The Man Who Unfolded Himself; Dreaming While Awake

I'm living in another timeline, one in which the Civil War never happened and slavery never ended. The US government is authoritarian and repressive. I am working to change things, working to free the slaves. A climactic battle approaches, and it looks as if my side, the anti-slavery revolutionaries are going to lose our final battle.

Somehow I have the ability to move along my own lifeline, and I move in time to a situation where I think I can do things differently and change things away from this defeat ... and it works! The slaves are freed, and America becomes a better place than it was.

But in doing so, I break open the gates between the alternate realities. I am now like Billy Pilgrim, only more so: unstuck in not just in time, but in all the possibilities encompassed by my lifespan.

I explore the amazing range of possibilities, moving from lifeline-thread to lifeline-thread quickly. Quick as those shifts are, when I arrive in a thread, I have a sense of the long duration of my life on that thread. The resulting experience has the sense of enormous amounts of detail quickly reviewed, but the detail is there to be examined when I choose to do so.

In the threads that involve defeating the slavers and freeing the slaves, I find myself married to a prominent midwife and natural-childbirth advocate

A bunch of threads pass through Austin, Texas. In some of these threads, the US is broken up into independent states and nations, and Austin is known as the Texas-stadt in some of them, and Texas-richt in others.

I find myself facing a group of tall, slender women wearing diaphanous gowns and silver filigree circlets on their foreheads. They are standing in a tight circle around one of their number. It is clear that they intend to do something sexual with the woman in the middle. They see me, and beckon me to join them. "But I'm a man," I say. One of them laughs, takes me by the hand, and pulls me into the circle. My body is now held close to those of the others, arms around me, my arms around them. One woman's face is particularly close to mine. "You may not touch yourself," she tells me. She smirks lustily when she adds, "You won't need to...." ("But I'm a man," I keep thinking. "Why am I welcome here?") [Later, and I can't recall if it was in the dream or not, I realized that it was possible that on that lifeline-thread, I wasn't a man, but a woman like them.]

Another thread finds me victorious and successful, and partnered with a man: [Omitted]. We sit together on a sofa in our livingroom, entertaining friends. [He] is vigorous and healthy, completely recovered from the effects of his waking-life surgery.

From here the scene segues into a peculiar homoerotic ritual of which I am the focus. There are a number of naked men, perched on ladders or hanging from ropes or swings. One man is tying his penis into a knot around a pretzel-shaped object. Men are singing and chanting. I look up, and a rain of semen falls on my face, my hair and my shoulders. I feel like I ought to be disgusted, but it is part of the ritual so everything is as it should be.

Next I am looking at Frodo Baggins and Gandalf facing each other, and somehow I know that in truth Gandalf is Frodo's grandfather.

At this point, I am awoken by the stirring of D. Potter in bed beside me. She is getting up to empty her bladder. I lay beside her as she gets out of bed, thinking of what I could recall of the dream, and realize that I'm not altogether awake, that it seems as if my REM state has persisted past the moment of my becoming aware of my surroundings. I'm thinking about the dream, feeling like it's particularly important, and wondering whether I should get up to try to write it down then and there, I am also having sudden rapid flashes of images (faces, pictures, landscapes) and sounds. I'm still dreaming, and at the same time I am awake. I decide that it is more important to be with the experience of dreaming while awake, and so I lay there, soaking in the experience of the quick flashes of images, sounds, thoughts.

D. returns to the bed and we snuggle close. "I've been having a really weird dream," I tell her, "but I don't know how to describe it. In fact, I think I'm still dreaming right now." The feeling of the solidity and warmth of her body has a different character from the ongoing dream flashes, and cuts through them, distracting me from them. They fade into normal wakefulness. Not long after that, I return to sleep.

Later in the night, in my dreaming, I find myself holding a book. It is a thick mass-market paperback: Slash, by David Vurt. I read the sales copy on the back cover. It is about a man, a social activist, who is married to a midwife and home-birthing advocate. I find myself disappointed that at least part of my earlier dream that seemed so important to me, should have been lifted wholesale from a book.