From the Narrow Desert

I had two strange, rather detailed dreams last night, which I document here in case they should turn out to be significant:

⁂

My friend wanted to get a closer look at the birds. As we got closer, it became clear that one of them was a vulture, a really enormous vulture, bigger than a man. Was it a condor, I wondered? Was it Garuda? But no, it was unmistakably an African white-backed vulture, only many times larger.

We got too close to the vulture, and it chased us for some time, on foot for some reason. Eventually, though, its aggression dissipated, and we began to think of it as our friend.

"Do you have a name?" I asked.

"No," the vulture replied telepathically. "I don't have a name."

"We usually use names here," I said. "Do you mind if we call you Sally? Wait, first are you a boy or a girl?"

"A girl," she said, and now she looked like a middle-aged Russian woman, not a vulture. She didn't want to be called Sally, though, as it was an embarrassing reminder that she had been a vulture when we found her. She explained this by telepathically conveying an image of a skull with several teeth missing. I figured that among scavengers "bald-headed Sally" (from the Little Richard song) was slang for a carcass that had been picked clean. (Why I thought of this, rather than of the obvious fact that vultures are themselves bald-headed, beats me.)

If not Sally, what should we call her? Any random female name, I guess, like Odessa or something.

Before I could say anything, she said, "Actually, my real name is Odessa someone's-daughter."

I told her I had just been thinking of Odessa as a random name we could give her and what an astonishing coincidence that was. (Somehow I didn't make the connection that she was telepathic.) She was being cagey about her patronymic, but I was sure I could guess that, too: She was Odessa Grigorievna.

I didn't tell her I knew her patronymic.

"Okay," I said. "We'll just call you Odessa. That's good because it sounds like Odyssey, and we can tell people that we call you that because we met at the -- uh, the Achilles, uh, the Iliad --"

"At the 2001 Odyssey Fencing Club," she put in. Fine, we'd go with that.

⁂

In a second dream the same night, I was Jim Carrey playing Joseph Smith, who had come back from the dead and was trying to sneak into his own house, which had been inherited by Martin Harris, who was played by Alan Rickman. Even though these were American characters, I understood that the whole thing was set in Russia.

The above-ground portion of the house was in ruins, and Martin Harris and his wife lived in the basement. I was trying to figure out how to get into the basement but couldn't find the entrance. Then I heard voices and saw that the Harrises were coming out. This showed me where the entrance was, so now I just had to hide until they left and then go down there. I crouched down in the shadows, confident that they wouldn't see me because it wasn't in the script.

The Harrises were dressed all in black and looked like necromancers or something. They were talking in a way that seemed very unnatural but was designed to fill in the viewer on necessary background information. A poorly written script, I thought.

Martin said something abut Joseph Smith III, complaining about him, and his wife said, "Why do you still call him 'the third'? His father's been dead for so long it's scarcely necessary."

"I know," said Martin, "but we're on a first-met basis." I understood this to mean that he had to continue calling him what he had been called when they first met, which was Joseph Smith III.

"As you know," said Mrs. Harris, "we inherited this house from him. And I've never complained, and I don't even mind trying to pay off the debts we also inherited from him." As Joseph Smith, I knew they'd also inherited a massive treasure from me -- I hadn't been such a failure at money-digging as commonly supposed -- but they didn't know where it was.

As Mrs. Harris said this, she went up to a large round table on the ruined first floor, which was covered with a black tablecloth, and began making perpendicular cuts into the cloth with a pair of scissors. I realized they were going to be here for a while.

For some reason, I decided that I'd better move from my current hiding place and hide on the table, under the tablecloth. I somehow did this without Mrs. Harris noticing, but now the problem was that she was making more and more cuts in the cloth, which was bound to expose me sooner or later.

Finally, so much of the tablecloth had been cut away that all that was left was a small black cloth covering the upper part of my face -- like Batman's mask -- with four long strips hanging off to either side like the legs of a spider. It looked like I was wearing some kind of Halloween mask intended to make my head look like a spider.

I stood up and was able to see myself from a third-person point of view: Jim Carrey, wearing this ridiculous black spider mask.

"Look, Martin," I said, "It's me, Joseph!"

"You don't look like him," Martin said -- and then proceeded to ignore me completely, as if masked strangers showed up in his house all the time.

"No, look, it's me," I insisted.

"Nope. I remember what he looked like, and he never wore a spider mask."

⁂

About four hours after posting the above, I clicked on a webm version of a TikTok video on 4chan. The webm had no sound, but apparently the original had background music, which was credited with this text at the bottom:

Apparently there's an American electronic music group called Odesza (a nice compromise among the Russian, Ukrainian, and Hungarian spellings!) that did a remix of something from another musician called Zhu. Looking both acts up just now, I find that Zhu was born Steven Zhu on April 28, 1989, so I've posted this on his birthday.

I thought running into a form of Odessa -- and as the name of some people, not a city -- was quite the coincidence.