Troubling Dreams: Pyrophone

Omens have been thick all over lately, but this is the one that comes with ominous imagery instead of sour hard-to-place feelings and encountering time after time strange street people that I suspect are me from the future sent to the present to warn me of something terrible to come, but instead have fallen into the vices we take for granted so often in this world-on-the-brink (fresh air, malt liquor, speed, people on the street to talk to about things in a sub-verbal manner).

This dream is also a variant on something that happened to me recently, which was far less foreboding than it was evidence of mild retardation.

I start by exiting my room in my current apartment in dim light down the hall towards the kitchenette/living room. I see a flickering orange glow on the wall beside the stove, eerily illuminating the bulletin boards loaded with the strange scraps and bric-a-brac that occupy it in real life. Recognizing this situation from before (the orange glow indicated one time that I had started a fire on my stove by turning on the burner beneath a plastic cutting board instead of a tea kettle, about five minutes after the initial to-maximum knob turning), I look towards the stove top and see a large black rectangle placed perpendicular to the back of the stove over two burners switched to high.

The rectangle is my father's large and heavy guitar case that houses his prized double-necked steel guitar. It is billowing smoke as it lay on the burners, which send tongues of flame up the case's side. Reaching behind the flames, case, and smoke, I blindly turn off both burners, and stand there in disbelief. How did I manage to do this? Why the fuck did I put that on top of the stove? What was I cooking anyways? And the question that probed the edge of the dream, why do I have his guitar here?

Waiting a tense moment, I grabbed the handle on top of the case, picked it up, and placed it on its side on the tile floor. One end of the case glowed orange in a network of fissures like a nearly-spent emberlike log on a fire. The smoke from all of this covered the ceiling, but it was static and distant, like an overcast sky. The fire alarm hadn't gone off, to my relief. I hesitated to flip open the metal fasteners to open the case, should they be extremely hot, but I soon did, and found them cool to the touch.

Inside was the blackened, burnt outline of an acoustic guitar, not what I'd expected to find in a case specifically built for the transport of an unwieldy double-necked steel. On top of this silhouette were the guitar's metal adornments: six tuning keys attached to six strings over the frets and attached to a large round resonator. It was my Dad's Dobro that he had given to me four years ago after I expressed interest in bluegrass instruments. It was his first one, but it had been damaged in the mail from one of his business trips, so he gave it to me after it was repaired, getting himself a really, really fancy one.

I spend the rest of the dream kneeling next to the guitar's ashes wondering what I was going to tell him. There was no good answer. There was no good explanation as to why I had put the guitar I never learned how to play on top of a stove, destroying it completely. It felt horrible. I recited the usually ineffective mantra over and over again: "This isn't real, this is a dream"

The surface tension of the dream stayed firm for a moment, terrifying me with the idea that this was in fact happening. Soon, it buckled and I was awake in the late afternoon.

I'm from a family full of musicians. Most of my friends are in some capacity musicians. I've had many opportunities to become musical, but I never embraced them for more than a moment. Part of me wants to justify not picking these instruments (in order: guitar, bongos, bass, keyboard, dobro), but there is a deep kind of laziness and evasiveness in my belly that keeps me from music and many other things.

I'm sure there is some intense pertinence to things I am facing right now, but I won't search at this hour.