead less than 14 months later. The dream suggested Diana, parenting a male child of mixed race heritage. Naturally, at the time of the dream, she was not then yet involved with Dodi Al-Fayed. Years later, whilst living in Montréal and transcribing the 250 audiocassette recordings of my dreams which spanned a decade, I happened on the dream. By the time of the transcription, Diana was dead and so, on poring through the dream I thought that the male child in the dream to whom Diana seemed a mother, must have been a child of hers and Dodi’s.
Fast forward twenty-three years from the dream in question and I am beginning to think that this exceptional male royal child was actually a dream of tuning into a future in which Diana was serving as protector of her beloved son’s own baby boy, Archie Harrison. The skull of the baby boy in the dream who seemed like a son of Diana, Princess of Wales’, is exactly shaped like that of Archie, Diana’s grandson by way of her son, HRH Prince Henry, Duke of Sussex with his black wife, Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex.
Alas, another dream encounter with Diana, Princess of Wales. This one would involve moving into a probable reality scenario which may well have eventualised had she not tragically died thirteen months after having had the dream.
*Then again, it may well have been tuning into a future which has now come to pass wherein, the interracial Sussexes have a male firstborn. END.
As with the dream of July 9, 1993, in which I would have a most rapturous astral plane encounter with task companion, Merlin, here too there would be lots of train travel. This means of transportation, I have come to realise is employed by the soul when one is questing and traversing the astral either to past, future or probable timelines.
In this case, I had clearly dreamquested to a probable and non-too-distant future for Diana, Princess of Wales. Sadly, it was not to be. Obviously, in this probable near-future astral plane dream, Diana, Princess of Wales was fulfilled and had gone on to start a second family and was mother to a rather precocious son; a son whom I might add was clearly at least fourth level old-souled.
At the time, it was Sunday, July 27, 1996 and the Moon then transited both Capricorn and my eighth house. The house of death wherein is posited my retrograde Saturn, gave interesting insights to things as they might have unfolded as others’ agendum precluded Diana, Princess of Wales’s life becoming more of an inconvenience.
*Then, too, as time has unfolded, this rather prophetic dream was actually tuning into a probable reality which has become the collective future of human civilisation and one which we enjoy today. Here’s to TRH Duke & Duchess of Sussex and their incredible baby boy, Archie Harrison. END.
Of course, at the time of these dreams, I was then resident in Vancouver’s West End. The dreams were audiocassette-recorded on tape two hundred and seventeen and to be found in volume XXII of the dream opus.
There was much sturm und drang in parts of the dreams as it mirrored the vicious tectonics, long after Merlin’s passing, being played out legally and otherwise with persons whom I am so glad to be finally rid of. Chief among them that STD-riddled, dominatrix poseuse and fag-hag to boot, who quixotically saw herself cast into the world to play Merlin’s protector and saviour – the dreams of lost village idiots… indeed.
At the end of the day, Merlin never liked her and rightly so considered her a damn idiot. At his passing, he had nothing to do with her; hence the fool spent the next two-plus decades being bedpan-changer of Merlin’s betrayers – a poor play at atonement that.
Enough about knock-kneed caribou roadkill; the journey endures. Besides, the bond with Merlin could never have been successfully broadsided.
Come now my magical darlings, mischievously sport that wry smile known only to kindred spirits, slip into a luxurious plié, take my hand and let’s have ourselves a delicious group flying dream. We are better for sharing this journey together; for your support, I love you more.
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Whilst heading down a street in what was undoubtedly Toronto, in this the first dream, it was then daytime. The street seemed like the one just around the corner from the Underground Railroad Restaurant, on King Street West, to the west of Sherbourne Street – Frederick Street. Going down Frederick Street’s incline, I noticed along a back lane that there was a large building. Too, I noticed a great many persons from past workplaces. The building seemed to be an annex to the main workplace as I had known it.
One of the first persons whom I recognised was Milton Bloomfield. He was wearing a pair of dark blue slacks and powder-blue short-sleeved shirt. Excited to see him, I bounded over and went around to the back entrance. Immediately, I began seeing persons whom I had completely forgotten about. Indeed, some of these persons looked as though they were definitely astral plane habitués. In particular, one old White male had that outré habitué look to him. I was simply astounded to have seen some of these persons. Truth be told, I had not thought of so many of them long in ages.
‘How quickly we do forget,’ I thought.
Such a very pleasant discovery of things past, it turned out to have been. That aside, I resumed my search of Milton Bloomfield in earnest. Again, I saw him in the distance. This time he was walking away from me without having noticed that I was there. In the end, though it would have been nice to have interacted with him, I just didn’t see the point in going after him. On going around another corner, since I was amongst persons from the past, I had thought to go in search of Yaramé Snead. I went over by some machines which no longer exist, in the waking state, seeing that she would shortly have shown up at the start of her shift. I then saw her at a desk working away and hurried over to be with her.
Stooping down to her left and rear, I playfully called out hello to her. On turning and seeing me, her reaction had been low-key. I was surprised really as I thought that she would at least have been her usual boisterous self. Her hair was beautifully braided. Frankly, I felt putout as she seemed not the least bit pleased to have seen me. With that, not wanting to be more of a seeming bother, I wrapped up the visit. Since she had declined to have become engaged, I just couldn’t be bothered to have invested much energy in the encounter.
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Part of the focus of this the second dream, a man and I were together and seemingly were lovers. Tall, he was a redhead; as such, he represented one of my more choice sexual partners. Somehow, this man was in showbiz. We were definitely lovers. Whilst looking at TV Rosie O’Donnell had made remarks about him that were rather cutting. Initially, I had thought that her remarks had been about Xerxes Hamelin. The joke had been a crude remark wondering as, to which sex Xerxes Hamelin was.
This was in reference to her having breast reduction surgery. As I did not appreciate the crass put-down of Xerxes Hamelin, I would abruptly take my leave. I then went indoors of a house which, here, was like moving from the veranda indoors of the Crab Hill house. A few persons were inside the house as I ranted, vowing to get that fat ugly dyke, Rosie O’Donnell. There also was much laughter as I added,
“And we all know that I’m wicked enough, to do just as I say. But first we’re going to sue her frigging Mickey ass.” But my lover didn’t want to go through with it, he was a showbiz lawyer. Snapping at him, I said,
“I won’t hear of it. I will not be cutting him or her any slack. Get her fucking ass! There is no way that that no-classed fool is going to insult Xerxes Hamelin and get off lightly. End of fucking discussion. We sue! During the show’s rehearsal when that joke came up around the production meeting table, she could have had the decency to say, ‘no way, I’m not doing that kind of humour’. Obviously, she fucking well didn’t.
“It’s not about the fucking money; she will learn a thing or two, when I’m done with her fat-retaining, tired-looking ass.” What really amazed me was how lucid and lived-in, in the body, I was. I was really killer mad and out to do battle, “There is positively no way that she’d have gone out there and made disparaging remarks about Jews. And if you can’t knock the fucking Jews, you sure the fuck can’t haul your tired grey arse out on a stage to knock Blacks. Just stop and think about it. If a Jew would have her head in a nanosecond, then so the fuck will I.”
After that, we went off together. My lover was ever quiet and reserved whilst I did much of the talking. In that sense, he energetically was much like Merlin. However, it definitely was not Merlin.
As we walked about, we ran into Diana, Princess of Wales, who had a little child on her hip. One had the sense that, after having divorced HRH Charles, Prince of Wales, she had gone on to start another family. Definitely, this third child of hers was a son. Apparently, she had always wanted a little girl but here she was with a dark-haired bouncing boy. Obviously, from the looks of things here, Diana, Princess of Wales was going to have more than one family.
One interesting feature was that the boy was born with almost a full mouth of teeth. I mentioned in passing that I guess if you end up grinning as much as she does, it would not be surprising to have newborns appear grin-ready. Too, the child was already able to say some words at birth. The child was exceptionally intelligent. The young son’s most interesting feature was that even at less than six weeks, he was able to follow conversations.
The eyes on this child were exceptionally old-souled and wise. Not the feigned coyness of Prince William was his demeanour. We were in a huge stately Bentley whilst the child sat on his regal mother’s lap. Diana, Princess of Wales sat on my left with my lover, a showbiz lawyer-celebrity, seated next to me. My lover was of British birth; he was a well-placed Londoner and terribly well-off at that.
He was part of the few in whom Diana, Princess of Wales confided and had done so during her divorce proceedings with the Firm. From the Bentley, we got into another car. Although he really didn’t need it, the precocious son was travelling in a basket here. This child perceptively was quite advanced for his mere few months of life. He represented hands down a case for reincarnation.
Though he could talk, especially for someone less than a year old, he was still rather stubby and full of baby fat. I took the rather self-aware child from Diana, Princess of Wales and headed for the car. I then didn’t know whether she would be sitting in back of the car with us. Considerately, I had opened the front door for her but she told me that it wasn’t necessary.
She then went into the back of the car at which point I returned her son to her. In all of this, the precocious son hadn’t uttered a word of whiny protest for having been separated. He had simply looked me in the eye whilst studying me and not, god forbid, because of something as absurd as my being Black. This woman, his mother, was rather a genuinely sweet-personalitied soul. Not your typical animus-charged, parvenu, New World wealthy snob, like heaven only knows so many North Americans, was she. After we had taken off, I had mentioned that I had heard Prince William – who now was much taller than her – was very well-hung.
Furthermore, he loved roughing it with all the little willing boys at Eton. This supposedly was hot gossip in those circles and which both my lover and Diana, Princess of Wales thought hysterical. She expressed great pride in having produced such a fine stud for the Firm. She mentioned that he had to start his studding practice sometime and far better that it be at Eton than with too many willing little girls the world over. Clearly, Diana, Princess of Wales had no desire to turn grandmother just yet. She was a very funny person with a distinctive snort-like giggle.
We then went into a store that was called something like Mayfair & Browne or something along those lines. A small, high-end department store it was.
*The warm blues here would suggest that it was, in fact, Fortnum & Mason. END.
Afterwards, we had attended the opening of Parliament where Queen Elizabeth II had naturally been present. The Queen had asked the House of Lords to stand and, at that point, they had drawn some heavy red drapes. At this point, there were rituals of an occult nature which were being performed. This had been the custom for centuries and had been nobody’s business. The few priests, who performed the rituals, spoke in an ancient tongue; olde English and Gaelic it would seem.
As part of the ceremony, the queen adopted a raspy, adversarial and tyrannical tone. She snapped at them as they spoke to her. Of course, this was to validate her absolute power as monarch. She had spoken by using the same ancient tongue as they had. Quite illuminating was all this for me. From where we all sat, the monarch sat opposite us at the far end of the stately hall. On the right was the House of Lords.
On the left, was the House of Peers where things were even more arcane and secretive. Clearly, there was much more wealth possessed by the members of the House of Peers than those in the House of Lords; for one, they wore more expensive fur-lined robes. Queen Elizabeth II then stood and put an end to the rituals. When the priests retreated, the curtains rose again and at that point members of both houses of Parliament rose to bow to her majesty, the queen.
The Queen now looked her usual stoical self. Next, a loud debate rang out in the House of Lords; this was the point at which bills were being introduced. All in all, this was a very noisy affair. This was the point at which my London-born lover was expected to have introduced my suit against Rosie O’Donnell. However, he was blowing cold on the issue and tried to back out of it.
What caused him to have hung back was the raucous fight that had broken out between two Lords on some point or other. In point of fact, they had been quite vituperative. Soon after, we took our leave of Westminster Palace. Diana, Princess of Wales was not seated with the rest of the royals. Nor, for that matter, was the more royally scorned Sarah, Duchess of York seated with the royals.
The ride to the department store was no more than ten minutes. Once inside, we had gone some escalators which took us to a cosmetics counter. The look was pretty much like a Clinique counter, though, I really don’t think that it was such. On seeing an extended member of the House of Windsor coming down the aisle towards us, my lover had dropped behind. The focus of my lover’s attention was a rather princely gentleman. He was young with full red lips but not was horsey-looking.
*This princely gentleman was, in fact, James Ogilvy – grandson of the dashing Prince George, Duke of Kent. END.
They exchanged pleasantries and it was clear that my lover was rather smitten with him. I didn’t though get the sense of him, Mr. Ogilvy, that he was Gay. From there, we kept going further down in the complex below street level. Each time that we had come off an escalator, we had headed to the left to get the next. This in turn had taken us down another flight. Eventually, we arrived at a level which was clearly part of the city’s sprawling Underground.
As we walked, there were two little birdlike, old English women whose slow amble gait had gotten me fast impatient. Finally, we managed to have pushed past them and gotten the train just in time. Here we had travelled at fantastic speeds. The trip was for quite some time and, somehow, it seemed as though they used magnetic conductors here in this civilisation. There was a sense too that we had been travelling several miles, at least 100, below the surface.
When finally we had arrived at our destination, we had gotten out into a labyrinth of tunnels which had eventually led above-ground in a Japanese city. We spent not very much time in Japan as it proved a stopover where we changed trains. Moving on, we had travelled on a futuristic-looking train. On board were two stylish, East Indian young women. Both were clearly tired for having travelled a lot and having crossed several time zones. A loud American was on board; she was an overweight woman. As can be expected, she talked aloud for everyone to notice her. She moronically complained about the trains not being aboveground and whined,
“I want it to be aboveground. There’s nothing to see down here. It’s all black and dark.” She said the word ‘black’ with the same customary loathing as she had applied to African-Americans her whole life. “Don’t they realise that there’re lots of tourists and we want to see. It’s so boring being down here in all this blackness.”
‘Such a fucking acculturated bigoted asshole,’ I thought. The train was painted white on the outside with lots of chrome and walnut finishing on the inside. Very comfortable, red leather seats throughout the interior; this was a truly posh experience. We had boarded at the front of the train. We pulled into a station, though, only briefly; the train took off again never having opened its doors. This time it took off in the opposite direction. By now, my lover and I were no longer travelling together; however, I did have a travelling companion with me.
