Dream Sweeper Bats

At 4:37 a.m. everyone sleeps-dreams. I fire up my super-efficient Dream Sweeper Machine and collect dreams, said Tran. I sort them by type, category, allegory, myth, metaphor, galaxy, nebula, genus, species, phylum, irrationality and coherent sublime symbolic meaning.

Words dance as hallucinations, poems, epilogues, prologues, blog slogs, musical incantations, rain drops, beads of sweat, bleached human bones, Sumerian script and abstract art congratulates a hand clapping the hollow bells of a Cambodian trash collector boy pulling his cart along life’s fractured possibilities.

This sensation is the bell, said Zeynep, visualizing her European-Asian future. It bridges the gap, gaps the bridge connections. 

Rita, Leo, Tran, Devina, Zeynep, Omar and Death meditate on the balcony.

Pre-dawn sky dances with pulsating stars singing their light. Ferns, plants, bamboo and a cold wind hum I feel free.

Fruit bats roost upside down under a coconut palm leaf. Who turned the world over?

One emits a shrill, high-pitched echolocation squeaky frequency vibration. Perceive senses their return. A sharp sound with a definite edge to the beginning, through the middle tonal range to finalities, a welcome signal to bats revealing where they are in spacetime awareness.

They said, Hello, I’m back. It’s a pleasure finding comfort after a night of flying.

I don’t need to learn the words, said Devina, I am the music.

My name is Nature, said Leo, I am grateful to be alive and paying attention to bat’s music.

This is why we wake early, said Omar.

Storytellers witnessed ten white seagulls flying toward Lenin Park Lake. Vision’s silent gift at dawn winged freedom in orange sky. Awareness of life in Hanoi has meaning, definition, value.

I don’t know where the artificial ends and the real begins, said Leo, Chief of Cannibals. I am a deeply superficial person.

90% of life is showing up, said Tran an amputee with a big heart.

Yes, said Rita in her orphan voice, 10% is what happens to you and 90% is how you deal with it. You are director, audience and players. I hear with my eyes. I see with my ears.

Stay in character. Two players practice lines and delivery.

-       I thought you’d never get here.

-       Sorry, I was delayed.

-       Obviously. Are you staying?

-       What do you think?

-       I don’t know. You’re such a mystery to me.

-       You talk too much.

Ha, said Laughter Therapy, All the clowns are not in the circus.

A work of art is never finished, it is abandoned, said Devina.

It’s the madness of art, said Zeynep, bleeding letters on parchment. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Arrival

Take the A Train from Lao Cai to Hanoi arriving at 4:30 a.m.

Rain cleans air.

Streets are deserted.

The Dream Sweeper Machine collects dreams from talking monkeys. Narrow alley dreams stream crawling, flying, dancing, staggering, singing, laughing, weeping, sighing into The Machine. Dreams, like writing, need simplicity, accuracy, brevity, clarity and humanity.

It’s a new day. The first day in a new space, new neighborhood, this Shikumen twisted Hanoi dream alley. People share toilets and kitchens. They share their lives on Fake Space, a glorious Internet frontier of brief equality and eternal technological distractions. Walls. Barb wire. Thick rusty window gratings. Dark. Silent.

Prison is a refuge and release.

Solitary confinement with the junkyard blues. Environmental impact statements.

Climate needs spare change.

No one gets out alive. You are a Stream-Winner, this cessation of sensation, perception. U experienced this deep illusive truth in Hanoi while editing a 227 page Ph.D. thesis of Buddhist enlightenment written by a monk in Nepal sitting under the Bodhi tree.

Edited pages are returned to Thanh. She’s the manager of Just Massage, a team of seven visually challenged masseurs and masseuses in the Hanoi diplomatic area. Great people with healing hands. Empowered.

Everyone is a Buddha, she said, smiling.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged