Dream: "As Was Above"

Dream 20030508, 4:20 AM:

As Was Above, is so below; as so below, above. Take (name) home again in Misery and Love.

I am driving along to an event with Chris. We stop at a craft store; they are doing some kind of special sale. There are several women with shopping carts lined up at the front of the store, as if they’re going to race through the store at the sound of a bell, like on that TV shopping game show. There is a manager here, who is showing me all the kinds of figurines and stuff that are available. Many of the figurines look like they’re made of resin with beach sand, or they have sand glued on them – they look sparkly, but scratchy. They’re not very nice looking, but he seems to think they are.

The shop turns into a weaving / sewing shop. There is an old woman who shows me antique treadle sewing machines. I tell her I need one that works, I already have the requisite broken one. The machines are very ornate, like clocks. I look at one that looks almost like a brass cuckoo clock; I think it folds out to use as a sewing machine. The lady shows me that the presser foot adjustment has an ivory knob at the bottom; she pushes it and it drops down, then she pushes it back up. She shows me around the store – I get a cloth packet to keep papers in. It’s like a satchel, with a flap that closes over it to keep things inside. Another woman shows me how to close it with a split piece of waxed leather. The leather piece is like a long-tined U, and it goes through buttonhole-type openings to close the flap.

The first woman talks about having bees out back, and the only ones here are in the toilet. She points to a toilet that is just sitting in the middle of the room with the merchandise, but it’s sealed up; I lean close to it, trying to see if I can hear them buzzing. I knock part of the toilet over; somehow it turns into this tiny porcelain swan-head that I’ve knocked off something. There’s a little hole in the bottom. One lone solitary bee flies around. It lands on my left pinkie finger; and stings me. The bee is pearl-colored and irridescent, and looks like ichneumonid wasp. My finger swells, and a square-ish lump rises up on it on the middle joint. It starts to throb, and turns red, and a line like a seam starts progressing down my finger and hand, like blood poisoning. My whole hand is swollen. I tell them that we’ll need to call 911. Chris is picking on me for calling, because it isn’t that serious. I don’t think that we call 911; someone has epinephrine, and benadryl – the swelling goes down, I’m OK, and go on.

We go onward. As we’re walking along, a truck comes by. We hide behind a big concrete sign; I don’t know why we’re concerned about the truck. We think it’s passed, but it stops. A man gets out, he looks like “Gas” from eXistenZ (played by a very sleazed-up countrified Willem Dafoe). There are two black men with him. They walk threateningly toward us. The man says something about all the times when we’ve done something to him (I don’t recognize him at all) are only a prelude to this night of mayhem and murder. Chris pushes on the bumper of his truck with his foot. The truck is running and in neutral, and it rolls forward into a warehouse/hangar, which collapses on top of it. We run away as they run after the truck. They turn and chase us. I have a semi-lucid moment, and think that I ought to be able to pull something helpful out of the bag to throw at them. The first thing that comes to mind is snakes. I reach in and think about snakes, and pull out a handful of them twisted together, all different colors and kinds, and toss them backwards at the men pursuing us. The bad guys aren’t very scared; one says, “What kind of deadly snake is this? Pretty weak.” The snakes aren’t behaving threateningly; they look almost like they’re made of fabric. I think about a spitting cobra, and try to pull one of those out of the bag, but get the same kind of lame snakes as before. We get into a different warehouse, and hide. We find a cow costume, put it on, and try to escape in that. The guys are still chasing us. Now, somehow the one white and two black guys have become three rednecks thugs. Chris and I try to fly to escape them, but have no luck. Up above the warehouse now, they’re chasing us through the air. I pull a tornado out of the bag, but one of the guys flies up through it toward me. It seems more like a twisting brown rope made of wind, than a funnel. Walking along electric wires, he carries one end as if he’s going to make a circuit.

Finally, we are able to fly upward and escape them. Then, we go to a festival where the weaving group will be. There are rows and rows of white pavilion tents. We get to the one where the weavers are set up; the thugs show up. They start talking about how they’re going to kill us with guns, they show us the guns they’re going to use, unwrapping them from handwoven cloths. One looks like a piece of tooling equipment; it is pale purple, and has a little hand crank like the sewer snake does. He turns it and it clicks like a Gatling gun, like it will be shooting bullets that way later.

Chris and I freeze them in time – we use some command, like “Tempus commandatus,” or something like that – stand on either side of them as we do it. The position we use is almost like we are “surrounding” the person with our hands. They seem to cooperate. We hit them with tools, a sledge hammer and a wrecking bar, to shatter them, but they’re not shattering – I expect them to splinter like the liquid nitrogen thing with the flower at NASA. One kind of cracks, but then just says, “Ow.” We keep beating on them. The one guy says he can’t take it any more, moves out of the way. In a brief weird flashback moment, there’s some conversation about how one of the guys has a piece of jewelry that he got from his father, and it’s broken – I fix it, and hold it up to him. It looks like a pendant made from a cotter pin. The man is black again, although I don’t remember any change. I hold his hands, and recite a little rhyme – As was above, is so below; as so below, above. Take (his name, something like Dohmed) home again in Misery and Love. (My memory of the phrase is very clear that it’s “Misery and Love.” My sense of the meaning of the phrase is more like “Mercy and Love.”) He falls to the ground, slowly disappears. I do the same thing to one of the other two guys. With the third, I ask him, “What’s your name?” and he gives me some half-assed nickname. I look him seriously in the eye, like this is real important, and say, “What do you want God to call you?” and he says, “Chris.” I look over at my Chris, like this is funny or ironic that the other guy has the same name. I hold his hands and say the rhyme, and he fades and is gone.

I walk into another tent room; on a tall shelf, there are three babies. They are all naked and clean, and sitting up. They are small, but probably six or eight months old. One has a strong farmers tan. I call to Chris, tell him we need a moel. Theme music rises up as I walk out; someone singing a sort of rousing spiritual song. I know somehow that the three babies are the reincarnations of the three thugs.