On this leg of the trip, we had moved above-ground at one point where we had passed the most glorious stand of ancient old trees. They were ginkgoes that looked millennia-old. Each was easily in excess of 200 feet. I quite liked it here. Though the vista was beautiful, it didn’t last very long as once again we were below-ground whilst ploughing through the lurching labyrinth of tunnels deep in the earth.
At the end of the trip, we had arrived at a swank hotel which seemed to be in either Switzerland or Austria. From the hotel, my lover and I were reunited and began trying to get in touch with Diana, Princess of Wales. He wanted to write to her instead of speaking so had sent her a fax. Here we were a bit in the future, where everyone was automatically assigned their personal phone number with cellphone/fax.
*Truth be told, rather than a fax, it was a text. Of course, at the point of the dream texting was well ahead of its time. END.
No matter where one was in the world, regardless of the borders, the same phone number managed to get you. Interestingly, they were not excessive amount of numbers. He had sent her a fax (text) with his private number and had asked Diana, Princess of Wales to call him; he had wanted to lend his support in her divorce proceedings.
At one point, when we had been driving, Diana, Princess of Wales opened up and spoke about her divorce from HRH Charles, Prince of Wales. She said that it had left her feeling truly awful. At the end of it, the one thing that she had taken away was the sense that she felt greater empathy for what Blacks suffer globally. Said she, she had gone to a couple of stores to shop, after having been divorced, where the mere salesclerks treated her with scorn.
Nobody wanted to serve her as if she had even been hostile to them. Diana, Princess of Wales said that it had been so overwhelming that in one case she had gone rushing back to her car in tears. For no longer being a part of the ‘Firm’, the public simply treated her as an unfortunate laughing stock. Some clerks had been outright rude to her. She said that she couldn’t believe that anything could have made her so mad.
To have been denied was the most painful experience. They were so mean-spirited and spiteful she claimed. Her voice here was high-pitched and almost feverish when she expressed her rage at the injustices she had experienced. She said that the idea of racial animus that she has heard Blacks speak of, she could finally understand. Diana, Princess of Wales said that she had experienced something pretty close to it in the lack of civility that she had gotten from everyone. Intently looking at her large clear eyes as she spoke, I was much impressed by her remarks. She was rather ravishing-looking and was so in her element for being mother to this exceptional child.
*Long after the dream and as things played out, the male child whom Diana, Princess of Wales had parented in this dream was clearly fathered by Dodi Fayed. Of course, at the time of the dream, I hadn’t a clue of Mr. Fayed’s existence. The precocious boy had his father’s nose and brows.
Clearly, this dream was tuning into a probable reality which finally was not to be. The child was clearly at least fourth level old-souled and may well have been a king or if not warrior soul.
**More thoughts on this dream. The fact that the lawyer who proved a lover of mine in this dream was a redhead, is at this time, I believe, a reference to HRH Prince Henry, Duke of Sussex. As it is extremely rare that I would dream of the latter, it is not a surprise that he was translated here by my waking consciousness as anyone but Prince Harry. Also, in light of the fact that in marrying Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry can be said to be an advocate of sorts for racial reconciliation with regards to the ties that the BRF historically have to the enslavement of Africans. Interestingly, that Diana, Princess of Wales should talk about having empathy for the racism that Blacks experience on a daily basis, is a dead giveaway. The theme of race and racism is a prevalent one where her son, HRH Prince Henry, Duke of Sussex is concerned.
For having chosen to wed an entity mate of his (HRH Prince Henry, Duke of Sussex) with whom he has a long reincarnational history and someone who has twice previously been a senior royal in the British Royal Family, is reason enough why the theme of race would be discussed and why Diana, Princess of Wales would be both empathetic and speak passionately about this issue. Naturally, throughout the dream she would be closely bonded with a firstborn male from another marriage; however, rather than being a firstborn of hers in a subsequent marriage, this older soul child would prove to be the firstborn mix-raced child of her son, Prince Harry, who was represented by the redhead lawyer/advocate who happened to be my lover. Indeed, Prince Harry can be seen to be an advocate for addressing and advancing racial dialogue and race relations. Similarly, that his firstborn son, Archie is a seventh-level mature priest soul would indicate someone whose focus in life will be about inspiring, uplift, healing and harmony… god only knows that is sorely needed at this time.
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Straighten up and fly right! I love you more than you know…
As this November marks the 30th anniversary of Merlin’s passing, rare indeed it is that I should dream of him. Recently, I remarked to a friend that in all honesty if I were to encounter Merlin a dream at this stage, I would likely be more surprised to see him than not. Of course, Merlin reincarnated in December 2006 and is female and was born in Holland and will likely have a life that will likely be exclusively focussed in academia. Alas, with all these glamorous royal weddings of late, Lucian Mann-Chomedy reminded me of that gloriously lucid dream had of Merlin almost a year on from his passing; it was a dream wherein we were man and wife being married – a truly glorious drink for the soul it proved.
Here then a dream of him and me in a possible future incarnation as lovers yet again. As ever love endures. Whilst the Moon transited Gemini and my first house, on Sunday, November 4, 1990, I would have a most revelatory dream. It would prove a glimpse into the future and probable relations, between Merlin and me, when incarnate together again.
The dream concerned getting married and as man and wife. It was the sixth dream that day.
Soon enough, I entered this building and there was a wedding in progress. There was a very dark-skinned Black man. He was timid and bore an uncanny resemblance, both energetically and facially, to Merlin. He seemed very much so African.
Then a woman came up and she was much like Dustin Kynes’s wife, Allegra Kynes – a slightly light-complected, big-boned woman. A take-charge person, she was very much so the leader. Clearly, she was the one in that relationship who called the shots.
They were getting married. She wore a gown that was, quite simply, out of this world. She was an utterly vain woman. I was quite reminded of myself by her. I got a strong sense that this was a look into the future, in which Merlin and I were being married, during a life up ahead.
It proved an unusual ceremony. For one, she was not dressed in white. She wore a gown that was very expensive. It was green and opened from the neck down; there, it was tied with a big black button.
It opened outwards and was very regal, very priestly, in feel. It was covered from the shoulders on down, to mid-torso, by a very richly dark exquisite sable.
HRH Princess Michael of Kent at Royal Wedding of TRH Duke & Duchess of Cambridge 29.4.2011.
She had on a large-brimmed hat that was round-shaped. It was actually like the hat that the new empress of Japan recently wore, at a state ceremony, following the death of Emperor Hirohito.
The ceremony was very Oriental, in fact, but they were definitely Black people. She had lots of curls that hung from beneath her beautiful hat. Her hair was very long and gathered up under the hat.
She came up to join him wearing green high heel shoes that matched the green lower part of the regal cape that she wore. She wore a maxi but it was split in the front, midway up the legs, to just below the knees.
She came regally up the church aisle, going up to meet the man – her groom. She was alone as she progressed, the length of the aisle, towards the altar.
She joined him and stood up and turned around, doing a little pivot, so that her left shoulder was leading her around. This movement brought her to face her audience.
When she did, she should though have moved out of the way. By not having stepped to the side, she had ended up covering the groom.
However, he did not even know where to go. Totally unaware of this gaffe, she simply smiled at the audience. She was totally lost in her own world that was saturated with pride and vanity.
As if next to her, I heard her from where I was in the rear of the large church. She impatiently directed him, through clenched teeth, saying,
“Come on, get beside me.”
However, whilst in back of her, he did not know whether to go to her right or her left. She snapped at him, still smiling, as he was going to go to the right,
“Come on!”
This was the traditional side for the male but she impatiently snapped,
“Get over here on my left. I want you on my left.”
I thought to myself,
‘My goodness, wouldn’t they have had rehearsals for this before?’
However, I realised that this woman was so utterly vain that she was being blinded by her vanity.
The dress was simply out of this world. It was truly an haute couture original, à la Christian Lacroix, with just a hint of ostentation suggesting perhaps John Galliano’s creative genius.
It was covered with peacock feathers that were turned down, with the crowns down and not up. They were, of course, shaped as though tiny fans.
I thought that direction to the fans an interesting one. There were, too, precious stones throughout the gown between each plume. These precious stones brilliantly glistened and added to the gowns dramatic effect.
It was utterly beautiful and utterly expensive. This was a dress of light-green – olive – satin with matching shoes that you just knew some poor cobbler had to slave over to complete her outfit. It was utterly expensive. Utterly beautiful she was.
The cathedral was tightly packed. Everybody was utterly enthralled by the sight of this beautiful woman. She was very self-possessed and utterly vain.
She was the kind of handsome beauty that always married wildly successful men. Her groom was so handsomely dark, strong-featured with a beautiful moustache and a little goatee.
He had a prominent aquiline nose. Most of all, he had such wonderful, beautiful soulful eyes.
It was so very much so Merlin – the mouth, nose and eyes. It was the same soul, using the amalgam of all the lives lived to date, to create this particular look.
He was Black with a very Nubian-to-East African look that somehow could maintain the overall physical attributes and integrity of the primary central features of the face, which was Merlin’s, in his last and just-completed life. That gloriously magical lifetime of Merlin’s, here in fin de siècle twentieth century Toronto, when he and I were together and lovers did shine through.
It was very, very beautiful to have been a witness at this ceremony.
He was so much like Merlin yet so very timid. Rather than timid, the operative word should be gracious – responsive to her (future my) authoritative self. Very much the gentleman, gentle-souled and highly evolved was he.
Definitely, this future incarnation of Merlin’s found him being feminine-principled to my strong, take-charge, animus-charged persona though female. Reincarnate male Merlin was yin to my future reincarnate female yang. Together, again, we formed a solid and complementary partnership.
Whilst hovering over everyone in the cathedral, I viewed the splendid nuptials and was actually rather taken by the man. I was, of course, not seen by anyone.
It was a high moment, at the level of soul, for both persons being married.
She did, of course, carry a bouquet in her hand and a very beautiful little bouquet it was. It was very good to see them both.
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As ever dream as if it is the very last dream your soul will have dreamt for this incarnation… So go on, take a deep breath, plié, push down whilst mischievously grinning and start having the most fuck-all glorious flying dream ever. Coz you are more beautiful of spirit than you’ve ever imagined on your better days… I love you more and please continuing supporting my creative tour-de-force, uplifting dream memoirs!
After having pored through an interesting OperaCanada article that featured the opera Otello‘s lead, Russell Thomas, and a predictably snide review in The Star – look there is no black lobby in Canada, so one can always be expected to be as curt and dismissive of blacks at every turn; this is after all the culture where the obsession with Jazz is almost as fever-pitched as the predatory late-night runs of Klansmen with nooses at the ready – I comfortably settled into my usual ring three seat, next to trusty Lucian Mann-Chomedy and warmly awaited the magic that is theatre to unfold.
After a month that was not soon revisited, my mind was at times distracted by the dreck that one must at times endure in order to get by. I thought of the heaviness in the air that the subject matter of the opera addressed; the quartet of retired ladies who usually chat about who has taken ill, moved to hospice or died since last they gathered, did a lot of coughing, sniffing and whispering. And as these things are as predictable as flies on shit, sure enough, I heard one of them whisper, “Meghan Markle.” Will these people ever just leave the damn woman alone and stop hunting her at every opportunity?
Otello, Verdi’s take on Shakespeare’s take on race relations did also from the row of retired and widowed ladies spirit the whisper of O. J. Simpson’s name. Some things just never change… alas. Indeed, at some moments as I looked at Otello onstage, I began to realise how we as a people are stigmatised and stereotypically projected onto. I soon got greater insight to why Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex is so reviled. Objectified, she as a black woman was only ever to have been nothing more than a bit of rough, a tryst.
Naturally, HRH Prince Henry, Duke of Sussex with his double sixness is seen as being readily taken advantage of and needed to be protected against the lascivious bit of rough who clearly conned her way into the royal family. Born September 15, 1984, Henry born in the year of the rat has quite beautifully empathetic, compassionate numbers and with his double sixness is given to OCD behaviour as displayed by his need to fidget with his clothing – right hand inside his jacket et al. Six people are awesome beings and Henry, a double six, is no exception. 15.9.1984 = 6.6.1 = 4.
With Otello, this projection of the black male as emotionally volatile, violent, easily manipulated has certainly proven an archetype that fits blind fools like Tiger Woods and O. J. Simpson to the letter. Either way, it was uncomfortable to watch this production in places as it so mirrored the warped perception of a people by persons who question our humanity and who never seem able to perceive us beyond their generationally custodial perception of a people.
Be that as it may, I so hungered to be removed from the morass through which I recently waded at the end of which, I dismissively remarked of yet another power-mad woman in the work place: “She certainly doesn’t look like a fucking horse for no good reason… Oh please, it’s just a matter of time before she rots the fuck in hell, eating every pope’s arse!” If you cannot take offence then don’t damn well give offence… Honest to god, some women in the work place are nothing but dickless faggots addicted to creating drama for the sheer sport of it and simply because they are just so drunk with power… to say nothing of being bored out of their frigging minds. Well, like a bowel movement, it did not take too long for me to sniff, flush and walk the fuck away from the BS,
This Desdemona was an earthy, warm, beautifully soulful portrayal of a wronged woman, a woman dominated by an insecure and deceived man. This production was a beautiful sweeping affair; I especially loved the dark broody look of the sets that captured the essence of the human condition portrayed. Indeed, it proved a good elixir after all the dross that I had recently endured in the work place.
During Otello‘s intermission, I received a forwarded Instagram post from an old dancer friend, which he labelled #everythingwasbeautifulattheballet. Of course, it was a direct response to my last blog, which highlighted the intense isolation and racial animus that I experienced for two god fuck-all maudlin years in Winnipeg. Yes, indeed, the world of art is saturated with lisping, bottom-feeding, small ‘b’ bigoted boors who see positively nothing remotely gauche about this sort of fare well into the 21st century.
