I was standing on a wooden platform waiting for a train with my friend Karl. It was a beautiful autumn day. When the train came, it was an old two-story house that moved sideways down the track. On the inside, it was still like a house, completely furnished as a private space. On the lower level, I stood in a living room where the front wall of the house glowed a brilliant pale green. I realized that the house was that of an elderly woman named Mildred. I became very bothered by the fact that I couldn’t account for her whereabouts. Everything about the house seemed so recently lived in, but she was nowhere to be found. Another elderly woman, very tiny and wearing a tan trench coat, came down the stairs into the living room. She became very emotional as she looked around the room. Every little object seemed to remind her of an act of great kindness that Mildred had performed. I noticed out the window that the view wasn’t changing even though I knew that he train was still moving. Later I went up to the second story which housed a small library. Talking to some people there, I remembered that Mildred was, “a Zen Buddhist Jew, like Leonard Cohen.” I realized that this held the answer to the question of her whereabouts. “Oh!” I said with amazement, “she was a bodhisattva…and this is what a bodhisattva leaves behind.” Throughout the rest of the dream, I revisited all the details of the house with the intent of eventually writing a story called, “What a Bodhisattva Leaves Behind.”
I was watching a commercial on tv that took place in what looked like a corporate office. A naked man entered the room and walked over to a stack of brightly colored translucent veils. He picked the top one off the stack and began dancing around the room with it very euphorically. This went on for some time, until he danced over to the window and jumped out of it, as though he thought he could fly. Then a naked woman came in, and she took the next veil off of the stack. She too danced all over the room, before continuing her dance on the desk top. She took some poses that didn’t shock me personally, but I couldn’t believe that they could be shown on tv. At the end of the commercial, the product name appeared on the screen; it was called “the Bra-less Cheesecloth,” and its slogan was, “Now, you can finally kiss yourself.”
|
Back