The White Cat

In the dream i am in ?Brussels with an odd assortment of friends. Logan is there. Debbie from Pacifica. Those are two i remember. There may have been more but i don't remember now.

We're sightseeing and enjoying the city and i see an attractive young lady walking a young white cat with longish silky looking hair on a leash. I'm astonished because the cat is very well leash trained and walks behind the girl at her pace so that the leash makes a nice curve between them both. Tethered together but independent too. The girl gets on a train and the cat follows her on like he's taken the train many times. I continue to be astonished!

My friends and i also get on this train. We're going to an art fair of some kind in a restored area. I think it was some kind of monastery/church place that has been restored and turned into an artists colony. Debbie heard about ???  and we had reservations to be there for the unveiling of the center.

We ride the train through the city. It's a nice city, old and lots of stone buildings and large trees. If we weren't on a schedule i would've liked to have gotten off the train to walk around a bit. I notice at one of the stops that the girl with the white cat is still on the train too. I see her and the cat get off the train but then get back on in another car of the same train. I'm still fascinated by that cat. So poised and beautiful. It turns out that the car she got on is the car my group is in. But now we're in the girl and cats' apartment. I'm asking her about the cat and how he is so comfortable on a leash, in crowds, riding the train. I don't remember the conversation we had but she explained it to me. The apartment was up above the ground level. Maybe third floor, and we were in the kitchen which overlooked an inner courtyard for the complex.  The sunlight streaming in the window over the sink colored everything with a warm golden warmth. It was a very nice space and i felt comfortable there.

Now we're all on the train again - my group and the girl and her cat. The train continues on for awhile and we travel through some countryside before coming back into more city of stone. At the next stop, the girl with the cat gets off and i wonder where she's going and if my group will run into the two of them again on our way back.

Now we pull into a station and get off. We have to walk along a paved road into the colony. At one point we're on a ledge-like part of the road overlooking the place and i can see from this vantage the aged building with some round turrets and steep stone staircases. I'm getting impatient to be there but we still have a ways to walk.

We're in a station of some kind. I think it's a gas station but it's arranged in a perfect circle with the "store" part in the center, and the pumps/stations all around it. My group kind of disintegrates now and it's just me and Debbie. She has to go ? give the tickets to our friends because she has all of them and tells me she'll meet me back at the station. I return to one of the pumps to wait for her and wonder if she'll be able to find me but even as i'm thinking that, she approaches me and we walk together towards the main building. Along the way we walk down the steep stone staircase i'd seen from above. It leads down into a grassy field between two buildings. They're more like castles. Large. In the field are several women, a dozen or so. One is leading the others in a dance class. Modern or interpretive type dance. Very free form. Debbie and i stop to watch for a few minutes then we continue along the path, through the field to the other side of the "castle".

There's an opening in the building at ground level. A sort of tube like opening of stone that is apparently something leftover from the old "monk" days - a sort of secret back door entrance. Debbie goes in feet first and is sliding down into the art exhibit. I go in next but the rubber soles on my tennis shoes keep gripping onto the stone inside the tube. I'm almost all the way in and i start to get claustrophobic and freak out because i realize i don't know how long this tunnel is and if i get stuck somewhere in the middle nobody will be able to get me out. I climb back out onto the grass and think that if i take my shoes off i'll be able to glide through the tunnel much easier with little chance of getting stuck and i wake up.

The cat is such a clear image throughout this dream. He glows, he's so white against all the colors of the other images of the dream. He's always walking from the left side of the scene to the right.

The space between aka getting open

I spent a good while last night in a state of semi-consciousness. It might've been minutes or hours (i won't discuss how i reached that state) that i found myself in another place of spirit where i had conversations with several souls, including Angie's. Although my "awake" mind was aware of the conversations, the content of what we discussed was taking place at a much higher level. My body was heavy on the couch where i was semi-passed out. We were souls that have been travelling with each other for all of Time. This physical "meat" me could feel the timelessness and the conversations were "lessons learned" mostly but i can't really remember now all of what we 'talked' about even though i was trying to retain it. It was like being part of a soap bubble and we were all merged and communicating inside each other all at once. We were spheres of light easily merging and separating from one another. We are more than friends and we are merged in our sense of love for each other. Or something. It's a place i have a sense of having been before but i'm not necessarily supposed to remember. 

Mostly what i remember today and now is just the feeling of peace and comfort in that 'nowhere' 'no place' that exists between the layers of our perception of Time. And the reminder that all of "this" we think of as "reality" is just a facade overlying the limitless, boundless "being" that we really are. I wonder if this was what Philip K. Dick meant when he said "The Empire never ended." t

When will those clouds all disappear?

Did Angie know these would be her last public words? The morning of the day after she wrote this her roommate found her dead on her couch. Outside of blood family, i've know Angie longer than i've know any other person on this planet. We were best friends for a portion of our lives, out of touch for many years, but always connected. It never failed, over all these years we were apart, that i would dream about her and within a day or two i'd get a phone call or a letter. There was a decade or so that we fell out of touch but i still regularly dreamed her but instead of a phone call or a letter i'd awake with the unsettling feeling that maybe something bad had happened to her and i worried. A kind of chronic, under the radar on consciousness kind of worry. She's dead now and somehow i feel lighter. Like a burden is lifted. My living friends say "I'm so sorry for your loss" but i want to tell them "Don't be. I'm relieved that she's finally safe from life's continued insults" but they wouldn't understand. Other people say "you're in my prayers" but what does that mean really? To those people i want to say "don't disrupt the balance of the Universe praying unnecessary prayers!"