On yet another too cold, rainy day, which proved all too reminiscent of Vancouver, I abandoned my art-filled lair in search of more inspiration the day after the opera. I cannot quite recall a season in recent memory that has proven both so cold and rainy as this protracted winter.
That’s right, the day before attending Otello, there was a break in the perpetual rains that gave way to snow and hail… truly, the dog days of summer cannot get here fast enough. As more of the city’s 19th century streetcar tracks were being ripped up and replaced so that the racket that is the TTC outdoor workers and the local constabulary can make a killing in overtime, it took close to 40 minutes on a bus for me and my fuck du jour to get from Yonge and Dundas to Dundas and McCaul.
My date, a lissom twenty-something with smoky hazel eyes, which were vaguely reminiscent of Merlin’s, was good company. I had for the past several hours pummelled his prostate as his daddy issues were satisfied and my angst from work place tensions were nicely dispensed with. We men when in our 20s can be so alarmingly insecure; I have often wondered how Merlin managed to stay with me during those angst-ridden and redundantly solipsistic years.
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My date on exiting the Yayoi Kusama Infinity Room expressed chagrin at not having done magic mushrooms before leaving my place where incense and Jazz magically perfumed the air, intoxicating our spirits as we riotously fucked our way out of winter’s gnawing frigidity.
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Without question, no trip to the AGO is completely inspiring without a visit to the galleries where the stellar art of Inuit artists are housed. There are some real masterpieces in the AGO collection.
As it was the tail end of this exhibition and I still had not visited, I simply had to make it there. Whilst walking along the long corridor to the start of the exhibition my fey-eyed beauty suggested that we take a break and go make out in a stall in the washrooms. Fingers interlaced, I assured him that there was better intimacy to be had the sooner we got through the exhibition and hightailed it back to my place by Uber.
To my very discriminating eye, the moment I saw this verbose title, I fully expected to observe a show that was curated by too much extraneous fare and not enough impressionist art. Tumescent and impatient, I had no time for reading, reading and reading more yada yada, all of which was to compensate for the lack of genuine, to say nothing of quality, impressionist art. Just as well, I was growing achingly moist by the minute as both my energetic ectomorph and I hungered to be carnally consumed with each other… yet again.
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This marvellous bronze fully captivated me; it would prove my favourite piece in the shoddily curated exhibition.
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Highlights from a rather underwhelming show.
Detail featuring two of the most beautiful creatures. Their depiction is not the most masterfully executed but there is something rapturous about the look of the dogs as they ambled with their human companions on a journey which they had taken countless times before that made me stop and gaze overlong whilst being truly inspired.
Detail of what for me proved sheer magnificence… the lighting is phenomenally executed.
A masterpiece to be sure; however, where it was hung and the palette of the salon were decidedly inappropriate. This was all I needed to see to finally wink the left eye at my horny power bottom and to speed home by Uber in the rain for noisy, exhausting, passionate play.
As ever, for your ongoing support I am both deeply grateful and indebted. Sweet dreams and don’t you ever forget to push off and start flying because life is a most beautiful drink. Cheers!
As I work 7 days a week, I was debating whether or not to attend the Twelfth Glenn Gould Prize Gala at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. That morning en route home from some errands, I discovered that someone had jumped from a neighbourhood condo. I got in and realised that there was no more feet-dragging; to hell with being dog-tired. I got on the phone and called up Lucian Mann-Chomedy and said, “My darling, we are going to the Jessye Norman Gala!” As ever, always positive, Lucian chimed in, “Oh my, oh yes, how lovely. Well, I’ll be both honoured and delighted.” Indeed, life is for living!
Merlin and I met Friday, October 1, 1982 in a Hell’s Kitchen Walk-up, the following Monday evening, on his return to Toronto, Merlin called up crying. The man whom he had spent so much of our first evening together speaking of, had died; Glenn Gould had died. For the seven years that we were together, Merlin listened to Glenn Gould’s interpretation of J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations at least thrice weekly. Indeed, the first gift I purchased Merlin, was a recently released recording of the Goldberg Variations at Christmas 1982: I think that it is safe to say that that gift sealed the deal, I was a keeper for sure.
As I had waited until the last minute to get seats, I was sat in Ring 4 rather than the usual Ring 3. This, alas, was my view of the stage and of course, the butterflies are from the set for Atom Egoyan’s masterful staging of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte, which the moment I saw the set, I began chuckling to Lucian on recall of Tracy Dahl’s unsurpassed performance as Despina.
As I was too busy trying to throw something together for Instagram, I was heard gasping when it was announced that the head of the Glenn Gould Foundation’s Jury this twelfth prize was none other than the actor, Viggo Mortensen, who then walked out onto stage. He, indeed, who in a few days time will be attending the Governors Ball where he may or may not be holding an Oscar.
Out onto the stage arrived the Twelfth Prize Laureate, Jessye Norman. Truly, it was a shock to the very core to see Madame being ushered out in a wheelchair. Suddenly, I was reminded of the events of earlier which caused me to rush home and purchase two tickets for the event. That aside, there was no greater joy than drinking of her soul’s inspiring beauty.
This beautiful gala was so filled with touchstones for me, none more so than the moment that bass baritone, Ryan Speedo Green was in full song. When he sang, “Aprite un po’ quegli occhi” from Wolfgang A. Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro.
Yes, indeed, this marvellous aria’s orchestration included a harpsichord. Straight away, I was teary-eyed as memories of the truly eccentric and delightful Milan Newcombe readily surfaced; Milan will ever remain a lover like no other.
During the intermission, I ran into two old friends not seen in at least 1.5 decades; we spoke of nothing but our surprise at Ms. Norman’s entrance. Life really does march full speed ahead.
After the intermission, it was the announcement of the Glenn Gould Foundation’s Progidy Prize with the recipient being none other than, Cécile McLorin-Salvant, the most fabulous Jazz singer on the planet. Is this not an evening to remember during Black History Month indeed.
This stunningly unforgettable gala was closed out by the final recitalist being the divinely gifted soprano and Glenn Gould Foundation Prize juror, Sondra Radvanovsky in full song, singing Verdi.
The gala concluded with Ms. Norman returning to the stage and singing a duet with Cécile McLorin-Salvant. This was a moving, emotionally intense evening and my life was greatly enriched for having chosen to attend. The gala was nothing short of magical.
As a tribute to this marvellous evening in the theatre, I will include herein two dreams, which were originally audio-cassette-recorded in the 1990s. Before each deam, one of Glenn Gould, the other Jessye Norman, I will include each individual’s Michael Overleaves.
Gould, Glenn Herbert 25/9/32 – 4/10/82, Toronto
This fragment was a sixth level mature artisan in the repression mode, with a goal of growth, an idealist in the moving part of intellectual centre. He had a Mercury/Saturn body type.
Glenn’s primary chief feature was self-destruction with a secondary of arrogance.
Glenn was third-cast in his cadence and his cadence is fourth in the greater cadence. He is a member of entity four, cadre five, greater cadre 17, pod/node 819.
This fragment has an artisan essence twin who was alive during Glenn’s life but there were no plans to meet. This fragment is still incarnate on the physical plane.
The fragment who was Glenn has a scholar task companion, who was in a previous life, Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach. They were not incarnate at the same time.
However, the fragment who was Glenn was exerting considerable influence on Carl Philip Emmanuel.
These two fragments had many lives together, once as luthiers, three times as court musicians, nine times as brothers of the cloth, twice as brothers in the flesh, as well as completing several important life monads, including student/mentor and master/slave.
In the immediate past life, the fragment who was Glenn had as his three primary needs: security, communion and exchange. Only the first of these was ever even partially satisfied.
So here we had a warrior-cast artisan who had seriously conflicting overleaves and a primary chief feature of self-destruction. He had a goal of growth but a repression mode which would not allow him to flourish.
He had a need for communion, but was sexually ambivalent and socially inept. Undeniably, he had great talent but took no pleasure from performing in public.
This fragment has a great deal of scholar energy that was used in the immediate past life to enable Glenn Herbert to painstakingly examine and interpret the works of Johann Sebastian Bach.
He was very interested in form and structure for all of his adult life. This fragment was, unfortunately, the victim of a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, also for all of his adult life, which worsened considerably during his third and fourth decades.
This fragment did not, as popular wisdom teaches, retire from public life because of any strong beliefs in the recording industry. Glenn Herbert retired from public life because he could no longer bear to be in crowds, even if he was distanced by a proscenium.
Needless to say, this fragment did not complete work on his fourth internal monad.
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Astral Plane Glenn Gould Recital!
Nothing is more uplifting than finding oneself at a great musical performance on the astral plane. This dream was about being richly inspired and by Glenn Herbert Gould, no less; it was truly marvellous an adventure for the spirit.
The dream occurred, on Tuesday, October 6, 1992, whilst the Moon transited both Aquarius and my ninth house.
I am in France where I leisurely browsed through a store; perhaps, it was somewhere in Paris. It seemed here like at nighttime. Whilst in one corner of the store, I noticed that there were all these big slabs of cheese in packaged containers.
There was a woman coordinating the display of the cheeses. Sometimes the cheese was being grated and other times not. There and then, I decided that I was going to buy one slab of the cheese that was packaged in a rectangular box.
The cheese was about an inch thick and about eight inches long. The cardboard box that it was in was white and almost like the size of a box of Cream of Wheat.
Surprisingly, the box was rather heavy. Though not unlike cheddar, it was a dark cheese. The smell of this cheese was really hard – quite the bite to it.
It had seemingly been opened for too long as parts of it was growing hardened and turning colour. I knew straight off the bat that I wanted to have some to take home with me.
So, off I went to purchase the slab that I liked. Everyone here was, of course, speaking French which I quite so understood and liked. Interestingly, I too was speaking very competently in French.
It was obvious that I was not too heavily accented as the others were pleasant-enough with me.
The second dream had me leaving the store; I then found myself hovering in the air. Whilst in flight, I went into a building which had a green – oxidised-copper – roof. It was part of a long set of buildings that had very, very tall stone chimneys.
These were chimneys that were not unlike the ones at the Palais du Louvre. As a matter of fact, the building was similar to the Canadian Parliament buildings though it was not those buildings.
This complex was considerably longer. These were a series of complex buildings. Here, I was easily thirty storeys up whilst in flight. I looked down at the complex which at maximum could not have been more than five storeys tall.
After having contemplatively observed the complex for awhile, I began very slowly gliding down through the air. I intently studied a procession of persons, way below, who were bailing out of very large buses; they were, as a matter of fact, tour buses.
This was all happening in a courtyard-like area and away from the bustle of the street. I next noticed some men who appeared; they seemed, in their long, flowing white robes, to be priests.
They were not Arabic or Muslims in caftans; rather, they were definitely Whites. The buildings here were long on the order of Palais Richelieu in Paris. When I finally alighted, we had to go through this incredible entrance.
This led into a wonderful sandstone building; it was very modern with a neo-classical design. On the order of being imposing, the door to this place was massive. They seemed to be the doors to a temple.
To get to the entrance, there were many steps which one had to climb. On entering, off to the right, there was a passage that one could take.
An aisle led along another passage; it seemed illumined by a skylight. The priestly men had all entered before me. They preceded a procession of adherents who had come to partake of some ritual.
I had gone to explore, off to the left, because it was the wing of the building that had reminded me of the Palais du Louvre. Going there, I wandered about being fascinated by the place.
Some women were posing for artists in this particular wing. They wore modern garb but were very exceptionally beautiful. What was most intriguing about their look was that it was exactly as they would have appeared on the finished canvases.
They were very nubile young women; they had to hold their poses for interminably long periods. Here several kids kept on going through the place; they were seemingly art students.
They were all very North American, middle class with their loud, snobbish bourgeois affectations. Right away, it was obvious that all the muses were still virgins.
Theirs was an innocence that could never be affected. They were all teenage girls whose bodies were very voluptuous and full. These were not skinny people at all.
There was one point at which one girl was holding different poses. Each girl would be painted by from three-to-five artists, at a time. Thus every pose would be captured from different perspectives.
At one point, they told her to take a break; they then reverted back to an earlier pose. This was so that they could return to that work and put some more work into finishing it up.
When she changed the pose, she had also turned some 180 degrees. This particular model, whom I was studying, wore socks with Oriental-looking sandals.
Inside her socks she kept little items of hers. Whilst she was making the transition, she simply reached up her foot and pulled up her right leg to reach down into the socks.
Hers was a pair of blue-coloured socks – pale blue. To just above the ankles was the extent to which the socks rose. Looking at her, she took out something from about her ankle which looked like a wafer.
Not the least bit self-conscious, she ate it at once; it seemed like a chocolate wafer which she favoured. She seemingly needed it to get an energy boost so that she could stay focussed on the tedious work that she did.
After having found it all very interesting, I moved on sufficiently knowledgeable of the goings on here. Walking along a corridor, I ended up going into a room where everyone was very strange.
A guy there was a lot like Galen Shim – my very beautiful, Hong Kong-born, Eurasian friend. He reclined on a bed with his head close to the door. When I came in, I noticed that he was naked. When giving him a massage, I began by oiling his body.
It was quite fragrant oil. Rubbing down his body, I began working on his toes and feet. Afterwards, I got up to leave but he very silently began coming with me.
So out we went and joined the procession of persons; among them this time were several kids. Mostly, they were teenagers – amongst whom I did not want to be.
Galen or the guy who seemed like him, here the guy was not wearing glasses as before nor would Galen for that matter, and I kept walking through the place. Pretty soon, after we had left the noisy kids, we started hearing the most beautiful music.
