mr. mxylplyx

After spending a few dreams making love to a beautiful Columbian woman, my mind drifts back to the events of the day, and to baseball. I am wandering around the outside of Shea Stadium, though it kinda feels like the line for that aquarium that is not the real aquarium but the one in my dreams from way back, and the stadium is short with the entrance designed in the back by the bleachers where you catch the home run balls, just like the Yankee Stadium I'm always at in my dreams. But it's subway series day, and just like in real life, I am outside with the tickets I just scalped and trying to find my boy so we can go bogart some better seats. But I'm wandering around out there, on this long, long line that seems like it stretches forever over this white marble concrete and I realize that the game is over, that in the oppressive heat we are all just waiting to get a glimpse at the bodies of other people in line laying all over the back wall, waiting for the Mets to take the field and begin the ritual ceremony, where the bodies will bake on the wall in sacrifice of the evil Mets gods, because they have won the game. I think. Or I am waiting on the line to find someone, and I am going to get them out of there, because the game is over and the Mets will start their heathen rituals, which I feel like I need to see the beginning of, even though I know they will be disgusting and a sacrillege, so I can witness the suffering of the people, and head out of there, ready to start the charge anew. They are the Mayan sun-worshippers, the corrupt astrologers who want to claim they are making an eclipse happen with their ritual, so they can control the eager masses of their followers, who are in a zombie-like torpor, flooding up the steps to the edge of the stage, the back of the stadium, which is now where they are exerting their influence, though I cannot see around the corner--I can only hear what is going on.

A little boy tugs me on the sleeves. I forgot what he was talking to me about. This is when I realized, when I realized that something was off, that the edge was strewn with the heat-exhausted, sun-stoked bodies of my fellows. This is when I realized that I was walking up to a sacrifice on the edge of the field. The kid starts telling me something, and he is a Mets fan. He has a look about him like, I don't quite know, like he has been reared on drops of blood. I let him take my place, and I go up to the edge. There is too big a crowd of people there and I cannot get through. I lie down in the sun, put my cheek on the concrete, and sweat, and lie in a torpor. I hear the end of the game going on around the corner. After a while I sit up and look at all the backs of people waiting to get in. They want to get in to see the ritual. To see the fans I should have been with there, at the end of the game, witness the apocalypto.

There is a disturbing looking fellow there, lanky and shifty looking. A Mets fan. And there is this weird, troubling looking woman. I don't know what it is about her that disturbs me so. She is ugly, yes, slightly deformed in the chin. It is distended to the left side. But there is something else about her. Something more...unsettling. She is old and young at the same time. There was almost something beautiful in her face but it has been deformed on purpose. On purpose to let me know. She wants me to come with her. Come down with her somewhere, onto the platform, onto the spit. The right side of her face is almost charming in her smile, but I see the distension of her left side, and there is something that is screaming inside of me that there is something wrong, something terribly wrong, with her. She is EVIL! I get myself up and go away from her, not overly quickly, but decidedly, trying not to let on what I know, not to show my perturbation. In a second I get back under the canopy, and I'm on my way out.
Under the stadium, I get the underground train and I am getting out of here, I am getting out of here. I close my eyes and I realize that they have been closed, that this is a reflection of the dream I had/was having/AM HAVING. I have been reliving what just happened, rethinking it, and I am seeing it now from a different frame of consciousness, outside of it, analyzing it. I was realizing that I had been dreaming, and I interfered with it! I changed its course! And, Oh my God!, if I'm doing that, I think "can't I become lucid?" I can start seeing things now! Possibilities! Space! It is all black here, but I can make colors! And I can see colors! Millions of colors! Couldn't I be God here? Couldn't I make everything? But that is not right. I only wanted to reinterpret the dream, to see how I was able to avoid from going into it from the feelings of....to....of.....

