The Guerilla’s Dream
The woman was asleep, and dreaming.
In this dream, the woman was pregnant with a world. Inside her: an entire ecosystem, a vast expanse; steamy chaotic primordial jungle. And, at the center of this embryonic garden? A single city surrounded by wilderness.
In the beginning, she dream-tumbled into her own womb like a falling star, sent or slipped out of the heavens. By the time her descent had ended, however, she would come to believe it had been her own choice to enter into the midst of herself. So, there she took her place, self-centered, to see what she could see.
Suspended, now, above the landscape, she regarded the isolated and vulnerable city that was both before her and within her. The streets of her city were calm, but she was not. She felt uneasy and didn’t understand, until she became aware of a stirring all around her (all within her): a quaking in the bush which signaled the approach of unseen threats. Soon what was hidden became manifest: the doom of the city revealed as a mob of terrifying beasts emerged from deep within the forest mists. As this congregation of mindless creatures assembled, she knew that the destruction of the city was imminent. And though the woman was acquainted with fear, had known anxiety throughout her life-before-this-life, when she lived as a girl, and when she would have said she belonged to herself; here on this field of battle she had, at first, no sense of danger. Because, in her dream she was one of them. That is, in her dream, each of the monsters was her.
Confused, she experienced the fall of the city as both destroyer and defenseless victim; as a terror and as one terrorized; ravaging one moment and running in the next from a threat she could not distinguish as separate from herself. Anyone watching would see the dream-woman’s bias for destruction. But, only the dreamer knew how much she hated it. She wished for defeat, longed to be overpowered, and imagined the peace that would come with annihilation. But in the dream she knew that she would not be free until the scene had repeated enough times for her to play all the parts and for the city to be reduced to rubble.
Finally, from desolation she would rise, one final time, high above the ruin, to take her place at the end of the dream as the Warrior Queen, at whose feet any remaining power would fall in humbled adoration.
This was the entire dream. This dream was mostly hidden from the watchers, and the woman herself would struggle to recall it when she woke. Whenever she had a long sleep she dreamed the entire dream; and every time she was put to sleep for a long time, the dream was always the same. And the duration of the dream was always the same: from the time the dream began to the time it ended, twenty-five years would pass.