This was one of the rare times that I found the music of the pipe organ to be beautiful. Within the complex, we happened on this wonderful cathedral inside which were most of the people from the procession.
On entering the structure, it seemed more like a concert hall. We soon learnt that the hall was specifically built so that only Johannes Sebastian Bach’s music could be played there.
Never before had I heard classical music sound so beautiful. We stood there transfixed whilst listening together. Who then should I notice way at the front of the hall, at the pipe organ that sat high on the dais-like stage, but Glenn Gould. I could see his right profile as if in close-up.
My god, this was rapture and then some. He was playing with such rapt abandon that I steadied myself and whispered more to myself than to Galen,
“My god, what an incredible dream to be having…”
There seemed to be a skylight on the side of the high-ceilinged nave. Instead of there being stained glass windows, windows for that matter, there was only intense light raining down through what seemed to be a skylight system.
The centre of the halved skylight was a wonderful neoclassical, oxidised, copper-looking, greenish flying buttress. Here the look, though modern, was more in the style of Islamic mosques or even Moorish architecture rather than the classic Gothic signatures.
A series of the most intricate and complex circles intertwined, like some riotous jungle vine, in the cathedral-like, concert hall’s stonework. Breathtakingly beautiful it was. I stood there, just inside the entrance to the hall, on the left of the wide aisle.
This was a very wide-bodied structure. As you progressed down the aisle, there were different levels where one could go up and sit. These were either on the right or left. The central aisle was covered by the most beautifully designed red carpet.
This place was considerably wider than Notre Dame Cathedral. Unlike the Parisian Gothic structure, it was not a darkened affair. Here it was very intensely bright out. The light coming in on the right and left side of the flying buttress-like, central girder fell through a slightly frosted glass.
The light was an intense – almost aquatic – blue. Interestingly, there were no beams or columns, supporting the unusual central, flying buttress-like beam. For looking at the light, one became slightly languorous. I felt paralysed with pleasure; there before me, down the massive hall, sat Glenn Gould.
He wore the most thick-fabricked garb; it seemed from an earlier age. All the men in the white gowns were up at the front. They were all transfixed – as well they should have been.
Though I love Johannes Sebastian Bach, at the time, I had some reservations as I am not especially fond of pipe organs. I suppose that it is because it has always had too many religious associations during my childhood.
The persons attending the concert were there simply to recharge their batteries. They seemed, all of them, as if not quite in their bodies for being so transfixed – they were otherwise-engaged.
Eerily, I had a sense that these were all persons who were between lives as is Glenn Gould. They were in a form of processing, a form of deep meditation on the order of sleep, as they prepared for the next incarnation.
This fugue was the most complex music imaginable. Indeed, the music seemed designed for those between lives. The fugue was composed for astral plane habitués who, sans bodies, could best endure the music’s intensity.
Getting a sense that I really shouldn’t be there, plus the fact that I finally couldn’t get into the pipe organ, I started taking my leave of the place.
Galen, or the person who seemed a lot like him, and I then went out front. There we waited for the specific tour buses to show up and take us away. Whilst I waited with Galen, or the person who seemed a lot like him, I was joined by Pandora.
It seemed that most of the people who were here were very young-souled. They seemed to be on a pilgrimage, like visiting the original Gohonzon in Japan or going on the Hajj, at Mecca.
As the pipe organ played, I could hear in the tone of the place a faint whisper from the men in white robes. Their thoughts, it turned out, could be telepathically heard. Even earlier, when I had been hovering in flight high above the complex, I knew that this was more so a political institution rather than not.
This was a structure which was just as colossal as the temple at Karnak and considerably older. This place was mind-bogglingly complex and massive. The temple was posited directly in the centre of it all.
Just like La Chapelle in Paris is comparably dwarfed, by its surroundings, so too the massive concert hall-like temple was dwarfed by the complex. This architectural marvel was simply soul-inspiring.
Whilst all the buses were waiting, I took to one of the buses with Pandora. I had gotten impatient waiting to be assigned to one. We spoke in French because everyone else here did the same.
This was not unlike a Parisian bus – the seats all faced each other. Seated close to the front, we were on the left side of the aisle behind the driver.
As though getting close to Saint-Sulpice Métro, I got up and said goodbye to Pandora. I wanted to get off there then walk back to her rue de Grenelle apartment.
Pandora planned to go out then come home later so had asked me to wait for her at her place. Here it seemed as if nighttime coming on to dawn.
Speaking guardedly in French, I made sure that I was speaking properly and not just fumbling partout. Really, I rather enjoyed this experience of being together with Pandora.
I was very serene enjoying the very beautiful experience. Galen, or the person who seemed a lot like him, had silently slipped from my side when Pandora came and joined me.
*Of course, it would turn out that the person in question was Louka Duplessis and not Galen. I would meet Louka, who accompanied me in this dream, the day following this dream.
Just prior to meeting for the first time, it is not uncommon for me to dream of persons.
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Norman, Jessye 15/9/45, Georgia
Jessye is a first level old priest in the passion mode, with a goal of rejection – functioning for the most part in the positive pole of discrimination, a spiritualist, in the emotional part of intellectual centre.
She has a Jupiter/Saturn body type.
Jessye’s primary chief feature is arrogance, with a secondary of stubbornness.
This fragment was third-cast in her cadence and her cadence is fifth in the greater cadence. She is a member of entity five, cadre six, greater cadre 33, pod/node 212.
She has a discarnate priest essence twin whom she did know earlier in this life but this fragment died in Vietnam. She has a warrior task companion and they have worked together and continue to do so occasionally.
Her three primary needs are: freedom, expression and power.
The warrior energy gives Jessye tremendous organisational powers and her stubbornness has enabled her to stick in there when the going got very rough many times.
Jessye is a warrior-cast priest who has been a spiritual rebel in this life. This is, by the way, not the first time this fragment has sung professionally. This fragment was a well-known castrato in seventeenth century Italy and performed many times before the crowned heads of Europe.
Jessye has great need to serve her concept of the higher ideal and has done so admirably by combining the folk music of her people with her operatic repertoire.
She performs well, as do most entity five fragments. This fragment has always enjoyed her work. Singing has been an extension of her inner spirituality. It is, in fact, a form of meditation for her.
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Now that’s a Hollywood wife!
These rather lucidly awakened dreams were experienced with an intense sense of wonder and joy, on Monday, July 2, 1990. At the time, the Moon transited both Scorpio and my sixth house.
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This first dream found me in a very busy place. When going south towards the Danforth, it was not unlike being on Broadview Ave. It was at nighttime. I came there and found that there were tons and tons of Black people.
Even so, it seemed like Toronto and at Broadview Subway station because there are all these streetcars there. One of the streetcars was improperly parked, as a result, it was going to go and turn around.
Waiting for it to do what it had to do, there was another streetcar out in the street. It was really more like a red-rocket streetcar. It was not like one of the newer ones.
Everyone here was Black. There were no Whites or other non-Blacks that I saw. Everybody was in the street which was very jam-packed. They were getting ready to cross, after the streetcar had passed, to go in.
There was now a system, where you paid your fare aboard the streetcar, so that you did not have to enter the front doors of the station on Broadview.
When you got aboard the streetcar, it was mandatory that you pay a fare. So it did not matter whether you paid a fare at the proper entrance or not. There were many people queuing up to get aboard a streetcar.
Passing these people who were seated there, I went through the proper entrance. One of them seemed like Gabriella Vartan† and they were talking about me.
I came around and began going down the steps, into the nether regions, en route to the trains. There was this little old lady who was taking her time, holding up things, so I pushed her to my right.
I made my way down then had to go around taking another flight of stairs; I then kept on going. There were a whole lot of levels to this subway system.
When I got down, there was this little cul-de-sac where there were these Black guys – homeboys – hanging out. However, they were not Black American.
I found one of them very attractive and smiled at him. He, however, was very homophobic. He went running upstairs to go call the police on me.
The train then came into the subway and it was a very, very large train. It towered very high to the ceiling. It was like an Amtrak train which seemed like a double Decker train. It was mostly silver, however, it turned out not to have been double Decker.
When it stopped, I began running full speed because I did not want the guy to come back and board the same car as me. I ran to the front of the train only to find that one couldn’t board there. Instead, one could only enter this train where the cars joined each other.
You could enter the front or backdoors of each car but not the front ones of the first car. It was very sleek, round and Deco like a train from the 1930s.
The whole place did have a feel of the ‘30s to it. It was very neo-Gothic like the Chrysler or McGraw-Hill buildings in New York City, or for that matter, even the Empire State Building.
It was reminiscent of very early in the twentieth century which was all about great architecture – of things being large, mammoth and spiralling upwards, too, things getting faster and faster.
That sense of adventure about the wonderful world of commerce that one had created. It was that time when people had not yet begun to see, as we now know, the consequences of things being bigger and better and faster and all the effects on nature.
I got onto the train heading, again, towards the front. Somehow, I felt relieved because I had lost the guy. I was there and noticed a stout man who was either High-Yellow or, perhaps, even White.
The people here were very strange because they were just rather unusual. Even though they looked White, they seemed more bronzish, actual bronze, than the pinkish tonality of the waking state.
This was not a place that I knew. It was very otherworldly here, I soon realised. I did not get a seat and as I stood there I then noticed a woman. She was standing at the very front of the train.
The train progressed with unusual speeds, I immediately noticed. When the train had shaken, the stout man had tried to brace himself by putting out his foot that was already out in the aisle.
In the process, he had stomped me and I had had to pull my foot out from under his and pushed his away. He wore business attire, a suit and tie, as though en route to an office job.
The woman who was standing up was playing on a wooden flute-like instrument that was less than a foot long. However, the thing about all this was that she had unusually short arms.
They were fully functional hands with tiny little fingers that nimbly danced over the valves of the wooden, wind instrument. Her arms were like a Thalidomide-damaged child’s.
Then I noticed too that there were other people on the train, about three or four musicians, practicing as well. I soon realised that everyone on board had some sort of physical deformity.
They were just ill-proportioned people with torsos that were too long or arms that were too short. Arms too long or what have you, moreover, this also applied to the legs.
The most pronounced cases were always the musicians like the female flautist – two or three of the other musicians were male.
Someone else who was on the train began laughing and, out of nervousness, I joined in. The person was laughing at the woman. She, however, hadn’t paid them any mind.
Nobody else was paying people, who were laughing, any mind. They did not see anything wrong with the people who were being laughed at.
I then got off the train and was out in this concourse area, where the trains arrived, before I went upstairs. Before I would go upstairs I saw this child seated in the middle of this white blanket that seemed more like diaper material than flannel.
The child wore a salmon-coloured merino. He had little, white, cloth diapers on. The infant had, again, very unusually, unusually short, short legs that made it look almost like a child because it was seated upright on its bottom.
However, it had a very big torso – matured, such that the child seemed like a very big, big child for its age. Its head was very large with a very developed large and soulful-looking face.
At the time it made me thing of Jake Hudson. Jake does have a very large head and face. I was trying to connect with him. He reached out his short little arms, crying out and said,
“Dad, I want to go.”
There was this youngish man, who was blond like the child, and he seemed not unlike the guy Olaf Knight. He picked up his son and used the blanket, on which the child sat, that had these straps and put him around his shoulder.
Like an African mother would, carry her child when in the fields, thus he was carried on his father’s back. He walked off with the child, who was holding on to him, except that the child was really an adult male.
It was all very strange here in this otherworldly place.
I ended up coming upstairs and going out in the outdoors. There were people here – again, mostly Black people. I was talking to them when I heard the strains of Richard Strauss‘s Four Last Songs beginning.
I beamed and excused myself from the people, with whom I was interacting, and went running off up this plaza. It was a clay-tiled plaza and when I got there, I saw the symphony.
I went and sat in lotus position and sat very close to the front. There was a gathering of persons in a semicircle and I was, as a matter of fact, the closest to the stage.
The stage was above on a dais and it was edged by old gold juniper. The juniper was really, really nice and quite fragrant, refreshingly so, to the smell.
Along came, from around a corner walking, Jessye Norman – the high priestess herself. She had been preceded by her divine voice’s magic. She was, of course, singing Four Last Songs.
She wore a beautiful, beautiful, glistening black dress that seemed almost organic with a life of its own. It was twinkling on and off but the lights were lifelike like fireflies.
They were sequins but they seemed, somehow, to be organic. It had hues of gold, silver, bronze, and dark green hues like pine and blue hues like lapis lazuli. It was very, very intensely rich a fabric.
She started singing the first song, Frühling, and it was very hauntingly beautiful. She saw me and beamed down at me. It was so connected between us. I was so enthralled and overpowered; I was quite smitten by her.
I thought very rapturously awakened,
‘Yes! I’m having a dream of Jessye Norman. So very good to see her again, my god here she is and performing Four Last Songs.’
She then came almost to the lip of the stage and stopped as though about to sneeze. Then she held her breath and started laughing because it was so hysterical.
The look on my face was one of being truly horrified for her. This had actually caused her to crack up. Then she began singing again and began making gestures for me to move or be removed.
I was stunned and thought this some sort of betrayal.
‘Why is she snubbing me like this?’ I wondered.
Then these two huge, burly guys came to eject me out of the area. As I was leaving, I could hear her starting to sing again. I was very, very upset.
I was, in the second dream, in this large house that was a very many-storeyed place. It had many apartments. I came out and it had a very slanted roof that one could go out onto. This roof was, however, very dangerously precipitous.
I was looking about and thinking of Carl Leroiderien because, somehow, someone was talking about him. This White man was talking to me and telling me that Carl had been enquiring after me.
He then went on to ask me if I smoked dope which I denied. I can’t think of it doing anything for me except, perhaps, to make me sneeze at the most. Sometimes if mixed with hashish, I then got a massive headache.
“It doesn’t do anything for me, I don’t really like it. I don’t see the point to it and I don’t smoke it.”
