The below story is an old one of mine, based on two even older dreams. The image in the first paragraph and the fish image in the last sentence are directly from the two separate dreams. I felt challenged back then, for what reason I don't remember, to make a connection between them. I also remember associating the closing image to a black-light poster of mine from my hippie years (yes, I’m an aging hippie :-D) of a huge lavender/blue fish swimming through the cosmos.
I used to really enjoy reading this story at open poetry readings – some readings welcome short-shorts, when there’s time. It was fun to “be” the woman, to sort of “hiss” as she does. I’d even bring one of my rattles with me and shake it at the appropriate times. (Who’s a ham? :-D)
The Hungry Symbol: A Story of Origins (Dream-Based)
She squats before the skull on a branch. The pupils of her gold eyes expand slowly like galaxies. Her long yellow hair hangs untended in hanks, dead flowers curled in its knots. She has come here to remember, to make the skull's brooding power pull the answers she seeks from their fitful sleep beneath her skin. Her black skin that glows ruddy even in the jungle shadows.
They had not counted on this. None of them. They had not been prepared for this life like an on-going sleep. It was getting more and more difficult to reconnect to true wakefulness. She, of all her tribe, was the only one who now remembered, ever made this trip to the heart of the jungle. And it was getting harder and harder to remember on her own, with none of her companions adding their strengths to hers until they bridged the stars, a rainbow of souls.
Even now, the Elders of the tribe would be telling the children long sunset stories of this new earth, giving its rocks and trees and animals, powers that were really The People's. Pouring the tribe's natural star-traveling talents into the hungry symbol of this young planet. She, alone among The People now, knew that even this ancient skull, with its long orange hair, had no power but what she gave it.
And the dreams, that silver pooling through which they dove when they landed here, exhausted after their long star journey. The dreams, too, were changing. Invaded more and more by what they could not, would not use in this simple world, the dreams were more like burial caves -- littered with the forgotten, the feared, the unwanted -- than the doorways they had once been.
She stares harder at the skull, and shakes a bone rattle. With her other hand she grasps a necklace of fangs that rests on her bare breast. Her belly swells and recedes as her breathing deepens. Her chant stirs the jungle clearing. The answers itch beneath her sweat slick skin. The moon white skull before her sways, the empty eye sockets expanding and sparkling like rising memory.
"Yes, yes," she hisses from between her blackened teeth, and shakes the rattle, her reed thin body perched tentatively like a house of sticks. The orange hair on the skull crackles like flame, as the jungle hums.
"Yes, yes," she hisses, they HAD known the connection might be drawn too thin by the abyss of space and their new homes of fleshly bodies. They HAD known. And now they were storing their star guides beneath their dreams, and their powers in the stones, in the things of this new earth, until these hybrid creatures they had become were ready.
"Yes, yes," she hisses, memory receding as the orange hair on the skull settles around the branch like a friendly embrace.
"Yes, yes," she hisses, collapsing at last onto the damp jungle earth into a dream of dancing iridescent fish returning to their home in the stars.
* * * *
Resource:
Dream Image Collages, another way to honor and explore one's dreams is to make collages of them; there are also transcripts of dreams here.
‘til next time, keep dreaming,
Roswila
[aka: Patricia Kelly]****If you wish to copy or use any of my writing or poems, please email me for permission (under “View my complete profile”)****My other blog:
ROSWILA’S TAROT GALLERY & JOURNAL.
