Mandate of Heaven

It started with an old acquaintance, an actor I worked with on a short film years ago. He was passing by the space I was, and we had a mutual friend, it seemed. Random Hawaiian shirts in a suitcase, people shuffling by, papers and lists. Looking out of a big window, reading very oddly appearing names from this list. The names seemed stale. Past. Hard sounding words like Abit, Banid. The feeling rushes over me that they are deceased. All the talk before bed about the righteous man, and society, and ruler. Different connotations of good and evil. A question is posed: are these names righteous? Or are they evil spirits? A sense of foreboding darkness is present, like a ghost in the room. The window has no glass, and I look out onto the turquoise blue sky as spirits fleeting, and languid, float and cavort back and forth. I refuse to submit to the evil, dark side of things, and I yell out “no, they are righteous souls”…my voice is not enough, and with some fear, I let them, these names I have been reading, enter into me and shout all together in a piercing, reverberating and unified voice: “RIGHTEOUS!!!!” Filled with wrath, anger, strength and power it is said. This confuses me, since I feel a darkness but am stating a positively bright exclamation.

At that moment, I am supernatural. I fly up through the huge windowless space and into the otherworldly sky. Up and up, sometimes I sink, and I have to make myself center with energy and shoot up, past the very prejudiced looking devils. They are women, dressed in red devil costumes like you might find at the drug store, skin painted red and black horns and tails. They are flying too, but I can soar up higher than them. There are also other spirits, in blues and whites, less formed and more ethereal, bounding around as they were when I first glanced them. I don’t know if they represent the names on my list or not. They point up to the endless sky (the earth looks like it is thousands of feet below; semblances of treetops and clouds, but hardly visible in this world, which looks more like a Bosch painting than anything I might actually see in life) and I keep trying to ascend. The forces in the air point to a huge white stone monument, floating in the many colours of this sky. I float and soar my way over to and around the monument, and see the stone body of Jesus, but the head is missing. Someone has taken it away, and I suppose it’s my job to get it back to its rightful place. I have devils and dark spirits at my back, but I avert them and notice the way to the next level- in the center of the immediate space, a thin stream of water flows down a small hole in the ceiling (a ceiling which is empty air, space upon space, without being anything actual). In true martial arts forms, I move around the pesky spirits, at this point not caring which are good or evil, and I take a breath in, and shoot myself up the stream of water and back through the “ceiling” drain into the next realm.

This one is more cavernous, earth-like. Dark, brown rocks and caves, yet all still floating in this level of things. These more menacing male forces are around, and as I avoid and dance about them, they prevent me from finding the same water/drain exit to the higher level. I decide, quite lucidly in my mind, to let them seduce me, since they seem like succubi, so why not engage in pleasure and keep rising to the righteous at the same time. Even in the dream world, I would never separate the two. Even though their heads seem more clear and finite than their bodies, now they appear to be only heads. One waits, while I let the other one work its tongue between my legs. Well, it turns out this is one of those dreams which affect your body in real life, and I let this activity go on and on, and then I manage to focus my attention on the elusive water stream and upstairs drain. I take one of the floating heads and throw him as far as I can, while the other one still keeps to his work. Simultaneously I came, separated myself from him and shot myself up the water stream to the next level, which was the earthly universe – the earth, the sun, the gleaming stars and planets I recognized.

My body, in its mimicking of the recent seduction, forces me to wake up for a groggy, incredibly turned on moment. I simply fell back to sleep as easily as I could, and dreamt dreams about my mother, a cottage in Ireland, boats taking us to and from the mainland, and a soft raining morning. I never found the head of Christ, and now wonder if it was the Most righteous one himself, who showed me heaven found at the top of a vertical river.

~ M. Lucia