Through the Gate of Dreams Chapter 15:1

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“These texts are not church hymnals.”

​WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 31, 1979
​
BASHA

I am floating high above the Earth.  Out of nowhere a black serpent appears.  He’s huge, slimy, and evil.  I try to fly away.  He’s catching up.  I cannot escape.  It is inevitable.  He lunges at me.  I struggle with the ebony snake.  It manages to wrap around my flaming hands and bind them together.  The other end of the serpent wraps around my legs and continues to wrap around me.  As it does so it smothers my flame!  Without my flame, gravity will grab a hold of me and I will fall!  My fears become reality, as I am now an ebony mummy plummeting earthward.  The roaring ocean-like sound of air rushing by as I fall.

I cannot move.  The snake fights me and tries to inhibit my slightest movement.  Even the labored rising of my chest to breathe meets with resistance.  I cannot take this confinement.  My muscles twitch, aching for release and freedom.  I am being crushed like a serpent’s victim.  It is getting harder and harder to breathe.  Think Basha.  Concentrate. Then, impact.  Ohh.  I open my eyes.  I am wrapped up in my bedding and on the floor.  Ouch.  Great, just what I need.  Nightmares.

LAMONT

When I wake up, I find out that this time Tezcat was a little negligent in seeing that I kept up with my homework.  I had to think fast to explain why some of my assignments weren’t ready to be turned in.  All my teachers looked at me oddly.  What was going on while I was asleep at the switch?  I had a lot of catching up to do.  Which I guess is good.  I don’t have much time to think about what happened last night.  I really don’t want to.  Better to fixate on my schoolwork.  But ‘all’s well that ends well’[1].

Since Basha now smiles at me!  She is concerned for me!  This is great.  I only wish she would stop calling me Kid.  Then everything would be perfect. 

Ahh, perfect?  You call being chosen as a human sacrifice a perfect situation?  Okay, relatively speaking it would all be perfect.  I just need to work on that one little detail.  Anyway, focusing on the positive, I’ll get to see her in my dreams!  For Real!

Remember our agreement. Come to my temple.

“Agreement.  Temple.  Oh, yeah, Tezcat, I’ll be there.”

*

I wander through Miriam’s store in search of answers.  I find a book entitled The Flayed God, which is most informative.  I devour as much information as I can in anticipation of reporting back to Basha.

‘Omnipresent and omniscient in human affairs.  Tezcatlipoca was the master of human destiny precisely because he represented the center of the cosmos and ruled the four directions.  The black Tezcatlipoca, his most powerful unfolding, a capricious, nocturnal god…was the god of darkness.  Protector of magicians and sorcerers, he was himself a trickster whose nature it was to tempt and tease mankind.  Capable of evil, he was not what one would consider a devil;…He was the darker, rather than the evil, side of a single nature.  Their cosmic conflict, expressed on various levels in various myths, symbolizes the struggle between the creative and destructive forces of nature: opposing light to dark, good to evil, priest to ruler, spirit to matter, and life to death.’[2]

My friend Tezcat turns out to be a major deity throughout Mexico and Central America, an area of land more properly referred to as Meso-America.  Most interesting that Tezcat appeared to me in one of her / his many forms, while appearing to Basha as his / her opposite.  Hmm?  Tezcat in the traditions of Mesoamerica does not have a feminine persona; I wonder why he did so with me?

*

I once more walk up, more like sneak up, the highest hill in Atlantis to that foreboding and long-forgotten Temple made out of Obsidian, the home of Tezcatlipoca.  It is near Midnight and few Dreamers are about.  Millions of stars fill the night sky like diamonds scattered unto a sheet of velvet.  Dreamland’s immense moon is only a visible thin sliver of bleached bone.  I pass the guarding jaguars and walk the empty halls to Tezcat’s throne.  My heartbeat begins to race.  I’m nervous, a bit afraid and I admit, a bit turned on.  Who could forget that body of hers, huge full melon breasts?  Wonderful curves.  All that bare skin with the gray smoke swirling out of her teasing you, letting you only see a little glimpse of skin  here and then there.  The ultimate Sex Goddess.  My reverie is interrupted by the sight of the real thing when I come to her throne room.

“Welcome, Lamont, our Chosen One.  Come into our presence and sit near us.”

I can’t help myself.  I rush to be by her.  She clothes herself in the smoke that rises off her silver, black, white, red, and blue skin like sweat off of someone in a steam room.  She is overwhelming.  Her presence and her scent of honey and vanilla fill me and I’m consumed.

“Your wish is ever my command, O’ Tezcat.”

“You are sweet our little one.  Sweet like precious chocolate is your flesh.  Soon you will give it to us.  And towards this end, we have your gift.”

“You said you had a book of spells for me.”

“There on the steps beside our seat is our gift.  There is the painted book, The Book of Red and Black.  The flower songs of those that danced before our smoking mirrors.”

he book is bound in pale tanned leather.  Inside is painted pictographs like the ones on the burning, but not consumed, door that first led me to Dreamland.  I stare at the pages and soon everything begins to spin.  I stumble across images like a stone skipping across the water.  Then the stone sinks beneath the water, and so do I.  Down into the inky black waters I plunge.  I sink into the dark ink.

“You will find this, our gift, waiting for you in the Library of Dreams.  Ask for the Book of Red and Black.”

I awaken.  The throne room is empty.  Oh.  My head hurts.  My eyes sting.  I have one huge, massive headache.  Hammers pounding between eyes.  The book is gone.  I stumble out of her obsidian temple.  I can tell by the length of my own shadow that it must be noon already.  I promised to meet Basha at the Queen of the Night’s temple.  She’s probably there waiting for me.  I’m late; I’m late for a very important date.


[1]  From John Heywoods’ book Proverbs, (chapter 10), a collection of English colloquial sayings first printed in 1546 and reprinted in 1598 and later reissued in 1874 when it was edited by Julian Sharman.

[2] Pg. 83, The Flayed God: The MesoAmerican Mythological Tradition; Sacred texts and Images From Pre-Columbian Mexico and Central America, By Roberta H. Markman and Peter T. Markman, HarperSanFrancisco, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, 1992.