At the time that he was saying this, we were climbing some very, very steep stairs. Then at that point, after she had given her performance, I encountered Jessye Norman again. She was seated on a bench and called me over.
She said hello very warmly and apologised saying,
“I hope you weren’t upset. You realise that it was a misunderstanding. I wasn’t laughing at you; it’s just that you don’t seem to realise where you were.
“You were, well there are certain degrees of protocol and you were ahead of the dignitaries.
“And you shouldn’t have been so close to the stage because one of the reasons why your nose started bleeding was, in this dimension, if you’re this close to the stage… when I’m singing, when I hit certain notes it can shatter your eardrums but also shatter your mind.
“So you see it was very crucial that I get you out of there. Also, I was having a very bad allergic reaction to the plants at the edge of the dais. They made me want to sneeze. It wasn’t at all you or exclusively you.”
In having embraced me thus, she was being most healing. I did, in fact, have quite the nosebleed. As I was being hustled out of the place, by the burly guards, it was then that I realised that my nose was bleeding.
At the time, I had thought it strange. As this dream progressed very lucidly and linearly, there was no point at which either burly guard had so much as touched me.
I was so upset. It was so very good, after the fact, to have had her explain as she did.
*This dream really does validate the notion that all persons encountered in the dreamtime, without exceptions, are separate entities and not figments of one’s imagination. END.
When I was being bounced by her, I was so stunned, upset and humiliated. Had she not explained as she had just done, I would have awakened from this dream with a totally different perception of events.
I had also no way of knowing that she was having an allergic reaction to the juniper which, at the time, I found so wonderfully soothing. What’s more, I hadn’t a clue that I had thrown the Chi of the place by having disrespected protocol.
I would never have thought that my nosebleed was due to her singing. In fact, it is possible that I could have awakened and not recalled that, indeed, I had had a nosebleed which I had totally forgotten until she had mentioned it.
Jessye Norman has indeed straddled, with great élan and diplomacy, many a dimension with great frequency and fluency.
I then began holding her hand and told her that there were times that I had dreams of her, in which there were sometimes cetacean-looking creatures that came and did formations around her as she sang hyper-dimensionally.
She was just enthralled and pleased. She squeezed my hands and laughed a healthy, really wonderful laugh. She was quite smitten by me and encouraged me to write it all down.
Her eyes here were so very large, soulfully dark and focussed right into me. It gave me a high just to have experienced them.
I was wearing, when close to the stage, a satin merino-like shirt. So at the time of being bounced out, I had passingly thought that I had been dressed too scantily for her liking.
In any event, it was quite interesting.
This third dream was truly hysterical. It seemed like on Eglinton Avenue East, between Yonge Street and Mount Pleasant Road. It was at nighttime. There was a lot of goings on.
Shirley MacLaine was there, Warren Beatty and Madonna Ciccone, as well. Warren Beatty was the man of the hour and the centre of everybody’s attention.
He had a great deal of sexual energy and magnetism. He had been performing for the camera and for everybody around. It felt very staid to me though.
One very interesting thing that happened was that he had been heavily drinking and, whilst laughing, had bent forward. He then began uncontrollably coughing and was holding his chest and faking a massive heart attack.
Next thing you knew, we were in a very crowded area and it turned out that he had not been faking the heart attack. He had a very, massive, massive heart attack.
He was dead just like that. He was gone within moments. It was just incredible. Shirley MacLaine became utterly hysterical. Her bawling was like from some Greek tragedy.
She went into a trance-like frenzied state and began calling on astral guides and her Pleiadean guides. Pulling out a very impressive clutch of crystals, she threw herself onto him and tried healing him of death.
She was placing them all over his body – at the chakras and elsewhere. It was too humourous for words.
Meanwhile, as Warren Beatty died, Madonna came rushing up to the scene. It had all been too late and they couldn’t rush him to a hospital. There was no way that he could have been revived.
They had been out in some desert area having a big party; there were no doctors around. There was nothing that they could do; he couldn’t be saved. He was dead… he was gone.
Shirley MacLaine started cursing to the gods, saying,
“This is so unfair.
“He hasn’t even been able to make the sequel to Dick Tracy. And right when he’s at the top of his career this is happening?”
“Well you know this will really immortalise him now. Definitely, this is great publicity, right at this point in his career.” someone had dryly said who was not attached to his whole entourage.
I had heard this but Shirley MacLaine hadn’t heard it. Madonna came and whatever she thought about I could telepathically hear it. Her immediate response was,
‘Oh shit! This is just going to fuck up my goddamn career.
‘If only I’d gotten a child by him. Shit why did I have to have that abortion of his child. Shit!’
She was thinking fast. She was someone who knew how to manipulate the media. She was really pissed off because it would have meant immediate Hollywood sainthood for her, were she to go on and have Warren Beatty’s only child, after he had tragically died.
She was really pissed off because this was media manipulation beyond her wildest schemes,
‘I’ve got to get him out of here. I’ve got to have the best genetic engineers flown in immediately…’
I was stunned when I read her thoughts because, of course, she intended to harvest his seed and impregnate herself and then have a premature love child of Warren Beatty’s.
I was stunned by this woman’s phenomenal megalomania.
‘During the autopsy, I’ll have his sperm taken out and I’ll have it copyrighted. It’ll be my possession. I’ll have it engineered so that I’ll have a child… a son. God we can even have twins…’
She, all the while, was cowering over his face… kissing him and doing the wailing widow number,
‘…Can you imagine, Madonna?’
She privately squealed to herself – unaware, of course, that she was broadcasting to someone like me. She was so triumphant at having had that idea because all she knew was that people who so loved Warren Beatty would take to her now.
She was insecure as to whether or not she would endure through time. However, with this, she knew that she would automatically become iconic. She would become truly the virgin mother!
She would be actually giving birth to some dead man’s child – he of course being, Warren Beatty. It was destiny. After all, she was ‘the’ Madonna.
She had this flash that this was why she had always been so drawn to crucifixes. She was going to capitalise on the whole drama by making sure that it would be a son.
Of course, not to be outdone by that old, other Holy Mother with the virgin birth, she would eclipse that Madonna by having twin sons. Again, La Stupenda squealed with delight to herself.
I passingly wondered if I were the only one to be privy to her thoughts. Then I realised that from my detachment, as everyone bawled and was truly horrified as though these were Olympians and not mere mortals, that I was the only one.
‘What could be better than having two Warren Beatty lookalikes crawling around the planet and who were his twins? And his only heirs! With today’s genetic engineering it will be a great coup.
‘Think of the press! I’ll be guaranteed perpetual immortality. I’ll be iconised for all history…’
I thought then and there,
‘My god, this woman is monstrous.’
In any event, the funeral was upon us and by some strange quirk of the dreamtime, I was very much so a part of the funeral. I was as though a fly on the wall, as it were, and aren’t you lucky?
Why, was I participating? I do not know?
In any event, I was dressed to the nines. I had on a wonderful, lace outfit with a mantilla with my veil covering my face. I was part, somehow, of the funeral party.
It turned out that Warren Beatty had had five wives and, at the point at which he died, his fifth wife was a High-Yellow woman. She was part Black, part White, partly Latina.
He had had all these wives. They had always been paid and kept to remain silent. They were never brought out in the public or media. It was one of Hollywood’s biggest secrets.
People, obviously, never knew about it. It had never once been spoken about. There was an interesting turn to all of this… I had been going along Eglinton East on the south side. It was as though I was going towards Yonge Street; however, it was not Eglinton Avenue East.
Madonna was going to be late because, luckily, it was that time of the month for her. She was off having herself impregnated, by way of a turkey baster, with Warren Beatty’s frozen sperm – the planet’s most expensively rare caviar fertiliser of sorts.
I was attending the funeral with a short woman who was the fifth wife’s mother. She seemed a lot like Sybil Ben-Daniel and wore a brown coat over her dress. I walked with my right arm embracing her as she was on my right.
I had burly bodyguards all about me, before, beside and behind me. They were real Mossad-goon-cum-Wrestlemania types. My pants were those flare-legged Giorgio Armanis that allowed me to stride throwing my legs.
There was a lot of train to them and I had such utter style. I had enormous energies about me and great flare. My eyes were bedazzling even though mantilla-veiled.
They were what were, of course, fuelling my high spirits. The onlookers were lapping up my entrance; I felt wonderful.
We then went into the church and the mother was talking about,
“We want the money to go to the Church because the Church is really the staple of society and civilisation. The Church does so much good.”
I just decided to let her babble on and kept my tongue in check. However, I cussed her under my breath saying,
“You demented old fool. What Church are you talking about?”
The church had a metallic-silver front and it looked not unlike York Cinemas on Eglinton Avenue East. It was not a very big church on the inside. As we got inside, I turned around and hissed at one of the bodyguards because he had earlier stepped on my train.
Of course, we were surrounded then by the paparazzi and the little people. His Bigfoot’s footprint was there on the pant’s train. I reached back and slapped his face real hard calling him a fucking asshole.
Of course, I knew that it was safe to do it here because everyone here knew, only too well, that side of me. However, I couldn’t wreck my public image doing so outside.
As we got closer to the church, I began striding firmer with each step in anticipation of getting his oafish arse. I was really careful not to show that side of me when in public.
I started going down the aisle and there at the end was Warren Beatty’s corpse in the open casket. It was a pure black casket that glistened. It was a dark black wood and a really gorgeous casket.
Escorting the mother-in-law, I came all the way down the aisle. I decided that I would go into the first pew on the right. The first pew on the left actually went further down the aisle and did go past the casket.
It held men in white flowing robes; they were priest of whatever denomination this was – very cream, ivory-coloured and obviously very Catholic.
I went and sat down and immediately behind me was the fifth wife’s family. They were very Hispanic-looking more so than Black. They were very handsome in that family.
I turned around and smiled at one of the men and the energies coming from them weren’t as I had expected – I had thought that they would hate me.
I knew Madonna; I was apparently part of her hangers on. Somehow, I had known her through dance. I thought that, for that association, they would hate me. However, they displayed no such hostilities towards me.
Finally, the fifth wife came and was walking very slowly, regally. She carried a globular bouquet consisting of tiny, little white roses that were sprinkled in amongst some baby’s breath. There were one or two little red roses as well.
She wore a white, lace outfit. Deliberately dressed as though attending her wedding, she was not though veiled. She came down to the casket and knelt before it, like Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis at the rotunda, staking her claim on history by her performance.
She sobbed in a controlled breath and then got up and walked around to the right end of the casket. Facing the church, she was now behind it and up on the altar. She was before the pews on the left side of the aisle.
She knelt down again and this time began wailing and ululating. She was doing ritual port de bras with her torso and head as well. She kept on holding on to the bouquet.
It was a very Latin; a very emotional display; definitely, not Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis. It was very soulful and moving. One really felt for her.
Finally, Madonna made her entrance and began slowly progressing down the aisle. There was utter silence in the place because everybody was thinking,
‘Oh dear, poor Madonna was slutting with Warren Beatty at the point of his death. Here is the fifth wife and is she going to create a scene or not?’
Well, of course, she is. The fifth wife is Latin so, of course, there will be theatre.
When the fifth wife had been crossing the casket, I took in her body which was very wide-beamed. I knew then, in a flash, that she was pregnant with Warren Beatty’s child and four months pregnant.
It was clearly no Immaculate Conception as per Madonna’s little trick. She was a very big-boned woman. She got up when Madonna entered the church and stopped crying.
Madonna saw her and avoided her glance as I turned and watched this fascinating bit of theatre unfold. Everyone was really excited at the potential fireworks about to go off.
She started coming down to confront Madonna. I immediately and intuitively knew that there was a gun inside the bouquet that the fifth wife so firmly clutched.
Positioning the gun, the fifth wife began holding the bouquet to her stomach. Madonna, staying her ground, kept on proudly walking down the aisle.
She wore black; it was an outfit that was not dissimilar to mine. She wore a short veil and not a mantilla like I did.
She came walking down towards the casket staying closer to the left pews. The fifth wife came around the right side of the casket and was walking down the right side of the aisle looking at Madonna.
She had a very, very vexed and determined – an almost trance-like, expression of self-absorption on her face. All the energy in her body was directed at Madonna.
When she was about five feet away from Madonna, she held up the bouquet and callously said,
“I’m going to blow your fucking brains out!”
It was filled with so much venom that it reverberated throughout the very high-ceilinged-though-tiny church. It was also very Gothic an interior.
Madonna stopped truly catatonically horrified. You could see it beyond the veil. She had no entourage or bodyguards. She showed up alone, so confident was she of the coup that she had just scored at the geneticist’s.
She was so flustered that she gallantly stuttered back,
“I dare you…”
She was very nervous and said very quickly with a weak, little laugh. She was also vamping à la Breathless Mahoney – the character she played in Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy film.
She was, however, visibly ashen. Madonna was visibly shaken with fear.
Those persons in the left pews automatically screamed out and crouched down for cover because the fifth wife had held up the bouquet in both her outstretched arms like the gun that it so obviously hid.
“Come on. You wouldn’t want to do that. That’s just stupid…” Madonna bravely said.
“…You can’t do that. Besides Warren’s already dead. What are you trying to prove? You can’t do this to me! Don’t be stupid.”
The woman, however, started slowly walking towards her not buying her bullshit. At that, Madonna turned around and started to bolt and she fell down over her long-trained dress.
She had already made it to the back of the pews on the left. She was much too vain, to run outside and possibly be murdered in front of the little people. So she got up and began running around the far side of the pews.
Of course, as she ran away, the fifth wife could easily have shot her in the back. Then Madonna got really pissed off, stopped against the far left wall of the church, holding out her palm at her attacker saying,
“Stop it! You don’t want to do this. This is stupid. You can’t kill me. I’m Madonna!”
