dream

I clearly haven't posted in a long time, so here's a dream I had last night.

I was walking up a spiral city - like a spiral staircase with a space in the middle. The city on both sides was old and stony - a bit like Italy and a bit like nowhere.

Then I arrived at the top, where there was some sort of Buddhist monastary. It looked like they were going to put on a play, so I went over, following two other people. I had to climb up something like a fish net, then I got to a flat area where the audience would presumably sit. The performance had two spaces. One had a female buddha with typical ushnisha (the extra brain bump that looks like a bun) and another person dancing. The second space seemed to be a team of work animals tethered together in a line. The second animal was a big bull or ox; the one in front of it was something slightly smaller (maybe a cow), and then there were three or so other animals behind the ox in descending size. The animals were running along vigorously, though they stayed in place.

The two people kneeled down, and so did I, a little bit farther back. Someone came over to the two, and I was concerned that I would be approached next and told to leave since I didn’t belong there. I was too busy watching the ticket-taking (or whatever it was) to notice that the play scenes had changed. The animals were on their sides, as if frozen in motion and tipped over, and there was a person standing next to them – the likely culprit. In the other scene, the Buddha was no longer dancing. Instead of the textured Buddha hair, there were numerous arms that seemed to be growing out of her neck or head, and they where all reaching up to push her down from the top of her head. The wrists settled into the dent between head and ushnisha, and the fingers curled over the ushnisha to push down. The Buddha was being pushed down and looked in distress. The other person had also stopped dancing, but otherwise I’m not sure what he or she was doing.

I thought, I wonder how they’ll resolve this problem. But then the alarm rang and I never found out.