Wait For The Wheel

Yesterday was a great example of being under The Wheel - that eagle eyed, cosmic-fate-ka-destiny-free will-karmic-dharmic-device - of being ground down, shattered, broken. Joints popped from their sockets, eyes squished to jelly, bones filled with jagged glass. A test, a test, it's all a fucking test. Someone, something, some where -- tending the lighthouse, better be fucking grading me on a curve. The pressure of The Wheel has been on top of me for so long -- bottom of the barrel, under the fucking barrel -- I don't know how to jab the numbs of my fingers into The Bastard to find purchase, to pull, to scrape, to drag myself upwards. The Fool. The Wheel Of Fortune. The Tower. The Devil. The Empress. It gets so you can't breath under here, can't see. This isn't internal, this isn't my fucked up chemistry -- this is outside, this is Other. External. Enemy. Some test, some debt.

I had this vivid dream Wednesday night. Powerful and fucked up dream. I was looking out of my window at the trees -- when suddenly this face, this old man's face appeared among the branches. And he started talking to me in this weird language that I slowly began to understand. He was hanging from the tree with a spear in his side. He only had one fucking eye. He called himself: Gallows God, Glad-Of-War, All-Father. There were two ravens or crows sitting in the tree with him. It was fucking Odin. Norse god. You know Thor, Loki, that kind of thing. I know a little bit about Norse mythology -- but I had forgotten a lot of it until I had this dream. I guess some lower part of my brain was thinking about it, remembering it. Anyway, he tells me to come and hang from the tree too. And I step out of my window and next thing I know - there I am, swinging from a noose, choking, dying, eyes filling with blood - and then I woke up, coughing, felt like I couldn't breath. Fucked up dream, huh?

Maybe all this praying to Apollo and Athena and Zeus for Oedipus got some dim memory of Odin a little jealous?

It was a really strange dream. And I have tons of strange dreams. It was strange in that it felt like I was awake - in the context of the dream it didn't seem unusual to look out my window and see a god hanging from a tree. Or to join him out there. It felt more real than the whole week I spent at the bank -- like I was more AWAKE hanging from that tree (Isn't there some Norse thing about a tree? A World Tree? Something like that.) than I was shuffling away behind the teller line.

Or maybe I've read to much Neil Gaiman...