SAVAGE GARDEN

maybe unfortunately, not about the band, though I love it dearly. inspired in part by the writing of Anne Rice, moreso by a disturbing dream I had.

***

It is the earliest of morning. I don’t know where I am, I think maybe in a vacuum. This is disconcerting to me, as I have never been exactly nowhere. To ease my displeasure I imagine surroundings for myself. I must have just woken into The Dream, normally when I arrive I am at least somewhere. I imagine myself suspended in midair many miles above the earth, dangling on the particles of nitrogen and oxygen beyond the weather. I am so light I cannot feel my body now.

After this I slip from consciousness into unconscious thought, and without realizing it, I have begun to descend towards the surface of the earth. Unaware of this, I continue to concentrate on an epiphany. The nature of an epiphany is that it is sudden and uncalculated prior to its birth, however, within the isolation of my hippocampus this nature can be stretched, manipulated, or destroyed. And as I ponder this somewhere it registers with me that the earth is no more than some celestial giant’s spit wad. It doesn’t necessarily spin in any orbit, and it only exists because it is simply imagined to do so.

My body is free of my mind, and has no navigator. It floats down, and is above Egypt. My eyes know this because the earth has transformed, it has become a life-size political map of a globe. Apparently, this spit is multicoloured. My body is absorbed into the multifaceted purple grains of sand that compose the desert.

My thoughts plunge back to my location, and just as this happens I experience the sensation of having put on a skintight jumpsuit made of a very thick rubber. I find it excruciating to move, and so, as though frozen, I am sort of sucked through the sands of time. I suppose what I feel is comparable to what a snake would feel if he was forced to shed his perfectly fine and bonded scales from his muscles beneath. Such is the sensation. In the midst of this, there is a sound like the pop heard when an airtight vacuum is unsealed. If feel completely new. I direct my focus to my limbs to find that they have arranged themselves in a bazaar fashion. My right leg is bent at my hip underneath my back. I must look strange should someone happen by, but also peculiarly elegant. I don’t recall being this flexible in the Waking Life. I am surprised that when I try to move it, I don’t feel pain. I don’t want to open my eyes until I am standing. I am incredibly aware of the severe silence. In the Waking Life there is the unwavering noise of machinery, the incessant buzzing of information being passed through wires and cables. The quite is pulsating, weirdly enough, hushing the intrusion of my thundering heart.
When my eyes did not open of their own accord, I lifted my hand to my forehead, and felt for the little cord underneath my skin between my brows, and yanked it up and outward from my face.

I missed a breath.

It occured to me that I had been catapulted through the crust of the earth to land in an uncharted land of beauty. I felt as though here, I could make a thousand fatal errors. I had discovered a wild and indifferent paradise without signposts.

A cartographer’s dream.

I decided immediately upon this revelation to roam the region. I found the perfection of my surroundings dizzying. The sprawling grandeur in steps to come looked positively nauseating. I contented myself to simply observe the terrain.

This beauty, I ascertained, contained alien dangers and lawlessness as had dwelled in the earth of my Waking Life, eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head. When I had collected some inertia to travel and presumed to take a step forward, instead of lifting my other foot in sequence I was sliding across a plane unseen to me. It was as if I was gliding on invisible ice, and when I threw my hands out in near desperation and fear of hurtling into the splendid foliage, and thereby possibly obliterating it, my arms extended behind me and out of my vision without consulting me.

“Curse you, damn arms!”

Perhaps in response to my hypothetical ‘slap on the wrist’ and aggression, my arms, having had enough of me, dislocated themselves in protest. This only elicited further rage from the rest of me, and my lips did not hesitate to guarantee that the consequences of my arms’ actions would not be pleasant. I did not take the time to consider whether or not I would feel any of the pain I was promising to inflict on them. In my anger, I failed to notice that I had stopped moving through the Savage Garden. I fumed as I watched the appendages that divorced my soar into the violet sky, expanding like balloons until, finally, they had become the size of blimps.

I became aware of the fact that my fear wasn’t stemming from the growing chance that these arms of mine would explode in a very Hindenburg-esque fashion (truly, I could still feel my arms and the effects this absurd bloating incurred.) My trepidation was due to the increasingly apparent fact that I had absolutely no control over my body.

After the couple zeppelins faded into the distance, I teetered on the brink of hysteria. Miraculously, the jungle came to my rescue; for what would become of me if I had no arms and no time to adapt to my newly self-mutilated body? Seeds from the towering green trees around me showered on me, planting in my scalp. Then I felt them sprout, and saw my tresses, emerald as the leaves, grow longer and longer, wrap around my chest and then elongated more. I watched, stunned, as my jade locks weaved into braids, and then wound around the plaits on either side of my torso to replace my arms as creepy extremities.

Forgot was the previous foreboding of the forest, the melancholy of the arboretum. In hugged myself in my rapture. My new arms were reluctant to release me. I hardly minded.

Victoriously, the vines consumed me, impervious to my damning. I was rooted in the very soil I had once gazed at in awe. The scintillating grains of sand were now my suppressors. I was now part of the bravura of the landscape.

For the first days of my captivity I entertained thoughts of escaping. After that did not happen, I stared at the other trees in horror. And after years of imprisonment, I have watched as others like me were ravaged by the Savage Garden.