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.

do you know what it means to miss the Kingdom of New Orleans?

Dreamt I visited the Kingdom of New Orleans. A cloaked Mardi Gras cult kidnapped my girlfriend, ceremonially sacrificed her, then shot & left me for dead.

A princess in disguise as an urban "prince" found me, tending my wound. Waiting to regain her throne from the interim republic, she DJed dirty beats, living in a rundown five-story house where she threw underground parties & exotic illegal dinners in. The city was walled like Carcassonne with additional giant saurian sculptures, a much larger Vieux Carré inside accented by medieval stonework & gargoyles, neon & glass, the sprawl extending all the way down to the Gulf Coast. The suburbs were composed of both brownstone and the raised gabled roofed houses, with bright but peeling shutters the Big Easy's known for.

The city was attacked by a sorcerer who came from the West with thousands of troops and gargantuan automatons, and I thought the city was done for.

[Carcassonne lit up. The city walls were like this but with neon accents.]

Then the outer wall's saurian sculptures animated, slashing with claws and breathing fire in their city's defense. The troops got in via many of the entrances, but the citizens of N.O. were no slouches, all taking up arms to defend their kingdom. The princess discarded her disguise, donned ballistic armor, and organized the people more effectively under her royalist banner. We fought the troops, but the invaders were overwhelming. She used magick to phase us into the depths of the city, but somewhere along the way I found myself displaced back in our world.

Weeks passed, and the phone rang. "It's the princess on the line," my Dad said, pausing, then, "At least that what she says she is." She told me that the city had been kept safe and she'd regained the throne, and was wondering when I'd be back for cake, champagne, and her latest setlist. But I knew that I couldn't get back there, that however I got there in the first place wouldn't be available again for a long time, and I was left saddened by the lack of means to return ...

... or couldn't I?

This dream of the Kingdom of New Orleans was amazing and all-too vivid. It felt more real than imagined. Sure, I could craft a short story or novella from this New Orleans that never Louisiana Purchase-d, that was discovered by France pre-Columbus and broke away from European colonial rule early. Instead I'm inquiring about the realness of the city, the feeling of its being out there somewhere, a solid in the chaos of dream, a true place.

[Crescent City Bridge. photo by Fred Gramoso.]

We can entertain the possibility of another thread on the Web of Wyrd, a variant design woven by The Norns to awe & explore, a quantum tapestry warp & wefted of a differing time & place, a shadow of choices not made here but elsewhere, where another version of ourselves louches purple absinthe at Duke Lafitte's Parlour House and eats ghost pepper & blue okra gumbo on cobblestoned Saint Peter Street.

This seems akin to a geographic slippage from the Berenstein to Berenstain universe, the rustling of cousinly leaves together from near branches of Yggdrasil, touching and aware of each other for a long, strange, wondrous moment.

In its Calvino-esque way, this Invisible City of New Orleans overlays, nests within, or is hidden upon the one we already know. Could the Texan Wizard's attack & invasion be the destructive Katrina of that world? Could the defensive saurians be our Louisiana swamps' aggressive alligators, memories of ancient colossi, or perhaps fossils & petrifactions given life in our foreshadowed future?

[Pink Alligator sculpture by the Cracking Art Group.]

Maybe the calls that say nothing from unknown numbers on your cellphone are coming from there, the princess dialing, looking for sleeping tourists who were once heroes of her kingdom's greatest battle. The city & her androgynous princess will haunt me, and I will miss them. So we ask: Have you been to the Kingdom of New Orleans? And if so, how did you get there?

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture, 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.

then I coloured with Prince at a cafe.

Just before waking, we saw Prince Rogers Nelson alone at a cafe table adjacent to ours. He looked completely dejected, looking at but looking through the butcher paper and crayons strewn across its surface. Abstract clouds of light blue and bolts of purple graced the white. We got up, walked over, and said, "Hey. We're going to join you," and we grabbed a few crayons, adding to the pastel sky abstractions he'd already laid down. He looked annoyed, but in that same expression, more glad that we'd broken his ennui and come along. Then I woke up.

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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.