Alayna and I were doing what we always do, which is to talk about our dreams, and how we live inside of one, and so on. And somehow we got to talking about being in a tower near the sea and dreaming our whole lives from inside this tower. I remember having a vision after my grandmother died of her waking up by the sea as a young woman, and the sky was orange and the sun was setting. And just as you wake up and recall the last little traces of your dream, so too did she have memories of her dream—the long dream that had been her entire life. In dying on Earth, she woke up on the shore of the other world and remembered the dream of being a person.
Last week, Laura and I were walking around Berkeley, and I kept talking about water. And she said something like, “You’re obsessed with water.” Which is true! I’m always thinking about water, either being in it or near it, or drinking it, or heating it, and so on.
In the first chapter of MOBY-DICK, Melville says that humans are naturally drawn to water:
Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
And so I see myself in the tower near the sea dreaming my whole life, dreaming of water, and on and on. Alayna and I decided that was not a bad place to be. In the other world, in the tower, we dream of our lives here. And when we dream here in this place, we are seeing glimpses of ourselves in the tower by the sea, though it is through a glass darkly.
MOBY-DICK:
Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.
MEANWHILE: At the exact same time, my friend Thomasina, a private investigator in Portland (which makes two PIs I know in Portland, somehow??), began talking about dreaming about the ocean. We had been talking about how squid and octopi are two of the best animals. And then she brought up her friend, a fellow Aquarian, which are of course the water-bearers of the cosmos:
Laura Rokas and I would call this a PLATE OF SHRIMP moment. To wit:
Every single day of my god dang life, Laura and I text each other our POS moments. Sometimes we’re listening to the exact same song at the exact same time, or something like that. This happens constantly. I’ll be thinking of a word or phrase and then it will appear in a book I’m reading or a movie I’m watching. I reckon if you’re open to such things, clairvoyancy / ESP and all that shit really do exist. I mean, why not? In viewing things as a lattice of coincidence as opposed to unconnected incidents, it is as though you are turning on your antenna. You are setting your motherfucker to “RECEIVE”. And then you really do start to see it all.
Whenever I do acid or mushrooms, I always look up at the stars. Like water I am also obsessed with stars. And every time Laura and I have been all spooked up together and walking around Berkeley at night, we both see these faint spiderwebbing lines connecting the stars . . . a huge ghostly grid of triangles that tie the whole night sky together. It’s real cool. I don’t know . . . maybe the whole thing, all of it, is like that: a spiderweb of faint lines tying it all together. I think it’s OK to go on thinking such things. After all:
