Nightmare: Government Shutdown Reductio Ad Absurdum

“Premonitions”: a sandwich made of Hare Krishna dancers in Tompkins Square Patk and anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in Central Park c. 1967, the moon added with my editor's punch in Seattle c. 1974. Tri-X, other data lost. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyrights 1976 and 2012. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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RECOGNIZABLY PROPHETIC DREAMS come to me very rarely, no more than a dozen times in all my 73 years, and thus far they have foretold only personal disasters, occurrences of no significance to anyone but myself or maybe a few other members of my relentlessly dysfunctional family. 

A few of these events were relatively minor vexations that at the time of their occurrence seemed bottomlessly horrific, like the vengefully inflicted delays by which my birthmother ensured I missed an end-of-summer passenger train and was fretfully tardy in returning to my academic-year residence in the home of my father and stepmother and even more anxious about my entrance to the bully-dominated jungle of a southern public high school – itself a profoundly disturbing transition after four years in the carefully regulated sanctuary of Roman Catholic parochial education. 

Some episodes in which my nightmares came true were a bit more problematical, like Vietnam-Era G.I. Bill education checks inexplicably delayed so long the resultant poverty nearly flung me into homelessness, which happened three times in 1971 and once in 1972. 

Another incident, of which I dreamed at least twice beforehand, was irremediably injurious: it was a Godzilla-versus-Bambi car crash at 4:30 p.m. on a rainy 23 September 1978, when one of Washington state's obscenely coddled habitually criminal drunken drivers slammed his huge 442 Oldsmobile into my tiny new Honda Civic and inflicted the spinal injuries that now in old age have reduced me to a cripple.

(For the record, “obscenely coddled” contains not one scintilla of hyperbole. The moral imbecile at the wheel of the monster Oldsmobile had been arrested 19 times on charges of driving while intoxicated, but the arrests were all dismissed or reduced to meaninglessness, a fit prelude to his 20th offense, when he crippled me, destroyed my little car and reportedly rang the Breathalyzer bell with a near-record blood-alcohol score of point-32. But the associated charges, which included assaulting an officer, also were thrown out, and this obviously well-connected Chug-a-Lug Charley continued his potentially deadly spree of defiantly dipsomaniacal motoring until only a few years ago, when terminal liver failure rather than a blind [drunk?] judiciary at last took him permanently off our streets and highways.) 

Nor could I have foreseen my encounter with this malicious sociopath clearly enough to avoid it. Unfortunately for my prospects as a professional seer, I never recognize my dreams as prophetic until they are confirmed by subsequent events. There are never any of those Biblical jazz angels whose trumpet riffs are alleged to signify prophecy; neither is there – as would surely be more appropriate in my case – a Celtic or perhaps Scythian priestess with Jecsa Hoop's  astonishingly evocative voice chanting of “Havoc in Heaven” or singing of a woman with “hair of fire and skin of snow” as if to warn me I am about to bear witness to my own future. 

Having duly acknowledged the relevant metaphysical handicaps, I will now try to write coherently of the dream that, five nights ago, scared me into palpitations of such intensity I thought for a moment I was having a heart attack. Then of course I remembered the Yoga by which I had held my deteriorating spinal injuries at bay for nearly three decades – that is, until the exercises themselves became impossibly painful – and there in my bed of post-frightmare cold-sweat nightfullness I soon managed to deep-breathe my pulse back to normal. 

Yet the content of the dream continues to haunt my waking hours, which tells me the only way I can exorcise its chilling grasp is by revealing it. Hence I describe it here as best as I can reconstruct its curious sequence of images, not because I suspect it might be prophetic – in fact I pray it is not – but rather because I hope full disclosure will be fully healing. 

I've also no doubt the dream expresses something of the awful anxiety the now undeniably total corruption of the U.S. political system and both its parties is inflicting on all of us – particularly on those of us who are dependent on the government for survival, as for example are all Social Security and Medicare recipients. We are afraid because we know cutbacks to these programs will literally kill us, and these days – given that the Republican and Democratic party labels are themselves Big Lies and that we are in fact ruled ever more despotically by one party of two names – our fears are rational, constant and mercilessly relentless.

Thus in this dream I am logically as I am now, old and crippled though still as journalistically capable as ever. But in its surrealism I am also again the investigative reporter for The Jersey Journal as I was in 1969 and 1970, when I scooped the world on the heroin-addiction epidemic inflicted on the U.S. by the Vietnam War, only to be robbed of proper credit for my greatest story ever by some back-shop patriot's vindictive removal of my byline and the resultant unrestrained glory-hogging by The New York Times the following morning. 

Jersey Journal Managing Editor August Lockwood has been dead since 1997, yet now in the dream he is again my boss. With his omnipresent corner-of-the-mouth cigar he looks exactly as he did when I was one of his star reporters, and just as he might have done in real life, he has assigned me to track down and interview a Jersey City man who supposedly knows the details of President Richard Nixon's plan to suspend the 1972 elections.

Perhaps significantly, this Nixon aspect is based on an obscure but damning truth. By Christmas 1969, a few Washington D.C. insiders were credibly claiming Nixon had commissioned the Rand Corporation to prepare the rationale for just such a coup, and their allegations were courageously exposed by the Newhouse News Service, another property of The JJ's parent corporation, which gives these parts of the dream even more logical cohesion.

