The Jennese Tarot
  By Jennifer Diane Reitz


 
Let me tell you about this
incredibly neat
semi-lucid dream I had once

I woke up, at least partially,
within my dream
to realize that I was
in a workshed
floating in a dark void.

Out back
of the shed
was a black hole,
or something like
a black hole,
which served as a garbage
dump.

There were bench-tables for working
inside the shed, and the shelves were lined
with both supplies and tools.

There were rolls of spacetime paper
that could be folded into universes

and time putty, to seal up the cracks,

and there were jars of primordial goop
for making life, mason jars filled with
various grades of planetary cores
and glowing stars
and a drawer full of assorted
scattered physical laws,
which looked like little
bits you would find in a
junk drawer.

In the dream,
I picked up the anti-perspective pliers
from off of the worktable,
and used them to pluck a planet
from the view outside
of the front of the shed.

I had to squeeze one eye shut, so
that the anti-perspective pliers would work,
of course, but soon I had
the miniature planet,
the size of a marble,
on the stage of the
godly micromacroscope
in the corner.

I grabbed a bottle of standard biosphere
off of the shelf, and dobbed a bit
over the brown surface of the little
planet, and water and clouds formed.

Then I grabbed some vials of
life-forms off the shelf,
mixed some up in an
old lid, so that they
would scramble and be unique,
and painted that onto the
planet too, using
a fine haired brush.

Under the micromacrosope,
strange forests grew like
mold across the planet,
spreading out from where
I had dobbed slime on it.

After a bit, I picked the planet up
with the anti-perspective pliers,
and closing one eye again,
set it back in orbit around
the star where I found it.

The I realized the universe I was
working on was leaking
so I put on my anti-perspective work gloves
and lifted the whole cosmos out of the void
in the front of the shed,
just out the front door.

I took some cosmic duct tape and
sealed the edges of the polyhedral
paper cosmos,
so it wouldn't leak anymore.

Then I put it back.

I botched a planet later,
and had to toss it into
the black hole out back.

Oh well.

I was just about to
pull down some spacetime paper
to fold up into a new
origami universe
when, alas,
I woke up.

I knew, instantly, that all the things I had
seen were metaphoric representations
of things beyond the capacity of my
meat mind to interpret directly.

Kind of like symbols in a computer language,
or icons in a computer interface,
which represent code that the human
mind cannot cope easily with directly.

I guess, even on the cosmic scale,
you don't need to know how things work,
to be able to use them.

 

Return to Card Gallery



Jenniverse.com

All Website Contents, including all characters, 
images, artwork, text, and any other contents are 
Copyright  © 2000 by Jennifer Diane Reitz

All Rights Reserved Worldwide