She was just winded; the expression on her face was unbridled rage, fear, terror, chutzpah, all in one. Then the fifth wife pulled the trigger, which was the only sound in the place, releasing the magazine.
Madonna cried out and began pleading with her. It was truly a spectacle. It was really pathetic. The fifth wife then pulled on the trigger and there was a loud plopping sound.
Everybody just screamed and the place became flooded with blinding blue light. It turned out to have been an older-model camera and the flashbulb from the camera as it went off.
At that, the fifth wife laughed this loud, truly callous, heavy-from-the-womb, ripe, wicked, vindictive, victorious-all-in-one laugh. It echoed throughout the church.
When her echo collapsed, as Madonna stood there truly disempowered, the fifth wife uttered in a weary breath,
“I always said to Warren that you’re an ugly slut. This picture will prove it.”
At that the fifth wife turned and came and sat down on the pew next to me. Her Latina family members were just going wild clapping and hysterically shrieking.
Now that’s a Hollywood wife!
Poor Madonna was still standing there involuntarily shaking. She was holding her chest and gasping for air like an asthmatic. Her left hand placed on her chest, with her right hand holding on to the pew, thus she stayed her ground.
Although her hand was on her chest, she was being most clever. However I knew that really where it should have been was at her pussy because what the fifth wife instinctively knew, as did I, was that she had just miscarried. Madonna was profusely bleeding.
Poor Madonna was so humiliated. The look on her face was truly sad; she was sweaty and runny-nosed. She soon collapsed and had to be taken away. Of course, she would be beaten out of having Warren Beatty’s heir by the fifth wife.
The whole thing was so funny and hysterical. I was so stunned that the fifth wife was going to pull this stunt. I really thought that it was a gun; I had, at least, gotten this flash that it was a gun.
The idea to have a bolt release, affecting a gun, was truly ingenious. The picture turned out to be truly horrific. It was all a joke being played on Madonna by Hollywood’s film elites who could not have cared less about her and her parvenu ambitions.
The whole affair was so very wickedly political. The whole thing was so hysterical. I wondered as to what next was going to happen.
Is the fifth wife going to come forward and produce the first Warren Beatty heir – the true child? A child that would look like Warren Beatty – more like a child of the future being of multiracial heritage and a bronzed version of Warren Beatty would the fifth wife bear.
What then will she do about Madonna’s copyright of Warren Beatty’s sperm? Will the fifth wife, for producing the heir, win the legal rights to them and have them destroyed if she chooses to?
Will this not, in fact, begin a Pop Religion rivalling the King, Elvis Presley’s, if Madonna had won custody of the sperm and gone on to impregnate herself and bear those miscarried twin sons because of her bonds to Warren Beatty and his two pseudo-virgin-birthed children – sons at that?
Truly, this is iconography for the new millennium, indeed.
*A very, very interesting dream. Certainly, that I would be dreaming about these people is interesting enough. I don’t pay much attention to any of them beyond the passing.
I had seen Dick Tracy three weeks ago. That the whole thing would evolve the way it did was rather insightful. I was totally surprised, as much so, as was Madonna in the church.
I really did think that she was going to be shot. I thought that it would be so messy.
You know, I just did not want having anybody’s can’t-wash-out bloodstains on my Giorgio Armani pants.
*What can I say, dreams are purely experiential. I dream it and awaken, immediately bringing forth the dream experiences, committing those experiences to audio-cassette tapes.
I rather enjoyed being alone and visiting with Jessye Norman in the earlier dream. Clearly, those dreams were set on a parallel Earth in another dimension and one in which the mostly Black population is differently proportioned than we humans of waking state Earth are.
On the eve of the Oscars, I thought this a fitting offering. I could never have fathomed the outcome of the fifth wife’s agendum until it unfolded. Ingenious, to say the least, was her use of the bouquet.
As ever, sweet dreams and don’t forget to push off and start flying… and so what if you bump into a wall, just attempt doing so again and this time believe that you can effortless transcend the barrier. Perception is, alas, everything.
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As ever my dear sweet ennobled friends, I am ever grateful for your continued support. Please do spread the word, far and wide about this happening dream joint on the cosmic wide web. Always remember to push off and start flying… I love you more.
These next dreams occurred on my birthday; yes, I am leonine to the core. It was my first birthday whilst living in Vancouver, British Columbia. At the time, I was returned to the city after having been off with Frederick Hinneault†, my two-spirit lover du jour who introduced me to the wonderful, spiritually evolved world of powwows and more.
I met Frederick as a result of the dream on summer solstice, 1994, some weeks earlier. That dream, of course, is shared herein on March 3, 2013. It was an uplifting dream and one which fittingly introduced me to Frederick.
More than that, of the six dreams the one of interest is of an astral plane encounter with dancer, Rudolf Nureyev at his Louvre apartments. This, of course, was dreamt after his passing.
The dreams were dreamt with focussed abandon on Tuesday – same day of the week as at my birth – August 2, 1994. At the time, the Moon was transiting Gemini and correspondingly my first house.
Joop happens to be my oldest friend and the only friend/lover with whom I have never had a fight or falling out which is no small feat when it comes to my thoroughly engaged passion mode which can be intensely overwhelming – what with this being my third life at seventh level mature and the fact that I am a combustible mix of warrior and priest indefatigable zeal… sixth position in third cadence, third greater cadence of entity six and cadre one of greater cadre 7, pod 414… of course, being a sceptic means that I will very callously – thanks in part to my Venus-Uranus conjunction – tell you to go fuck yourself in two nanoseconds – used to be with a cool and cutting look in my 20s; now, I just do so with inordinate impatience or charmed vituperativeness depending on my moody artisan prerogative.
Obviously, I am reposting these dreams now as a tribute to Lee Radziwill-Ross who recently passed. Hers was, at least from afar, a truly aristocratic, iconic American life.
*At midnight, I took to the pyramid where I meditated for quite some time or at least had intended to. The phone rang at quarter past as Joop van der Pelster† called to wish me happy birthday.
We shared a really lovely moment of great intimacy. I would then decline returning to the pyramid. Instead, I took to the bed and continued meditating.
Lying on my back, with lids closed, I felt after some time rather opened up and expansive. Then my inner vision became focussed and things began unfolding; so, here then is what I experienced.
Again, for the record, I had not done any drugs prior to this experience as I do not do drugs. Period.
I saw a large container coming, through the air, towards me. Turning around, it shifted and then opened up to reveal a large tunnel that was yellow-red hot-looking.
Contained in the rust-coloured container, it was a flame of light. The only way that I can describe the container’s unfoldment is by drawing an analogy to the protective lens panels on the Hubble space telescope opening up to focus on a point in space.
There was something inside the container which had a round aperture. Growing cautious, I had thought that it was possibly a snake.
However, I then felt myself being quieted into being less hasty to project. My voice to self, during this interval, was almost like Merlin’s at those times – when he would say or do exactly the same thing and encourage me to be open to potentials.
Thoughts of the container being there to suck away my life-force were, of course, premature. There was no way to get around the fact that this large container had a magnetic quality to it; it was almost, if you will, a giant vacuum.
I did not have a sense that it was sending me light energies. Instead of protesting anything, I decided to bleed all the bile within into the container. The container really did look like a gaping hole.
The mouth kept on shifting; yet, on the inside of the container’s mouth, the light was brilliantly red. Then I saw some stray wafer thin waves of energy leaving my body.
As though made of solidified carbon dioxide, they slowly radiated outwards. They left my aura and headed into the same opened up container. I was pleased to see it and, as it were, decided to go with the flow.
I then focussed on letting all spent energies, which were not of the highest nature, be allowed to become disengaged with my corporeal being and waste away – truly spent.
I thought of all the bile that has collected in my body, from so many clung-to painful life experiences. Mostly, this had to do with neutralising the shrapnel that had been psychically projected onto me for being here, in this archly hostile place – this racist black hole work environment here in phenomenally beautiful Vancouver.
I wanted all my fears of ill health and lack of certainty to be dissolved; I wanted it discarded into this large container. This was great meditative and healing work.
The presence – the force of the container was massive. It was as if a black hole had warped space and bled its way through to being close to Sol. Thus, it allowed for this energetic work to take place.
This experience endured, for quite some time, without me once falling asleep… unusually enough. When it was done, I managed to crack my back and got as many vertebrae realigned as when being adjusted by my chiropractor.
This was effortless and really productive. So relaxed was I that I had even been able to crack my neck. I felt truly yogic, relaxed and all expansive. After having manipulated my vertebrae, I returned to meditation and did some deep-breathing exercises.
When my inner vision resumed, everything was completely different. Now I was instantaneously flooded with a deluge of intense white light. A container had approach and, on opening up, produced the flood of white light.
This light was so intense, its beauty so uplifting, as to make it almost too sacred as to have been experienced whilst incarnate. Nonetheless, there you have it, we are here to spiritually get the most out of our journey.
The light was such a glorious experience, its touch a longed for aqueous, silken movement. Being able to experience this light was so very healing and uplifting as well. I was really rather impressed by it all such that I simply further let go and fell into sleep. END.
In this the first dream, I was on the veranda of a very tropical house. It also seemed to have been connected to a back alley. There was a van coming down the road which was to my left.
As it sneaked along, I suddenly didn’t have a very good feeling about this van and its occupants. The main entrance to the house was to my right. The road, on which the van progressed, was a back road.
With the backs of the houses visible as they faced out to the main road beyond, there were larger roads close by. Though I had no idea who was in the van, I had stealthily ducked out of view at the last moment.
A little while later, in the opposite direction from left to right, a car came by bearing Vanessa Banks-Abella†. There and then she was thrilled to see me and excitedly called out,
“Boy what are you doing up there? What are you still doing up at this time of night?”
I told her that I was reading over my notes as I tried properly recording my dreams. Surprised, she claimed disbelief at my still being focussed on recording the dreamtime’s experiences.
“Well wha ah goin stop fa?”
She then asked me to make sure that those kids – hers and others, stayed in the house. I could see her plainly because the car was a convertible. She then had to be off for an engagement.
I suppose that the house would have been hers. I then went around making sure that all the locks on the doors operated properly. In one instance, one had to push a latch to further secure it from the inside.
When the latch was in place, there was no way to open that particular door. I had been concerned that the latch was in place once the children were all indoors.
The door had been opened and I didn’t want any of them to get outside then not be able to get back in. So, for starters, I rounded them all up and made sure that they were inside and left things at that.
Here, too, there were lots of video games both on the veranda, and scattered about the living room. A very cluttered and noisy affair – Vanessa Banks-Abella and William Abella do have three boys, plus their peers, who were over to hang out.
I enjoyed listening to them noisily.
I had an encounter with Isha da Braga, in this the second dream, in which I asked what she had been discussing with Marc-André Viaux. I wanted to know if he had told her what my HIV status was.
Obviously uncomfortable, by being very evasive, she brushed off the line of questioning. She said that it would be more appropriate for me to directly speak to him than go through her.
She simply did not care to get involved. It was obvious though that she didn’t want to have to get involved. Too, it was obvious from her neurotic unsteady eye movements that she knew more than she was letting on to.
For my sake, I simply did not want to become HIV infected. I was in my darkened apartment, here in Vancouver, whilst speaking to Isha da Braga on the phone.
I could see her clearly in her Toronto condo as though we were face-to-face. She could see me too and, for that reason, was avoiding eye contact. A very lucid psychic connection this was.
This, the third dream, was set outdoors at nighttime. I noticed that there was a barre in the middle of the street. As they drove past, persons slowed down to observe.
I was near the back of the barre and felt really strong. Not only was my technique good but my breathing was really relaxed and expansive. I was quite so well grounded.
We had to do the tendus in plié. Maria de Cortez, the Mestiza, was taking the class as well. The female instructor told us what to do. Then she let the left side of her face rub against my right jeaned thigh.
The right foot was pointed in tendu to fifth position in front. At the time, I was in plié. She did this out of admiration of me. I was flattered though concerned that my jeans which were soiled could possibly be a tad malodorous.
She could not have cared less as she wanted to pay me homage. We then did the battements tendus which incorporated a flick that was reminiscent of a coupé. Four times this was done, en croix, then repeated to the other side.
Naturally, when we had turned around to do the exercises at the barre, I had end up being at the front of the line. There were port de bras that accompanied this very rapidly executed tendu exercise.
Maria de Cortez had the port de bras down pat; I really admired her grace and focus. She and I were the only ones who were confident in our movements.
On the sous-sous to turn around, I then did a passé which I held indefinitely before closing, in plié, in fifth position at the end. My turn out was rather elastic and supple.
Here, I was wearing a pair of red legwarmers. When doing the tendus en avant, my arms were up in fifth whilst I looked under the arm. In second position the head was inclined up and outwards.
En arrière, if the arm was kept in second position, one looked below the arm with head inclined forward and down. Furthermore, there was the option of holding the arm in second position arabesque.
During the exercise, the instructor walked past and touched my arm when in fifth position. My port de bras was perfect. My alignment and posture were perfect.
I felt completely on my supporting leg and properly aligned. I felt rather elongated and princely. However, the nature of the discipline was such that she felt it incumbent on her to come by and break me down to size.
It was a way of pushing you to always strive for greater mastery of the technique. Too, it was a way of her saying that I should not have been so advanced yet.
There was a sense, on a personal level, that she almost resented my refinement. I could not have cared less; I was too connected to spirit and the light within to have become thrown by her intervention.
She took her leave of me as her tactics were to moot effect.
An encounter, in this the fourth dream, I would have with a woman who was rather like, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She was an aristocrat and was quite concerned in nature about being loyal.
She had been the only one to have stayed with Rudolf Nureyev, until the very end, as he suffered from AIDS. This woman, whoever she was, had been the one to have gotten him to stop being in denial of his illness.
