CONTENT WARNING: SEX, MURDER.
I understand there’s a thin veil between sex and death. The literary devices are aplenty (e.g. “a little death”), and death/sex drives are expounded upon by a litany of philosophers. I am curious about the subconscious connection my brain has recently made. Dreams over the course of a slumber, have involved sexual excitement followed by witness to murder. Recently I dreamt I was having some kind of oral extravaganza (and not that it felt so amazing as a “wet dream” but the spectacle was so hilarious in a way that felt significant). But then BOOM! my dream surroundings transformed to a hostage situation. In this case, I was in a large warehouse where a group of us attempted to produce a public event when suddenly a couple of contractors turned on us and started shooting us down, one by one.
Early dreams in the calendar year hold uncommon significance. Not unlike new habits we resolve to start, or old ones we pretend we’ll break, the First Dream is an omen in many Asian cultures. I think I woke up on January 1st thinking about mundane office drama, so sure, I’m gonna talk about the wet dream/public assassination dreams instead.
How can the warmth of pleasure be anything but love, I think, while in the same hand I hold crumbling notions of what it means to let go of expectation, if not reframing desire, entirely? My first dream, is perhaps, to escape conflict. Leaping into the sash of heated body parts experiencing the cold exteriors of skin still in the sleep state, might be peace; might then be close to love. That contact causes the comparison.
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It was not very long ago I’d felt peace and love on my own in the natural paradise of Oregon’s redwood forest, the pacifying Pacific northern coast. Saying all of this embarrasses me. Love and peace, so fucking corny as a phrase, especially when I come home to the reality of “headquarters,” “management,” of determinations, and of course, war.
It was not very long ago I’d felt I would evaporate if I did not express a love letter every single day of the year. Express like a taut milk-feeding breast, a cystic pimple, a distended gastrointestinal system, an engorged sex, an evicted surplus of food that was momentarily cuisine, that will be remembered thereafter as a night of misery because we expressed ourselves in a direction that caused the opposite of pleasure in a place in our bodies where we want more, always more, to come in. A juxtaposition of erotic bliss, a physical terminus and the substance of all that keeps us alive.