Angie. I met her when i was 9 years old and my family moved into the house next door to hers. She was 11 months older than i and complete opposites in personality and appearance. We'd go through periods of being inseparable and then periods of trying out other "best friends" and come back to being inseparable. It was a strange relationship in some ways. She loved me, of that i have no doubt. Whether she felt this complicated connection the same way i do, i'm not sure. I'm not sure many or any of my true heart and soul friends feel the connection the way i do. Sharon does, i think, but she has tons of friends and i'm very selective and have very few. Introvert. I remember so many times Angie coming over to my house and trying to get me to leave my bedroom to come out and play. Sometimes she could get me out, but a lot of times she'd leave mad  because she didn't understand my need for quiet solitude, being more of the extroverted personality type. So many memories...

One summer, i was probably 11 or 12, Angie did something that caused her parents to ground her for the entire summer. I'm sure it was something stupid like not drying the dishes completely before putting them away, or failing to complete some task to the satisfaction of her cunt of a mother. Whatever it was, we spent that entire summer in the farthest point from her house we could get while still being within her boundary. We lived in the country and had big yards but it was still like being chained. And i had other friends so many days she would just be sitting there, at the edge of her yard, waiting. I don't even remember now what we did besides talk and dream about the future that summer. But we were those kinds of friends to each other and she had a shitty life. We were opposites that way too. My life must've seemed idyllic to her and other than the crippling depression i suffered from, it pretty much was idyllic. Intelligent, thoughtful parents, a good middle-class kind of life... while she lived what was probably the original house on our street. A converted modular kind of building from the 40's. It wasn't a terrible house but they were poor and couldn't furnish it or afford air conditioning. Stuff like that. And there were six of them living in that house that only had one bathroom and three bedrooms. A kitchen and living room rounded out the place. Angie and her older sister Debbie shared on room, younger brothers Michael and Benji shared the other, smaller room, and the parents got the other room. It always felt like camping when i went over there. But the place was clean. And as long as you stayed out of the boys room, it wasn't too bad. The boys were bed-wetters well beyond the potty training years. Michael and Benji were about a year apart and Michael was only a few years younger than me so we're talking big kid bed-wetters. I still don't know what kind of psychological abuse they must have been subjected to. But Angie was my friend and she's the focus of this remembrance. :o)

We were close for most of the 70's and through the mid 80's. Even though we went our separate ways, i was a voracious letter writer and she would often write me back or call from where ever she was at the time. She lived with my family for awhile and when we left Manassas to move to Raleigh my parents would have gladly brought her along. I don't know why she didn't come with but all of her life, Angie would ruin any kind of good thing that came her way. Definitely her own worst enemy. Anyways, all of these memories are mixed up in no kind of linear pattern. They jump from playing with her Barbie dolls when we were pre-teens to smoking pot with her boyfriend when we were suppose to be in school. We were like little wild creatures in those days. Beautiful creatures, we were.

I want to tell about the times with her boyfriend Ron. Or Bill. I can't remember his name. The other Beatle freak, but no match for my Beatle-freakiness. And her boyfriend Ray. He was a great guy. Another of her ruined opportunities. It never mattered who she was dating, she always wanted me to be the third wheel. Her boyfriends never minded either. They liked fucking Angie and having intellectual conversations with me afterwards. If somehow Angie and I could've been merged we would have made one excellent human being. Maybe that's our connection. She's my physical side i've never explored and i'm her intellectual side. She was dyslexic but didn't get treatment until she was twelve or older. I want to tell about the time we were hitchhiking to the mall and a young guy in a van picked us up. It wasn't until we got in that we saw the big gun. Luckily for us he wasn't a hunter because we would have been easy prey. Close calls. I see how close they were from this distance of Time, but we were constantly putting ourselves in harms way but somehow never got into serious trouble. Angie was a tease. She couldn't help herself. If it was an older man, she was on him like a cat in heat. Even my dad had to tell her to keep her hands to herself. She would hang the oddest assortment of people. I don't know how she met them. Older construction guys, a retired Hell's Angel name Ben working as a mechanic in town, a journeyman electrician from DC named Theodore but who everyone called Beaver, who worked a few months out of the year and lived off his earnings for the rest. All these people i met through Angie. I am who i am today because of people Angie introduced me to when we were kids. It's a very strange relationship. There's too much too tell but with her death so fresh i feel the need to get some of it down. I guess it doesn't really matter now but as much as i loved her, and as much of a relief it is knowing that she's finally safe from harm, and knowing that we really didn't have anything to talk about now besides the past, i still hope she visits me in my dreams. The idea that i won't dream her ever again is more painful than knowing she's dead.

Oh yeah. I have to remember to tell about Jay and Linda, and about the Kevins' who worked at Ross' garage, the track team in middle school. The haunted hill. Tequila Sunrises and bong hits every morning. The biting flies incident along the railroad tracks. Sunbathing at the cow pond. Terry from Richmond with the teeth rotting around the braces he'd had put on but never got taken off. The meanness of kids. Or maybe it's just life that i'm thinking about and you can't tell the details of a life because it's like describing individual pieces of a puzzle and out of context they're probably not all that interesting and maybe i should just let it all drift away for good now.

I think that Angie knew those would be her last words and i think she finally decided that she'd had enough. Unless she tells me in dreams though, i guess i'll never know the truth.