Shit! All of a sudden, I wake up on the train, and realize it has all been a dream. I was just on the point of realizing something, but I lost it. It's so depressing. Every time I'm on the verge like that with my dreams, almost becoming lucid, I lose it. There was something about that woman's face, something in the look of it, and I realize that I didn't know what was around that corner of the stadium, didn't know that the dream was going to turn ugly, that there was going to be a sacrifice. I was going to walk right into it, a victim. But I started to feel like something was off, something, I don't know, and so I got caught in the sun, in the traffic, and I thought about it. And the people gave me signs. The little boy, then that shifty looking guy, and finally, the girl. I recognized what she was going to do. Or I didn't. But I recognized what she was.

But damn I've lost it now. Lost the rest. And shit, Who is this Muslim woman on the train now bothering me. She keeps asking me something in Arabic, but I don't know what she is saying. I think she wants to know where the next stop is, but why can't she leave me alone to my thoughts? I was almost lucid. The train stops and she points and gets off and one of those conductor fellows in a cap and uniform gets on and tells me that it is the last stop and we have to change trains. I get off of the subway car and onto the Long Island Railroad platform, which is painted all in a bright but dark London telephone-booth kind of red. It is incredibly narrow and close to the wall, with barely enough space for my body and two feet between me and the tracks. The train leaves down the dark tunnel way, and the next one pulls up and I see that there are two tunnels down the way, the same color of deep red as this platform, and they feel like the entrance to the mine-cart ride in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or the beginning of the long tunnel down the mine shaft in Space Mountain or something, except they are going straight, which did not strike me as strange, even though the train platform I am on had a view to the rainy forested outside of Long Island and this tunnel was way down deep underground.

I get on board and we get going and I notice that on this train, there are no walls, only poles to hold onto, like on the subway, but you can see everything around you--the red hue of the caverns, the dinginess, and the darkness--everything. This doesn't phase any of the other passengers, they just keep hanging on with their heads down, or looking around blankly just as if they were in the subway. I am by no means astonished, but I look around at the walls and the goings on of the mine curiously. The platform train does not follow a straight route, but makes many right angles and full u-turns as we pass through the mine, though not at an inordinate speed (very smoothly in fact, so I don't even really notice), and I look around at everything. There are people down here slaving, pushing mine-carts, though they are empty, and it all seems like this is normal enough for them down here, because they don't even take notice of the train that is passing right through their work space. There are pipes and dingy metallic things sticking out of the low ceiling, which is just above my head, and some of the rock walls, and here and there I see piles of filthy rags and dirty, scum-filled washbasins full of them.

As the cart goes from weird, dirty subterranean place to filthy place, it slows down or stops quickly, as these places are I guess supposed to be stops. I start noticing that my vision is first person, like through one of those fish-eye lenses that they use to round the corners of the picture in videophotography, and I start noticing more workers going back and forth, particularly one or two women walking here and there with filthy rags to put in or take out of the filthy basins. The cart pulls right up to the one nearest, with her hair tied up in a do-rag, and she turns around. "Hiii," she says, You made it down here." Something immediately feels off to me about her, and I get this nervous feeling, like I have seen her before. Though she is strangely familiar, she looks younger than this other girl I vaguely remember, and her jaw isn't as.... distended, yes. But she still looks strange, and there is something about her familiarity with me. I say to her quickly, "Who are you. Tell me where do I know you from." She smiles and says, "You wouldn't remember. I knew you before you were born. I'm from your real family, that died when you were just a baby. You've been raised by other people that kept you from me." But immediately when she says that, something clicks in me, and I say "Nope, that's wrong!" cuz I recognize her as the evil witch that tried to get me at the Mets game, and now she's down here, trying it again. Ha, Ha! I recognize you!!!!

And in the next instant, I'm awake for real, dazed, slightly disturbed (though it is still hard to say why she disturbed me so), and all I know is, part of my conscious mind came into my dream tonight to stop me from having some sort of twisted nightmare, where that witch was going to do something to me. I asked her the question, that's what saved me. I remembered her from the dream, and I became partly lucid. For one of the rare occasions in my life, I was able to avoid going into a world that would have been a topsy-turvy hell, because I recognized the warning signs that were there, that always preceed it. Then, when the dream switched up on me and tried to trick me into it again, I was able to remember, and dodge the bullet again. I think I'm getting better at this stuff after all. Damn the Mets and their witches! The Yankees are comin' back!