Nightscape

Jane Mansfield blows me a kiss followed by a hair toss and moue from Marilyn Monroe. Coats and bags in hand, they are leaving the show bar next to the store in the dicey part of town with a gaggle of tipsy admirers. Transvestites hold court both on stage and off during show hours but it has long since closed with the last of the audience and performers drifting out onto rain soaked early morning streets to find cars parked in the alley and behind the club. One stoplight set to a perpetual wink at this hour paints the slicked pavement lurid red like nail polish poured out of a bottle. I am forewarned.

As I unlock the decrepit old door of the store, a beat up black Dodge van pulls up to the curb. The windows are smudged and darkened hiding a mysterious interior. A tall, thin man dressed in a coal colored wool coat, turtleneck and jeans gets out, greets me with a leather-gloved hand. Pale blue, almost white eyes encased in craggy and ominous features are softened by the lopsided smile he flashes me. Shaking back a fringe of shoulder-length dirty blond hair showing streaks of silver, he pulls a rickety wooden chair from the alley and places an upturned white plastic bucket next to it below the grimy store windows.

I return from the dark interior with two longneck Millers and we sit silently, watching the stragglers from the club totter out on size 12 high heels with sycophants in tow. The club owner is last. Locking up behind him, he executes a tired salute our way and walks off.

My visitor is quiet and I follow suit. It is an easy silence, much different than his other forays into my life where he chases me down dark passages as I try to run from him all the while encased in an invisible marshmallow, my slow-mo steps just a nick away from the hatchet or dagger he threatens me with. But tonight we’re at peace with each other. Half way through the beers we start talking about George, my cowboy lover from Montana in decades past. Jim, the Marlboro man who taught me how to rope, quick draw a Rueger Security 6, and make my own bullets is also on the bill tonight as we discuss my archetypes – the ones who desert me at every rough spot in the road and my penchant for attracting beautiful, interesting but very dangerous and rowdy men throughout my life.

Who better to hash this out with me than my very own Dark Man? He is anathema for all fears and unsettled business unnamed, still powerful. But tonight, he is my advocate as he has been on other nights, other occasions. We talk about how I still dream of Jim running off to another woman or worse yet, just leaving and not telling me. Jim leaves me in some pretty unrespectable sitches, facing imminent disasters of one stripe or another. Worse yet, embarrassing me by choosing some bimbo with boobs instead of brains. In real life, infidelity infrequently happened to me as it has in one form or another to almost every woman. But it is more the specter of being abandoned at my most needful times that we hash out along with hidden meanings for my dreams, my archetypes and their significance. Why can't I get over this?

Pretty slick having a dreamtime therapy session to work out issues with archetypes and my mental boo-boos with the Big Daddy Nasty archetype of all. We all have a Dark Man in our dreamscape. You know yours, don't you? I’m told that my dreams are more vivid and richer than most. I agree. Three D, Panavision and Technicolor with emotions, sounds and smells. Jeez.

The Dark Man beer and chat session happened between dreams that would make any creative blocked Hollywood screenwriter green with envy for storyline. One involved Croatian expatriates returning to their capitol with vital information involving an assassination attempt on a high-level government visitor from the United States. The three men are a journalist, professor of history, and a former military officer. Beset on every side and pursued by Croat terrorists, they hang precariously from rocks above the Black Sea, exchange gunfire, hide under bracken and freezing water to escape detection as they make their way from one safe house to another. Car chases, witness to brutal crimes, unexpected aid from a rebel in a dingy old motorboat, separation from the coffee colored ex-commando threatens their mission leave me gasping for breath, heart pounding.

The next dream involves a train chase with dump trucks rigged as rolling bombs. Counter agents, specialty forces, cops and innocent bystanders battle it out at high speeds by automatic weapons, high tech gadgetry -- all on trains. The mission: Bad guy elements from the current administration are going to blow up a depot used to temporarily store transported chemical and nuclear waste.

Instilling fear in a public rattled since 9/11, they will be able to use this latest staged terrorist act to implement an even more restrictive regime installing a defacto dictatorship who will not leave power when their temporary visit is up. Agents, both good and bad are dressed in white making it impossible to tell which side they’re on. One particularly vicious woman orders a rival agent dangled over the side of a boxcar so that he is smeared and dismembered along the side of another car in a train yard. Another gory segment involves a woman being burned alive as a bomb goes off in a dump truck she is locked into. This is all very realistic down to the crisping flesh, horrible screams and terribly toasty. They’ll need to get Industrial Light and Sound Studio to do the special effects.

Parts of this scenario are being filmed from a helicopter for media propaganda to cover the crime. Nasty Girl, who looks suspiciously like Condalezza Rice makes some of her goons redo a part where a dump truck drags a utility vehicle in front of the runaway train because the cab ends up too far from the tracks to be believable by a gullible public.

This takes place while an incendiary device on the train is ticking away in its last seconds. Does she care that they will be right THERE when it goes boom? Nah.

I wake up drenched and heart pounding from this one.

This is my typical sleep cycle. Fall asleep, dream, get up, pee, drink water, pet George the cat who has joined me in bed, go back to sleep, dream some more. Sometimes, I have several of these action adventure dreams. Other nights, I have serials or sequences where a dream takes off from a point I awoke from like a mini-series.

My dreams are unlike the soporific morphine induced dreams of pain. Yes. I've used. Legally. Given copious amounts of the drug during hospitalizations for accidents injuries and my one lone surgery, I can tell you that morphine dreams and the accompanying hallucinations are nothing to chase. Mine involved very Bosch-like amorphic beings with body parts that just ain't right which morph and slither against a very twisted landscape. Morphine dreams were ominous and all dark - Toto and Dorothy in an Oz gone very, very wrong. I have my share of symbolic dreams, of course. And I work out much of the hidden messages encoded there. But I much prefer nights in my private screening room.

Vampire wars, invasions by aliens from outer space (and Mexico), harrowing spy plots, international intrigue, bodice rippers from the 1700s, even comedy – all find a screening in my brain. I’ll always have plenty of ideas and entertainment. Sometimes, after a particularly active night I wake up exhausted. I guess I shouldn’t bitch.

Who can beat having your very own in-house psychotherapist to hash out past romantic blunders with no $175.00 an hour bills, no long discovery process to develop the analysand/analyst relationship, trust and rapport - it's all built in. But sometimes I ask, can’t a girl just sleep?