Dreams: January 19, 2023 - Festival Night

 Festival Night

    I walked among the festivalgoers, raucous and clad in myriad costumes. All the celebrants wore black garments making their bodies seem fluid and boneless in the long shadows cast by the weak light of leaning street lamps. The coppery smell of cooking organ meat filled the air, the sulphuric smoke from assorted vendors' trailers polluting the night sky. I could not discern what festival the people were celebrating. The elements I could understand combined the aesthetic of Halloween with the mood of Mardi Gras, creating a fusion that was altogether Bacchanalian. A sexual tension charged the parking lot where they had gathered, with drunken groups of two, three, and four, amalgamating into seething clusters of sloppy kisses and aggressive groping. Those who were not fornicating sat along the edge of the pavement on a long uninterrupted curb that stretched on into nothingness, their mouths agape and drooling as they laughed and leered in manic delight with chunks of meat clenched in white-knuckled fists. 

    The pockets of dingy yellow light illuminated the pavement in patches, contrasting sharply with the pervasive darkness surrounding them. The pitch blackness was absolute, save for the sudden appearance of darkly clad people, their greasy mouths and wide eyes snagging stray rays of urine-colored luminescence that danced like specters in the shadows. Though I could not see the people's bodies clearly, the dark spaces writhed and roiled in Goyan torment as they moved through them. Where the people came from, was beyond my understanding. They emerged from the darkness like inky worms born on moonless nights, their skin glistening with afterbirth, starving bellies groaning; testaments to their motherless existence.

    I felt out of place among the cavorting crowd. The utter lack of abandon with which they enjoyed themselves made them seem loose, uncouth, anthropomorphic, as if they had no grain of grace within. They drank and ate in vulgar excess, wine, and liquor streaming down their cheeks, chins, and necks, hunks of meat, and smears of grease covering a wide swath around their mouths. As they ate, they sang in discordant choruses, spewing hunks of the perpetually supplied meat that was pushed out of sooty service windows that provided brief glimpses into the grease-caked interiors of faded aluminum food trailers. Slabs of ribs, bulbous pale sausages, hunks of beef, all barely cooked, dripped fat and warm blood that ran in red and brown rivulets down the faces and hands of revelers.  There were no napkins, no plates, just tightly gripped hands that squeezed more and more fluid from the meat, fluid that leaked between their vice-like fingers. The parts that were not eaten, bones and viscera of the crude cuts of meat they served, lay in wet piles just outside of the enclosures, occasionally resupplied with heaps of slick tissue that slapped wetly as they were dumped onto the asphalt. Meat in hand, people danced around a-rhythmically continuing with their drunken recital of the tuneless festival song. Those who did not dance coalesced into sporadic orgies that trailed up and down the endless curb, each person licking and sucking the reddish brown fluids from one another's skin, each sharing their uncooked meals which they tore at greedily before turning back to kiss their shifting partners with full mouths. 

I had not moved from the spot beside the vendor, and yet I had no sense of space,  no sense of direction, no sense of how I had gotten there. I felt sober and nauseated by the scene I witnessed unfolding around me. My clothes contrasted markedly with the festival goers, provoking sneers and derisive comments from passersby. Too tense to stand still any longer, I decided to leave the festival. The only path out I could discern was down the long curb, which I knew terminated into utter darkness. However, everything else felt walled in. It was clear my unconscious mind wanted me to take this path. 

    I made my way past the long line of fornicators, moving through a perpetual shadow that was intermittently broken by cones of light that revealed grotesque scenes, each one a painting of derangement and perversion. As I proceeded along the line, many of the people stopped what they were doing and jeered at me for my pale, homespun outfit. "Nice sandals, Holy Man," they quipped. "You too afraid to party with us?" another said. "Look at his blue shirt - He looks like a little boy!" Each comment drew a chorus of brays that I tried to ignore. I kept my head down and just nodded, my eyes fixed on the road ahead. Aggravated with my lack of interaction, the carousers began throwing their chunks of undercooked meat at me, the pieces smacking wetly on the ground around my feet. But no matter how much they threw, the meat did not touch me. 

    Despite not being hit, I felt a mixture of pity and terror that made my stomach twist into anxious knots. The curb debauchees were growing increasingly restless, the whites of their eyes gleaming yellow, their pupils dilated. I could sense the growing awareness among them that I was not supposed to be there, that I had intruded upon their ritual and in some way had stained the evening with my presence. Many of them began baring their teeth at me and hissing harsh commands in my direction: "Leave this place," "You are not welcome," "If you do not eat the meat, you will be eaten in turn." Frantic to escape, I quickened my pace until I was running as fast as I could, my sandals clapping against the hot pavement as the last stretch of curb melted away. Their mocking laughter trailed me until I was far beyond the parking lot. 

    After running into pitch blackness for an unknowable amount of time, I finally stopped and slowed myself to a walk. My lungs burned and my hands tingled from the adrenaline that coursed through my veins. Eventually, the darkness turned to a shadowy landscape of trees and shrubs and small buildings,   all silhouetted against a featureless background. The smell of fragrant blooms and fresh dew filled my nose, replacing the smell of sulfur and copper that had loomed over the festival. I glanced over my shoulder furtively, hopeful that I was still free and from the sticky hands of ghoulish people. All that remained of the scene were patches of yellow light within which shadows danced and writhed. A wave of nausea overwhelmed me and I vomited in the street, over and over again, until I was dry heaving. Purged of whatever poison had been inside of me, the nausea quickly dissipated, leaving me standing over a pool of bile and worm-like creatures that smoldered and dried up into desiccated little sticks. 

The urge to remove my clothes, much like the urge to vomit. overwhelmed me and I quickly disrobed, throwing aside my shirt, pants, and sandals. I walked further on toward the fragrance that had filled my senses, and as I did I approached a garden lit from within by a small well. I went to the well and drank of the golden fluid that bubbled out from the center of a large black stone. It tasted like sour honey. 

I awoke.