lightning, trains, and dreams

We got to Sophie's house in a choir of lightningbolts, always my favorite force of nature, and ran inside to find her back door wide open. Thankfully nothing was missing, nor strange lurkers about the house, and we sighed, thinking it could have only been one person, her naive but well-meaning housemate, Mr. Crowe. Shortly he came in, woozy from an acupuncture session, and with no clue about the back door, but carrying a painting he'd seen at the Shadow Lounge of a silhouette image over a starry sky of a figure jumping between the cars of a train. On being asked about it he said it reminded him of a dream he recently had of running along the top of a train to escape a werewolf, until dawn broke and the wolf reverted into a man he could tackle, while an old dorky boyscout chum who he hadn't thought about since his childhood looked on. Immediately I thought of the series of train dreams I had last summer, upon moving back to Bloomfield where the trains howl through the night, particularly the one, after watching Dead Man for the first time, in which my twin brother and I were riding on top of two parallel trains, like the sandworms in Dune, in the old red and green overalls of the Mario Brothers. We reached out our hands and gleefully pulled the trains in to each other, causing them to crash and fall into a wooded ravine, followed by a daring escape from the law in the coffin of my anima's dead grandfather. Mr. Crowe thought it interesting the whole death/ rebirth theme in my dream, which comes up quite often, and went on to explain how he can often tell how he's doing in his life by the appearance of dogs in his sleep, and how he reacts to them, as he had once been mauled by a canine when he was a child. In all my years studying dreams I hadn't heard this theory, of how one reacts to images of one's primal (primary) fear in dreams being a gauge of their power, but I certainly can see that in relation to my own dreaming. For all the years of watching the world end in endlessly horrible ways, I've reached a point where in the dreams I accept it, and upon waking reach quickly for my pen, excited for the new material that is infinitely more interesting than dreaming about work.