the sweetness of a dream.

I was in a yellow Cadillac with the Korean DJ Girl, but it was a dream, so it was and it wasn't her at the same time in that half-certain well-it-couldn't-be-anyone-else way people in dreams aren't and still are who they are. Bench seats with the piping around roll 'n' tuck 1960s cream & red leather upholstery. We sailed along a highway as though on a cloud, sometime late at night, the dark isolating us, the headlights the only indication we were moving, the amber glow of an incandescent dashboard adding to the golden celestialiality of her skin as she drove. In the dream, I'd completely forgotten her pronounced antipathy towards cars, but maybe it was the undeniable comfort of the caddy that had compromised her.

[photo of Minji Money by Jamie Nelson.]

Moving next to her, I tentatively pressed into her lithe body, feeling the warmth beneath her dress. She exhaled slowly, looked half-sideways, and smiled, saying, "You know, it's been a long time since I actually cared about which pair of underwear I'd bothered to put on for anyone." Her eyes then completely left the road, head tilting, lips pressing into mine. We didn't care that for the next minute we weren't looking at where the car was going -- the caddy's firm boatlike alignment would take care of it all for us.

And then I woke up, smiling, for the first time in months.

It felt just as good as a real kiss, even better than some, her statement's sure thing intentions reassuringly comfortable and rewarding in its promise, a certainty of things to come.

It made me forget for a second the absence in my life. And the ability of the dream to make me feel this way makes me ask the question: If my mind can generate an experiential reality, or even if it can tap and let me into a quantum/parallel reality, then how much of a lateral concentration would it be to invoke that in the waking world whenever we need to? Would the technique require a particular meditation, or trance, or ecstatic movement, or lucid intermediary borderline semi-wakefulness, or some combination of the above to willfully breach that emotional barrier into the headspace that can just create its own internal gratification, or an external projection, or a borrowing from an actual tangential alternity of what a person needs or wants or desires?

From a Heathen Worldview, are these the Alfar either indulging us or becoming wrangled by us into the shapes we would most like to see? Or are we incidentally performing a subconscious mental galdr that makes fylgia forms from us and for us? Or are we actually picking a more attractive thread from the tapestry of Wyrd itself to follow? If engineered by our Gods or ancestral spirits, are these emotionally real pockets of dream experience meant to inspire us to greater deeds in this world on an interpersonal level? Or is there a technical elskamantic process to be found just inside of all this to mold the world into the shape of our very heart?

All I know is that I really, really want that kiss again.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.