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To: kjc@cs.rutgers.edu
Cc: cdr@livingston.com, li@inigo
Subject: Weird Dreams or Talking Heads
Date: Fri, 02 Sep 94 11:09:37 -0700
From: li@inigo

This was a dream I had this morning:

---

A sunny summer reunion.  Lot of laughter and hugging amid the cool
hallways of a rather exclusive hotel in the middle of a summer
vacation city.  Colorful people, interesting people in all shapes,
sizes.  All with a good sense of humor.  A few stick out in my mind, a
tall, lanky teen, a big woman with a booming laugh, a girl with
flowers in her hair, and a dark man with black eyes and face that
hadn't smiled very much.

Then I dreamed of murders.  A series of them, and in places beyond
belief.  One was that of an astronaut that recognized the person
killing him before he was pushed into the heart of a sun.  That's the
last one that I remembered.  There was a series of them.  The look of
surprise is what I remember, and also knowing that they were all
ever-youthful like me.  Perhaps there was someone that was pushed into
the heart of a volcano, another trapped, forever, in an underwater
cavern, and another blown apart by a bomb.  I simply remember a series
of them.

They were like the Highlander immortals but even more resilient, and,
actually, among our people, we didn't really know what would kill
one of us other than complete annihilation of the body.  There was
also no incentive to kill each other like in Highlander.  No power in
the balance.

It was a slow building horror of sorts.  Something always in the
background of this sunny, summer reunion.  Somehow, during the reunion
and during the activities I saw the black eyed man looking at me and
smiling.  I remember smiling back and we were interested in each
other, but we never touched...  We had movies, and I think at the end
of the movie, I saw the tall teenager striding off somewhere and the
intense, black eyed man following him.

I followed as well, and found them in a flowershop.  During the
flashbacks, the bits of all the killings, I'd known that it was the
black eyed man all along.  I think that the astronaut one had actually
shown me his face.  But there's a feeling I have that there were tiny
things in all of them that had pointed to him.  I also just kinda
*knew* it in the ways one knows things in dreams.

I stepped up to him, there in the flower shop.  He looked at me, and I
think he knew that I knew what he had done, and what he wanted to do
to the teenager.  He opened his arms to me, and I went in them and
hugged him, firm, warm and close.  He stroked my hair, as I closed my
eyes, my cheek against his shoulder, my face turned towards his
throat.  It felt like coming home.

It FELT like coming HOME... I was utterly safe, utterly loved with
that embrace... and it was true love; but we both knew what I had to do.

I kissed his throat.  I could feel the blood pulsing through it, hear
the air being drawn in and out.  I could taste the salt of his sweat.
He lifted his head just a bit for me.  I felt my jaws elongate, and
then I tore his throat out with my teeth.  Did I say we also morphed,
some? 

His body fell to the ground.  All the flesh from around his neck was
magically gone, and all that was left was the dry stick (like my rain
stick) of his spine, holding his head on.  The teenager grabbed a
hacksaw.  The florist had fled with the gout of blood.  We cut the
head from the body and stood back, kinda horrified.   The head was
still alive, even as the body started to decay.

"I thought..."

We nodded at each other, both half hysterical and both thinking that a
beheading should have done it.  And I was crying at my betrayal and
with the need to do this.

The head looked at us and at the body and said, quite calmly, that the
only way we were going to kill him was if we destroyed his brains.
Will alone was enough to keep him alive and to grow back.  He glanced
at a sledgehammer that was there in the shop (why?  I don't know).  I
picked up the sledge and used the old splitting motion to swing it.  A
motion that's so automatic for me and one that I know I can't stop
when I begin it.  I woke up when he closed his eyes as the sledge was
coming down...



----------------


Still in that half-awake state, I rewrote it in my head... the sheer
vulnerability of his head-onlyness, and that gut deep love and
confusion and the thought that killing him was only because the
'teenager' (who was also a judge?? uhm... a person of authority among
the immortals?  Something that feels like that but isn't...) thought
he couldn't change... and the sledge fell to the side of the head as I
said, "I can't."  Thoughts and alternates slid into more dreams as I
think I fell asleep again.