She managed to have gotten him to stop drinking, to excess, as he suffered a breakdown of his character. He turned into a literal vagabond about his very opulent, finely decorated Paris apartment.
Perseveringly, she had succeeded in getting him to rein things in. Too, in preparation of his death, she was instrumental in getting him to focus in on his spirituality.
At the time, she was trying to get him sequestered into a place where I was following up on her efforts. I saw Rudolf Nureyev and he did so look as though he were suffering from AIDS dementia.
Though he was standing up at the time, he really didn’t seem strong enough to be doing anything so taxing. There was no way to get around that this man was gravely ill.
His face was ashen, gaunt and his sagging skin left his eyes really large possessed-looking orbs. He wore a narrow-rimmed little hat, from that era in this century, when men customarily wore hats; his hat was not a broad-rimmed affair.
The doyenne went up these stairs, in a very lavish opulent building, that was so very empire and distinctively Parisienne. The stairs inside the foyer led up to a large museum where there was an art exhibit.
The paintings here were rather large. I helped her carry him up the stairs. In a bid to not attract attention, she had turned her back as if looking at a piece of art; it was a tiny drawing.
She did not want the public to notice her; she just wanted to be inspired as a way of recharging her batteries. Rudolf Nureyev was there but by himself.
We had struggled up the stairs, both of us on either side of him, supporting him just ahead of his elbows as his arms were bent at the elbows. I was across the way from them and being silently observant of them both.
There was a path that one could take diagonally to another wing. We had silently managed to slip the birdlike yet regal Rudolf Nureyev into the next wing; there, the space was smaller than the previous salon.
The floors here were of a rough marble that made for a noisy gallery as shoes marched across them. It was though a wonderful light-entrapping interior where the colours were pale and soothing.
Thus the walls enlivened whatever natural light made its way so far indoors. There was no direct natural light here, however, the soft tones of the walls left the place light rather than subdued.
The museum’s salon was rather beautifully laid out. As we walked down to another man, I noticed an African man who was clearly an exchange student.
He had some equipment; he was an arts student of some sort. The gear that he carried was a measuring instrument of some type. It seemed to be a surveyor’s gear or a mini telescope of some sort.
The aristocratic woman was deeply concerned about this. She thought that for using the instrument that he would be able to recognise Rudolf Nureyev who was fairly well-disguised.
She seemed too to be concerned that he might just recognise her which she did not want. She did though seem to be, the more time that I spent near her, to be Lee Radziwill-Ross and not her sister, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
There were times when she seemed to be Elizabeth Taylor. However, this woman was a born aristocrat and was dark-eyed. She also spoke fluent French which I don’t think that Elizabeth Taylor does.
Besides, I don’t think that Elizabeth Taylor was that close to Rudolf Nureyev. This person was an aristocratic arts enthusiast, who was also a patron of the ballet, which sounds more like the Auchincloss sisters, Jacqueline and Caroline (Lee) rather than Elizabeth Taylor.
Besides, these two were so close towards the end because it turned out that they had a soul connection. Not only did they have several past lives together but it would seem that they shared a close connection that bespoke being cadre mates.
She was in his life to spiritually help him. She wanted him to become focussed such that he would pass with some degree of dignity and be able to move on. This was something that one did for being of the same spiritual tribe or, in this case, cadre.
Finally, the African student, a tall East African Nubian, with richly dark skin did not recognise either of them. He was a deeply introspective Scholar soul who just didn’t focus beyond the object of study which presently happened to have had nothing to do with them.
Both Rudolf Nureyev and his aristocratic confidante were rather pleased that the African had not recognised them and tried to interact with them. I was rather observant of everything whilst with them.
Though I helped out, I was never intrusive and remained at times as though not a part of their party. She had needed me to come in, from time to time, and be of assistance but then I had become nonexistent as this was how she was accustomed to relating to help.
For both of them, being in this place was like a way of staying grounded and inspired. What’s more, this museum was connected to where Rudolf Nureyev lived.
This happened to be the case, in the waking state, as Rudolf Nureyev did have apartments which were a part of the Palais du Louvre – the majority of which houses the Musée du Louvre.
This was supposed to be his last visit to the museum. He had been actually cutting through it whilst en route to his apartments. This was a section of the Louvre where there were lots of prints and architectural drawings.
These salons, however, were not normally opened to the general public it would seem. Members of the diplomatic corps, the very wealthy the world over, could be invited to view these exceptionally rare prints.
It would seem that some of them were Leonardo da Vinci prints. The collection was considerably vaster than the prints that are on display in that wing that is close to the River Seine.
This wing of the museum did feel like it was closer to the Rue de Rivoli. Including Rudolf Nureyev’s, this would also be the wing of the Palais du Louvre where the exclusive apartments are.
I was hoping, in this the fifth dream, to get directions to some place that I had never been to before. There was a woman on the phone telling me where to meet her.
She said that she would be at a kiosk by way of the A1, at the Bay department store. This was here in Vancouver. I was then over on West Georgia Street, on the south side, east of Seymour Street.
Yet, I never saw her anywhere so soon became concerned. I could not quite figure out, why she would want to meet at the Bay. It did though contain the Granville Street Skytrain stop – the city centre’s major hub.
Then I thought that it was by the entrance to the Skytrain; she had said that the kiosk was close to the ‘A’ doors. She had said that she actually worked at the Bay department store so could meet me there.
I thought that, perhaps, it was at the doors by the Granville Street Skytrain entrance. There was, it turned out, no kiosk there nor had I seen her at the Seymour Street entrance. So I returned and went across Georgia to ask further directions.
Later, when she did point it out to me, I saw that it was at the northwest corner of Seymour and West Georgia Streets. Here, things were set up differently to the waking state. There was an overhang.
The side of the building, where the display stood, was cutaway and here in the dreamtime painted blue. Large television screens and other television studio paraphernalia were present.
They were interactive and gave directions to the public. The woman, who had been on the phone whom I was supposed to have met, I then saw across the street on the north side of West Georgia Street.
There was an island in the middle of West Georgia Street reminiscent of Toronto’s University Avenue. I walked along the island going westerly and towards Granville Street.
I saw three Black women with long braided extensions who looked rather well turned out. On seeing them, surprised to see Blacks here in Vancouver, I grew self-conscious.
As compared to being in Toronto, it was such a rare occurrence seeing Blacks locally. Seeing me, they totally scuffed at the eccentric, outré look of me. I could not have cared less about their fake-arsed weave-headed self-loathing idiocy.
One of them had blonde streaks in her hair. Though not High-Yellow they were light-complected and clearly of mixed parentage, perhaps, a generation removed.
All three were of mixed familial heritage in the past, with Whites, and were possibly related. They were very cliquish that way that young women can be.
I did notice in the blue schemata, over by the overgrowth next to the Scotia Tower, there was an opening where there was more blue. This opening up which created a break in the Scotia Tower complex does not exist in the waking state.
A guy was there who was genuinely, archly even, eccentric. This man immediately reminded me of Daryll Newcombe†. On his head he wore a tiny blue and white umbrella.
A striped affair with slats in it, it looked much like a propeller which he could use to take off à la Mary Poppins. Terribly eccentric, he was and just the sort of thing that one could expect of Daryll Newcombe.
I kept on moving along the island, going westwards, on the wider-than-in-the-waking-state West Georgia Street.
Eventually, in this the sixth dream, I came to the end of the land. I looked out to sea past two jetties that were quite built up. I was high up from the water and with me was a Black man; he was young.
I rather liked his energies. One of the jetties doubled as a wharf in this deep-water harbour. Though it seemed fairly tropical here, I was certain that it was not St. Kitts.
Standing to the rear of my Black companion, there was a wall to my left. Though not grey out, it was also not bright and sunny either. The land went out to the left more and formed a peninsula.
I had a pair of binoculars which I used to try and find the second jetty. I was trying to find the large ship; it was a navy vessel rather than a tourist cruise liner. The ship was rather large.
However, I couldn’t find the bloody thing to be able to have surveilled the deck of the ship. All that I could find was the steely grey of the cold-looking sea. Never did I get to find the vessel with the binoculars.
Soon enough, I was otherwise engaged as a jetliner came into view. It flew from right to left whilst headed for an airport. There were times when this place did feel as if some part of Basseterre, St. Kitts.
This was definitely a Tri-Star L1011 aircraft. Wide-bodied with some red in the schemata worked into the tail and the third engine – which sits atop the back of the fuselage and beneath the tail.
Coming in to land, the plane cut quite a majestic line. The plane travelled unusually slowly which caused me some concern. My companion, though, assured me that he was just making its final approach for the airport. This didn’t seem to be the case to me; for this reason, I asked him when then was it going to deploy its landing gear.
The craft at that point was dangerously close to the ground. It did eventually initiate the deployment of the landing gear. Moving away the binoculars, it did seem to my eyes that the flaps had not opened sufficiently to enable the wheels to drop.
Replacing the binoculars confirmed my suspicions. Still following its progress through the binoculars, the plane then began turning to the left. It was seemingly a standard manoeuvre at that point in all approaching flights to the nearby airport to our rear.
To compensate for having dipped too much, the right wing sharply tipped – in a bid to prevent it from curving too close to the sea. With that, the plane went into a sudden nose dive and landed on the shore of a black volcanic beach.
Skidding in the sand, the plane travelled some distance breaking against the wet sand. The waves were gently crashing ashore; it was not at all a rough sea. I drew my companion’s attention to the fact that the tide began suddenly changing.
This I pointed out was good as it allowed the plane not to move into the water. The craft was veering off towards the right, rather than left, wing. My companion, however, was not the least bit concerned about the plane’s supposed crash landing.
Meanwhile, no one seemed to be the least bit scared. Too, no one was screaming at the unscheduled landing. At one point, the plane’s nose fell downwards and kicked up lots of sand as it dug in whilst barrelling its way along the beach.
It was a muddy consistency as the sand was still fairly wet; it eventually covered the entire plane in a wet sheen of black sand. Ultimately, after having made a sharp left turn facing towards the land, the crashed craft came to a stop.
The rear end of the fuselage was being partially covered by the sea. Still, the tides receded some more and at which point a group of us began rushing down from the cliff to the shore below. We were keen to investigate the crash.
Not knowing what next would happen, I hung back as I feared the worst case scenario of the plane possibly exploding in a massive fireball. A little bit to the rear, and right of the plane the ocean floor dropped off, suddenly.
Beyond that, the ocean had receded to beyond 100 yards. Stranger still, from beyond the receded cover of the ocean up to the plateau came a procession of persons.
There was no mistaking the fact that they came from the ocean. The look of these people was decidedly Oriental. Clearly, they were rushing to the aircraft to try and help pry the bodies or passengers from the crash.
They were there to help out in this emergency situation but there was no getting around the fact that they lived in the ocean. Though wet, they seemed not the least bit affected by the wetness or the cool temperatures of the water.
From my vantage point, high up on the beach, I saw that the aircraft had opened up an emergency exit shoot. Instantaneously, all these bodies came popping out of the craft. This was a horrific sight. Truly it was.
Everyone in the airplane was doused and appeared as if made from rubber. Also, one feature that they all had was that their eyes had popped.
Their mouths were wide-open in the same horrific arrested scream as in the Edvard Munch canvas, The Scream. Clearly, their deaths had been horrific and their final expressions were frozen in death.
Too, from their mouths poured what appeared to be the small intestines, brain matter or lung tissue. They had vomited a great deal. Obviously, from this, one could deduce that the airplane’s cabin had suddenly depressurised.
I got the sense at that point, at which I saw it coming down to land, the entire group – passengers and crew – had already died whilst at greater altitudes. The plane was simply flying itself in on autopilot.
The landing gear failing to deploy was another indicator that the entire crew had died before they had gotten so close to landing the craft. The bodies were all squashed, and atop one another, as though they had been banged around at high altitudes, during the flight.
It was all very sad. Then I noticed a stout woman trying to shove her way free of the craft but the listless bodies proved a formidable obstacle. Eventually, I noticed that there were others who wanted to make their way free of the crashed airline.
These survivors were in a state of shock, not surprisingly, and screaming their heads off. As a matter of fact, they seemed on the verge of savagery in a bid to shake free of the bloated exploded, rubbery-looking bodies that were piled everywhere and obstructed their escape.
One stout woman appeared to be in the process of being birthed by the clamor of dead rubbery bodies piled thick, pouring through the mouth of the escape hatch.
The look of the piled up bodies was tantamount to toothpaste being forcefully squeezed from a tube. Once halfway out of this macabre birthing canal, the woman then turned around.
What seemed like a bid on her part to free her body, from the tangle of listless bloated limbs, proved a bid on her part to pull others free who were struggling to make it out after her.
This was quite the grotesque spectacle. By this time, some of the people began making it onto the beach rooftop from which I had safely been on looking. For fear that the airplane may yet explode in a sudden fireball, I was still cautious about getting any closer.
The rooftop was not especially large. A Black woman came out sometime after the stout woman. She looked completely dazed, and just out of it, as though she were still on the astral plane whilst her body clambered and struggled of sheer instinct.
Truly exhausted, she – like all the others – was covered in a white substance that looked much like rice or stringy pasta. This was a very lucid experience. As much as I wanted to turn away, I simply couldn’t. It was way too garish.
As much as I wanted to turn away from this horrific sight, I was magnetised to its surreal unfoldment. Truly horrific was the experience vicariously. Eventually, the Black woman made it from the aircraft and then came up onto the rooftop with the rest of the crash survivors.
Laying there on her side, as though she were looking for the solace of the womb’s protection, her legs were drawn up foetally. Clearly, she was in retreat. Too, she was experiencing a great deal of abdominal pains.
I had a glass of ginger ale or some such soda. Kneeling down before the Black woman, she rolled over onto her back and rocked herself back and forth whilst writhing with pain.
Pandora da Braga was also here, incidentally, as an observer. She seemed fairly numbed by all the devastation here. In any event, the Black woman wore a brown floral printed dress that was soaked.