But then as so often happens in dreamtime, the meaning of “now” shifts without warning or advance notice and it is suddenly 1 October 2013. I am still on assignment, still working for the resurrected Gus Lockwood, still at my battered oaken desk, still banging out my copy on a Royal Standard mechanical typewriter in The Journal's smoke-filled newsroom, and my reportorial thought process is still subconsciously punctuated by the suck-bang of the pneumatic tubes that carried copy to the composing room, but the Nixon story has morphed into an elaborate conspiracy by which the Democrats and Republicans and their Wall Street masters are scheming to end all pretense of constitutional governance. 

These politicians have gridlocked Congress behind a charade of controversy and shut down the government, and now they intend to hurl the nation into internationally ruinous default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. The stock market has plunged to an all-time low and the resultant chaos already includes breathtakingly violent rioting by desperate people who are condemned to death by the end of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and every other federal socioeconomic-assistance program. 

Meanwhile the same sources who had defied federal secrecy to reveal the Vietnam Era heroin-addiction scandal have returned from their own graves and retirement homes and are restored to the bodies they occupied in 1970, and now in my dream they are telling me the entire shutdown crisis is the deliberately scripted prelude to a military takeover intended to be at least as bloody as the 1973 Chilean murder-and-torture coup that was engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency to protect USian imperial business interests and capitalism in general. The military, these sources say, will impose the fascist dictatorship the One Percent has sought since the failure of the Bankers' Plot in 1934. And one source has finally squirreled away the top secret documents to prove it.

The purloined papers indicate the dreamland junta will immediately transfer power to a national board of directors chosen from the chief executives of the most profitable USian corporations. The formerly elected politicians whose deceptions facilitated the coup will be rewarded with lifetime appointments as local managers who carry out the board's decrees. The board's absolute and unchallengeable authority will be explained to the USian citizenry as vital to the defense of corporate personhood against angry parasites turned domestic terrorists – seniors, disabled people, welfare recipients, all the “takers not makers” officially despised in accordance with Ayn Rand doctrine.

"At last" – or so the nation's most expensive advertising campaign will announce as soon as the coup is complete – “we're running government as a business.” 

Now in the dream I recognize my story is shaping up to be one helluva fine exposé, and in the old days before the news monopolies turned USian journalism into Randite propaganda, I already know it would have earned me a sure Pulitzer. But it is still 2013; even in dreamtime  I must convince the presumably immortal Gus to defy the invisible censors if the scoop is ever to see the light of day. 

But when I gather my notes and unhook my cane from a slightly open desk drawer and lurch up from my swivel chair to go tell Gus what I've unearthed and plead the case for its full disclosure, The JJ's busy East Coast newsroom is suddenly an empty but familiar Pacific Northwest newspaper office with a torn and faded “Tired of the Same Old Shit” poster on its far wall, a defiant bit of Manhattan outrageousness the politically correct staffers of this particular publication would never have tolerated in actuality.  

What has happened is I've been dream-teleported into an abandoned and thoroughly trashed version of the ramshackle space in the faded-brick-and-crumbling-plaster, Klondike gold-rush-era building from which a self-consciously countrified but environmentally competent alternative journal called Northwest Passage was published in Bellingham's Fairhaven District during the height of the Back-to-the-Land Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I am utterly alone. There is no one else in this structure save the fearsomely malevolent ghosts I know are lurking in its darker corners and behind its closed doors and at the ends of its oppressively lightless corridors. I have been in this place during other dream odysseys and have learned from experience my magick is not strong enough to protect me from these ectoplasmic predators. 

In self-protective revulsion I hurredly limp outside, but now the entire physical environment has changed. The building is no longer a nightmare variant of the Good Earth Community Center, which was a countercultural meeting hall and a crash-pad for itinerant hippies as well as a food co-op and the editorial home of the Passage. Instead it has become the ominous remnant of a three-storey Georgian mansion amidst a Blair Witch Project forest, toxically gnarly versions of the deciduous trees common to New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania, oak and ash and sycamore and willow, their branches stripped bare by winter, the overwhelming sense of desolation eerily intensified by occasional white pine or blue spruce grown uncomfortably like exclamation points of silent screams. 

Then beyond the ruin I see a river, thick and murky and steaming with pollution, and amidst the barren willows on its further bank is a squad of soldiers – present-day U.S. soldiers with their Darth Vader assault rifles and camouflage uniforms and Nazi-like helmets – and now the soldiers are shooting at me and their bullets are cracking past my head and smacking into the building and gouging the surrounding trees and I am fleeing, hobbling as fast as I can through damply matted piles of brown leaves and across cold slippery patches of dirty snow ever deeper into the forest and my arthritic knees hurt and now I am too old and too tired and too winded to go any further and my fear gives way to terrible sadness and I wake up gasping for breath and grateful to have been rescued by wakefulness from torture and death.

Thank Goddess or god or fate or karma or randomness or entropy or the divine self or whatever higher power you choose, it was only a nightmare. I hope.

LB/6 October 2014 

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