WIth that idea of not killing him came a cloud and flood of feelings
that even with only a head, the killer could do a lot of damage, could
probably kill me, could turn others against me, and could, with his
words and his looks and persuasive abilities could probably turn me
against everyone I'd ever known or loved without my ever knowing it.
His reputation was that he was completely irredeemable, like Loki, and
anyone that tried was in for a world of hurt.

Part of it was the feeling that all the people he's killed were people
that had hurt him in some way as well.  The later dreaming he'd told
me that they had killed mortals, which the immortals hadn't noticed,
but mortals that had meant something to him, so he'd killed them in
retaliation.  

Part of the latter dreaming was that *I* was going to be in for a
world of hurt for doing what I'd done to him, eventhough he loved me,
and vice versa.

There were odd flashes of nearly dreaming of when I was taking care of
the head.  Flashes of a performance in a side show, and afterwards,
while we were walking a away and some lady with too much makeup and a
loud laugh and plastic flowers, "Oh... it's *so* realistic!!"  And my
love opening his eyes and smiling brightly at her, and saying, "But I
*am* real."  And her screaming with laughter at the clever mechanical
toy...

Making love to just a head was interesting as well... :)

At the background of it all was 'even immortals change'... kinda
pounded into me by Gaiman's Hob, I think... and the feeling that he'd
been hurt terribly so many times, that with the decades of just being
with him and his being utterly dependent on me, and my giving him all
that he needed when he could do nothing for himself, that he'd change.
That there would be some part of him that would know that there was
someone that really *did* love him for just who he was instead of
anything he could do or anything he could affect or anything he had,
because he could do nothing, had nothing, and was nothing.

I think that part of why the head lived might also be blamed on
Gaimen, or, maybe older yet, all the Greek myths I inhaled as a child.

Of course, I changed, too.

Anyway... he grew.  The wheelchair era was actually really fun.
Eventually, he was whole, and we grew a healthy relationship with a
far more even power flow between us.  Part of it was that no one had
ever trusted him a great deal either.  And I gave him that as well.
At one point, I was tied, spreadeagle on the bed, naked as the day I
was born, knowing what was going to happen when he brought the sword
out and lopped off my head.

"I... I didn't know it would be so soon." I said, but there was no
sound.  I hadn't figured out how to talk with no lungs, yet.

It *hurt*, too.  It hurt so bad, I just wanted to go away, to die, and
just leave.  The pain was so terrible, and I was sobbing soundlessly
and crying and *dying*... and then I heard him crying as well, and
pleading by ordering me not to leave.  But the light was so
beautiful...  But he told me emphatically that I didn't have to die
unless I wanted to, that I didn't have to follow the light or the
peace unless I wanted to, and please, oh "please, don't leave me
alone..." the fear brought me back.  His fear.  I wanted to hold him,
and cried 'cause I couldn't...

He picked me up, all bloody still, and cradelled me close.

I mouthed words, stuttering and lost without being able to hear what I
was trying to say.  I tried to say, "How could you speak?"

He laughed through his tears and said softly, "I remembered from the
time before."  We both knew that if I were curious I would do
*anything* to satisfy the curiosity.

"Time before?" and something in my heart went cold.

He described to me a king that had had him beheaded for a trivial
thing, and was so amused by the stuttering, screaming from pain head
that had dropped in with the others that the king'd kept his head on a
spike in the throne room.  The background knowledge of the dream was
that the kingdom was brought to ruin quite quickly, and the king lost
his head without staying alive.

Without thinking, I mouthed "Gods... I wish I could hold you..."

And that started him crying again, because even after what he just did
to me, that I'd think that... and the thought that he'd like to be
held, prompted the action he had of simply holding me close to him.

He taught me how to close certain areas of my throat and pull air in
and hold it for speaking with... and with a dream's sense of turn
around is fair play, he went through all the trouble that I did when
I had to take care of him, just as I went through all the frustrations
of having to depend on him.  And since he'd been through it, himself,
both frustrations and the acknowledgment that the help and gifts were
given freely... it was kinda cool...

Weird thing was when I got my head lopped off, I realized that I
wasn't in my 'real' body... it was Caucasian... with ultra straight
blonde streaked with black? or dark? hair and grey-blue eyes...

I don't know... part of me likes to think that, after that, the two of
us went immortal hunting.  :)  Another part just thinks it might have
been happily ever after, but that's boring.

-----
Phyllis