IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE

By Dolores J. Nurss

Volume VII: The Burning

Chapter 16

RED RIVER

DREAM NOTES

I recently had a vague, brief dream of staring at a seedpod twirling in a breeze, while I lay upon the ground. I felt utterly depleted. That’s where the opening came from.

I didn’t write down the nap-dream about the hermit burial, thinking I had forgotten it. But later it came back to me as I typed, first the realization that this hermit happened to be a woman, something seemed very feminine about the setting, and then a flash of dresses that seemed unusually tall and a growing sense that the late hermit was not assigned female at birth. Mind you, I know a number of unusually tall women who were born female, so that’s no indicator by itself. It was just a sense that I felt.

I suppose I don’t have quite a normal dreaming female/animus relationship with my dreams. I have never felt precisely like a woman, but not inclined to take on the cultural baggage of being a man in this society, either. I just sort of am me.

In the larger dream previously referenced, I dreamed of being Zanne hopping a train with Cybil. In the actual dream I saw the hay being loaded into a plane, and wishing on it from a distance (as in waking life I’d learned from my Grandmother) but I transferred that to the boxcar to make Zanne and Cybil’s landing easier. The rest of it, the airport and the massacre, happened as dreamed. I dreamed separately something later that included a memory of the final incident with Cybil.

Lufti refers to a childhood trauma of Deirdre’s. He also connects Zanne’s experiences to theirs, through an inadvertent link with Deirdre. And some of that zings back again to the mad youth on the fire escape.

The idea for the dinner of hoppers comes from watching an episode of “Survivor” in the waking world, where the participants captured lots of grasshoppers and tried to use them as fishing bait, with no success. Meanwhile I sat at home, thinking, “Idiots! Grasshoppers are food, themselves!”