Dream of: 29 October 1997 (2) "Black Spirit"

Sitting at a cafeteria-style table with two women and a man. The man was sitting across the table, while the two women were sitting on my left, also facing each other. All of us seemed to be in our 40s, and everyone was neatly dressed. The man across from me was a dark black, stout, stolid, with short curly black hair. The women were wiry and concentrated on what we were doing: working on our taxes. We had all been called into this place by the IRS to review our tax returns. I had been studying my 1994 tax return, bogged down in extremely complicated computations.

I actually had only been concentrating on one quarter of my 1994 taxes. I had paid the taxes of the other three quarters, but I had failed to pay the taxes on one of the quarters. My computations showed my income during that missed quarter was over $18,000. It was therefore obvious that I was going to owe quite a bit on taxes, another burden with which I would have to contend. When I mentioned to the others that I had made over $18,000 during the quarter in question and had failed to pay the taxes on it, they seemed astonished I could have made such a mistake. The whole matter was all the more galling for me because I had already been audited once for 1994 taxes. But apparently the IRS had overlooked the missing quarter during the audit, and now I was being forced to review it all again.

When I had first walked in, I had brought a bottle of wine with me, a bottle now sitting before me on the table. The bottle was tall and flat, in the shape of a pint bottle, only about twice the size as a pint. The bottle contained a cheap dark purple wine. I had thought everyone else would also be drinking while they did their taxes, and only after we had been working for quite a while did I look up and realize I was the only one drinking. However even I had only touched my wine, having drunk only a fraction of a centimeter's worth of wine out of the neck of the bottle. Realizing no one else had been drinking, I was glad I had consumed so little of my rotgut. The woman on my left also seemed glad I had drunk so little. Someone put the lid back on my bottle and laid the bottle in the middle of the table. I was sure I didn't want anymore.

I could tell the black man was curious about my drinking, and he finally made a comment about it. He also mentioned he had once before heard about my "running around naked." It was soon evident he was talking about an event in my distant past, when I had been in high school. It seemed that once while I had been in high school, I had become intoxicated, taken off all my clothes, and run around naked at a high school basketball game. I recalled the event to which he was referring, and I asked him if he had been there. I was beginning to suspect that he was approximately the same age as I, and that he might have been in high school at the same time I had been there. But I also had an uneasy feeling that he wasn't to be trusted, that he might be working for the government and might be spying on me. I really didn't want to review the matter with him. But I did tell him that Charlie Samuels (a former schoolmate from high school) had had an influence on me during that period of my life.

Samuels had been a black fellow who had gone to my high school. I had never known him well, but I had always been impressed by him and had gone out drinking with him a time or two. He had a black belt in karate and was definitely the toughest guy in my school. But he was never a bully, and once he even helped me out when another fellow had been threatening me. At that time, even though Samuels had been dissolute, I had admired his style.

I told the black man in front of me that on the night to which he was referring, the night when he said I had been "running around naked," Samuels had played a prominent role. On that night, I said, Samuels' spirit had come into me, possessed me, and inspired me to act the way I had. The black spirit of Samuels had possessed and controlled me.

What the man across from me didn't know (and I didn't tell him), was that the event in question had been a one-time affair. I had never acted like that since that night. However I suspected the black man believed the night in question had been a typical night for me. I regretted the event. Even though it was so far removed in my past, it was still a bit depressing to contemplate.

***

I was sitting on the window sill of a huge window. There was no glass in the window, just an empty opening. On one side was a spacious vacant room, and on the other a vague and cloudy outside.

I was sitting with my back to one side of the window, and sitting directly across from me, with her back to the other side, in the same opposite position, was a beautiful young blonde-haired woman, all dressed in white. There was something almost angelic about her, something which caused me to open up and talk to her about my life. I was depressed because I was unsure of the direction my life was taking. The woman softly and reassuringly answered, "I think you know what you want."

Her answer was so to the point, I realized she was correct: I did know what I wanted in life.