The smell of gastro-intestinal acids was rife and stifled the briny sting of the ocean. A sour smell it was. Holding the Black female survivor by the right hand, I bled my very life-force into her and soothed her spirit with the quiet whisper of cooing reassurances.
I told her that it was all up to her that if she wanted to she could definitely survive the ordeal. Too, I let her know that she was merely in a state of shock. As we were all right there for her, there was no need for her to panic anymore.
Important too, I thought, to seek out someone who was Black to comfort her. After all, over the course of her life, the stresses of all-pervasive racism are so Real that her tolerance threshold was already considerably diminished.
She needed not to have been abandoned. I knew how important it was for her to feel not to be passed over, as is socially customary, in this hour of need. There weren’t, anyway, White survivors up on the rooftop.
I felt that it was important to stay there and give my support, rather than run off, lending my energies to the others who were exclusively White.
However, there was one woman in all of this who was beginning to go hysterical; her child was being administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Ridiculously, this idiotic Black woman began screaming at the man to stop kissing her child. How dare he put his mouth on her child’s? This was all a part of her denial – the state of shock into which she had been catapulted with the high altitude incident that had led to the crash.
She had had to be restrained. I gave the glass of ginger ale to the other Black woman and then went over, with Pandora da Braga, to pacify the mother. The mother wore a brownish-red floral-printed dress.
As the others worked frantically, in a bid to resuscitate her, the child was very limp. Then she went stark raving mad, all bug-eyed, saying to whomever off in the indeterminate distance,
“I know it, you know. Ah goin’ sue dey ass! As soon as Donna Summer announced that we were going to crash, that’s de firss ting ah say. ‘Ah goin’ sue dey ass!’”
Similarly dark-skinned, this woman so much reminded me of Dian Mason. She was, in both senses of the word, truly hysterical. Then she added, licking her lips frantically, and looking so distinctively West Indian,
“Boy, yu wait! If ah live, ah goin’ sue dey f-ing mudderscunt…”
This woman proved the point of one of the most hysterical dream experiences in ages. Offering up some reassurance, I told her that she had to calm down and not get herself too agitated.
I told her that she simply had to focus on calming her nerves. If the child were to survive then she needed to focus instead on the child and not her issues, to which she answered,
“Boy, hush yu damn ass!”
She went wild with rage at my suggestions. Then she turned on Pandora da Braga and made threats of her whilst insisting that it was Pandora’s fault why all of this had happened.
According to her, it had been Pandora da Braga’s idea that she take the bloody flight. Threatening to beat her up, she pounced towards an unflinching Pandora da Braga. And she was a tall woman too, much like Jan Hartley.
With that I leapt in between her and Pandora da Braga, squaring off with her, meeting her eyeball for eyeball as I hissed at her,
“Watch your fucking mudderscunt!”
I was deadly ferocious; my intensity was more than she could withstand. This diffused and centered her energies; she was the first to flinch then stand back.
There was positively no way that anyone was going to attack Pandora da Braga once I was around or alive. The tension diffused, I watched her back as she walked away to go look after her daughter.
There was then a woman, down off the rooftop, to the left of where we stood. Looking down at her intently, she was a somehow familiar Black woman.
It was as though I was supposed to have known who she was. Perhaps, I had encountered her years earlier in a dream. Perhaps, she was from another time… another life.
At the time, everyone was laying blame at Donna Summer’s door. Apparently, the chartered flight had been organised by Donna Summer. The entertainer was headlining at a resort which was a partly owned business venture of hers.
The discussion was about who exactly was karmically responsible for the crash and the number of persons who had lost their lives as a result. The woman down below was there to keep score of everything: who had been lucky enough to survive, who had not.
Also, she sought to learn the severities of the injuries sustained by the survivors. Her record keeping was also on the order of keeping akashic score of who owed who karma in this multidimensional group dilemma of sorts.
Opening nights are always such fun… Tuesday night past, I was reminded of all the opening nights that I would attend with a slightly neurotic Merlin as some show or other that he had directed was being presented to the world… As ever, it was great to see my plus one, Lucian Mann-Chomedy as the ideal partner for these occasions. Always reserved, pleasant and just the right amount of chatter and wit.
Whilst Lucian enjoyed the pre-show lecture in the Four Seasons Centre Amphitheatre, I slipped next door into the warmth of the Sheraton Centre Hotel and warmed myself on a glass of sherry whilst finishing off 2018’s Scotiabank Giller Prize winner on my KOBO.
What an utterly stunning tour de force. It was a moment to reflect, this Black History Month on just where we blacks are in the scheme of things. God only knows, it has been bruising to watch Meghan, HRH Duchess of Sussex become the print media’s most reviled and hunted fugitive from justice of that most vile creature, the racial predator.
I was still smarting at the events of a week earlier during the winter season’s first major snowstorm. I had been recalling to friends how strange it now was, compared to my first winter in Canada. December 1, 1974 and it snowed that day more than 8 inches. Back then it generally was guaranteed to snow once if not twice weekly. Now at end of January, 2019 and we were finally having our first major snow. This was not like snow from years past… Now it was a dirty, sooty-looking hard mess that lingered, largely in part because the city has contracted out its snow removal services.
As there are no windows in my apartment – Sol’s too damn bright by far and besides, boarded up windows afford me more art-hanging space – I got down in the early afternoon that Monday with my bike, only to be met by falling snow and several accumulated inches. Back up I went, retired the trusty chrome steed and returned and hopped into a snazzy Audi A6 Uber ride with a Macedonian whose spirit was as smooth and elegant as matchingly was his car. The mood set the tone for my day. As I am known to work 16-hr days, I called another Uber at the end of gig one whilst hoping to get to gig 2 in good time. The snow was still coming down; it was also bitterly cold and windy.
When finally, Uber #2 arrived, cold and dark with icy pellets mixed in with the snow, the driver rolled down his passenger side window and declared, “Sorry Buddy but I am going to have to cancel this ride…” Already running late, with my wheeled suitcase at the ready, he edged along as I tried to open the door and raised his voice, his eyes almost feral-looking beneath his turbanned, narrow skull. “I said I am cancelling you. One: I never take people like you in my car. Two: you have a shitty rating… Sorry, not sorry. Fuck you Buddy.” With that, he stepped on the gas and I had to swiftly haul me and suitcase out of the way as the rear of his red older model car whose interior did have that blasted malodorous melange of curry, dirty armpit, dirty arse, smegma and whatever the fuck else that passes for immigrants of choice these days. Finally, after having struggled out onto a still-not-ploughed Bay Street, I managed to hail the fourth cab whose West African driver insisted that I call Uber and report him… Days later, I was afforded assurances that the racist Dravidian was no longer part of Uber’s fleet. Similarly, when calling a Beck Taxi with a fairly generic name as Arvin, on coming downstairs the Indo-Canadian drivers on several occasions as though staying on script would feign obsequiousness and state that they were deeply sorry but owing to a family emergency, they were having to take the cab out of service. No sooner than having refused me a ride, they would then be observed heading out to Wellesley, turning on their unoccupied light and picking up a fare off the road. As if the blasted motherfuck, the likes of your overbred arse invented Jazz.
Each and every time that one experiences racial animus, is preyed on racially, it always harks back to that first winter in Toronto. My best mate from two summers earlier, when I would come to Canada to visit with my dad during school break, had been sick. After Sunday church service at Knox Presbyterian at Harbord and Spadina before returning to our beautiful home at 122 Mortimer Avenue, I would visit – my dad and I – with Tommy who was holding up at Toronto Sick Kids Hospital on University Avenue. My father explained that Tommy was sick with the winter flu, which sometimes could last for months and well beyond winter. I was a scrawny little fourteen-year-old who looked like most ten-year-old Canadian kids as I crawled the halls at Harbord Collegiate where among my mostly Italian-Canadian chums was future lawyer, Rocco Galati. As Tommy, who was a couple of years older than me, had gladly shared books with me the two summers prior that I would take to Knox summer camp and read then have a good stroke off, lusting after my inamorato, Tommy, I readily agreed to do his newspaper route for him until he came home. My first Saturday, the cart was overflowing with the thick Toronto Star newspaper and there was a good foot of snow everywhere. It was hellish but for Tommy, I was game to go the distance – who knows what hot frottage, docking and more was in the offing for having done his route for him! When I got to the northeast corner of Floyd and Bater Avenues that first Saturday to collect the funds, the door opened to a woman whose response to me was the most hideous display of the displaced madness that is white bigotry. Screaming at the top of her lungs, the woman in her upper seventies, vituperatively cursed my black bugger arse off and laid down the law. Never again, “you dirty little nigger” was I to set foot on her verandah.., I was to put the paper between her screen and front doors, knock then return to the top of her steps and wait for her to pay the bill. That first Saturday, she ripped the paper from my hand, flung the money at me. She was terrifying, in her faded blue A-line dress, black spectacles that had those upturned pointed edges at the sides; she wore faux pearls. Most of all, she wore the most hideously terrifying eyes. I remember how much they looked like eyes of a rooster, especially so for being such puffy eyes. Like the evolved, winged and feathered reptilians that roosters are, her eyes truly did look not the least bit human. She was so consumed with racial animus that it was truly frightening. By the time I made it home, I found myself regurgitating. Thereafter, every Saturday, I would take my spot at the top of the steps and consistently she would hurl out pennies mostly at me rather than the verandah where that first winter I had to suffer the indignity of picking through inches of snow on the verandah, steps and lawn to collect my money. Naturally, without fail she called most Saturdays to the Toronto Star, complaining of either not having received her paper on time or that it was missing altogether. This would mean having to buy her a replacement at the corner store, take it and only to be fed on by the hideous-of-spirit racial predator. Like a true cockhound many an indignity I suffered in hopes of my spectacled, full-lipped and scholarly inamorato, Tommy hooking up with me for having been so loyal to him. The summer prior, I had ventured to the public pool on Broadview at Riverdale Park with him and a couple of others and thrilled beyond belief was I to spy his large pendulous balls and that hammer-headed girthsome salami that pummelled his bikinis. Indeed, for Tommy I would suffer much indignity. There was a low-rise apartment building at 1111 Broadview where on the ground floor, there was another predator, this one equally septuagenarian who lived alone, smoked incessantly and always answered the door in various stages of undress, mostly ever only wearing a soiled merino. He was always a generous tipper; a whole 2$ bill in 1974/75 was serious cash. Naturally, in the pre-Ciaslis epoch old anorexic, drunken paunched predator would sometimes tug on the old bulbous semi-flaccid/semi-tumescent, though, pendulous but perfectly useless appendage, trying to lure me in. Sitting there in all that squalor and acting as though he was sugar daddy material… indeed. He was always keen on trying to grab me when giving me the “tip” and I was ever sly and crafty enough to get away from him each time. He, too, lead me to regurgitate, which I had not done since age nine and suffering my first racial attack. Of course, to this day, neither academia nor medicine will concede that there is any such a thing as the racial predator and the effects it has on those preyed on – mostly blacks – and the psyche/mental illness of those who prey on others chiefly non-blacks in varying degrees of severity based on otherness.
Finally, the house lights went down and I was met by the whimsical vista of the COC’s production of W. A. Mozart’s glorious opera, Cosi Fan Tutte. Previously, I had caught productions of this Mozart gem in Chicago, Montréal and New York City. I was not expecting much at this rate. The Frida Kahlo connection was a bit of a stretch but the butterflies fast won me over.
From the moment that she stepped onto stage, my spirit soared aloft higher than Mozart’s glorious music to that point had spirited me. Never before had there been so captivating a Despina. My eyes teared up and I was ever on the cusp of explosive giggles. Then what made me truly come undone was the moment Tracy Dahl took to the stage as the notary… by now, I was losing tears and beginning to emit choked snorted chuckles. Each Saturday back in 1974/75 when doing Tommy’s newspaper route, I would end off taking the Saturday Star to Giovanna an octogenarian Italian, who was plump, charming and more adorable than any mere mortal ought to be. Soon, we were fast lovers and she loved fussing over me, baking me each Saturday nice, warm, oven-fresh biscotti washed down with a glass of ice-cold “gingah raleh”… her thick Italian accent was part of her charm. Hers was a large black and white cat, simply known as pussy gatto, who always sat nesting on the armchair. Each week, Giovanna sat transfixed as I read her the newspaper; her vision was to that point fairly deteriorated. As a way of better forging our bond and because most of my mates at Harbord were Italian, for three years, I studied Italian and that really impressed Giovanna, who was simply known as “Mama Mia.”
As the opera progressed, Ms. Dahl as the notary, dashed and took cover beneath the table at which point, I buried my face in the program with explosive laughter. Straight away, I was reminded of each Saturday when the ever silent pussy gatto would bolt from the armchair and take cover beneath the sofa where I sat as Giovanna began an explosion of long-winded farts. Even the singer’s voice sounded much like Giovanna’s as she sang the role of notary. Remarkably, it was as though she was channelling Giovanna. In that moment, I was healed of the bile, which the recent Uber incident had caused to surface, bile that dated as far back as 1974.
In the end, Tommy’s parents sold their house and it was not until a couple years later that I discovered from the neighbour next-door that Tommy, who had never returned to their Mortimer and Logan home, had died of Leukaemia. Indeed, the winter flu was my dad’s way of protecting me from the callousness of having to lose a friend so early in life.
Apart from the catharsis that Tracy Dahl’s performance personally effected, I don’t think that it would be biased of me to state that hers was the runaway performance in the COC’s fantastic, and fast-paced I might add, production of Cosi Fan Tutte.
As ever, mischievously push down and melt with laughter in celebration of the joy that is life and start having yourselves a most glorious of flying dreams. Thanks for your ongoing support of this happening astral joint on this side of the astral plane. I love you more.
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