Sometime in 2006, I had a dream of being a God.

Dream Written in the Present Tense

I am flying over the dust of what was once the illustrious capitol of a powerful empire that fell into ruin centuries before. The city had been extremely wealthy and filled with extensive temple complexes and verdant gardens. Water bubbled playfully in fountains throughout the city which was vibrant with rich commerce, bustling marketplaces, artistic expression, and religious ceremonies where people made daily offerings in homage to the gods.

As I fly over the city in my eagle god form, I can see all that remains of this once thriving cultural mecca is desert waste and crumbling walls of baked clay. I am neither male nor female, for I am all things. I switch back and forth between both polarities very fluidly. I masterfully express whatever serves me in the moment, and my forms are diverse and mercurial.

I am remembering the raucous fun and mayhem I stirred up here when the city was alive. It’s sad to see it all in ruin, but since I am eternal and infinite, I have seen the rise and fall of countless civilizations. I have a very open acceptance of how power cycles.

Although I am ageless, my spirit is young and firey. My impish nature requires adventure and challenge. Where other gods seek worshippers, sacrifice, and tribute, I seek freedom and open space.

I take my time circling the ruins and land in a temple that was once my own. Upon landing, I seamlessly step into a human looking form which is beautiful, masculine, and strong. Another god is sitting before the altar in the form of a small boy. It is one of my best friends, Elon. I walk to join him by the altar, and I place my left arm around him to comfort him.

“Why this sorrow, my friend? We can never truly be separated. We will meet this challenge like we have every other with ease and grace. There is no limit to our creative powers.”

“But that’s the point,” my friend cries. “We will be stripped of our memory of power, even our memory of each other. We will believe we are finite and weak. You will not be there with me to dream another outlandish plot to reveal what fools our power-hungry brothers and sisters are. You may not even remember you have a sense of humor!”

“Ahh- come now- who could imagine me without a sense of humor?”

I boom with laughter at the thought of it.

My friend regards me with watering eyes and a tight painful smile on his once playful and sensuous lips. He has the look of someone who believes he is seeing the last of what he loves most. He is afraid, and it devastates my heart to see my partner in mayhem diminished so. I feel a chill shiver across my spirit to even consider the possibility of living small and unaware of my own divinity.

At the height of creating pandemonium among the pantheon of gods and goddesses, Elon and I boldly, and perhaps unwisely, accepted the challenge to play the game, Mortality. We had thoroughly incensed our brothers and sisters who constantly sought to subjugate the mortals into fearful grovelers and obedient worshipers without dignity.

Freedom and Chaos is our function.

Elon and I are trickster gods who have overturned the power of our families for ages. Through our constant mischievous subversion, we reveal them for the parasitic fools they are. We’ve become so effective and inventive at overturning the power and control the gods that we had become “a problem.”

Now we have been tricked in return.
We allowed our success to inflate our egos to such a point that we accepted the dare to remember who we are after being reborn as mortals. We will be stripped of our memory and the knowledge of our powers. We won’t even have each other to rely on as we have for countless ages. We who have never been separated must remember ourselves within mortal bodies or we will never see our divine selves in each other’s eyes again.

I am confident that our spirits are so powerful, being mortal will only be a small impediment like a sneeze or a rapidly healing cut. We will soon remember ourselves and rediscover each other. Then we will set the mortal world upside down from the inside out. The mortals will see they are free, and they are infinite. They will know that they don’t have to bow down the to the images of power that they create- the images that my family uses to control the masses into cowed subservience.

But as I gaze into the sad eyes of my best friend, I’m not so sure anymore. I, the fearless one who has strapped galaxies to my feet to ice skate jubilantly across the frozen wastes of time, feel the first cracks of insidious doubt creep across what used to be my infinite sense of Wholeness and Power.

I lose my wings.
I lose my memory.
I lose my boldness and vision.
I become mortal.

What happens when I remember?

 

Artwork by Ivett Almaguer

Ruins of ancient Gonur in the Kara-Kum Desert of Turkmenistan, courtesy of Kenneth Garrett.