In last nights dream I was back in my old home town of Wolverhampton. In the area around Victoria Street and Queen's Square - it seemed to be about the 1920's and I was at a barber shop.
I had seen briefly into the basement (psychically somehow) and down there was a man being staked out on the ground in the shape of a cross. The last wooden and rope stake was being put in place onto an old stone flagged floor. He was pleading to be killed saying "I can't bear this". I knew there were other men down there, and that they were each suffering the terrible fate of slowly being eaten alive.
Back up top in the Barber's shop ...
I am in the body of a man. I am talking with the barber who is giving an army style short back and sides to a man the chair. I quietly argue and plead with him, in horror at what he is doing to the men in his basement. He tells me coldly yes he has about seven men in the basement, in various states of being eaten alive. The oldest one I understand is hovering in a place of dead / non dead - like a zombie perhaps - almost no longer human.
I realise that he will not be persuaded and for the first time I begin to feel in fear for my own life. Till now I have felt in no danger, I am in an open fronted shop facing onto the street, life is going on as normal, people shopping etc - what could possibly happen here? I start to try to move away, but then men dressed in the barber shop uniform (black with a small white logo) start to close in around me. They are tall and threatening, I suddenly realise I am trapped.
I look to people in the street and wonder if I can mouth the word "help" silently without my captors seeing. There is a pause of some minutes helplessness, in this time I wonder about the guards supporting this crime. One has glossy black shoulder length hair with androgynous features that seem soft, beautiful and quiet incongruous with the abomination unfolding here. "What do they get out of this?" I wonder. "How does the barber afford to pay them all?" And "does he feed them in human meat, do they partake in this (I sense not) and if not, why do they support it?"
I have slowly edged towards and am sitting near the open front of the shop - free and civilised space is so close yet there is this looming wall of danger in front of me. Behind me is the man still having his hair cut by the barber, he is silent all this time. I lean backwards finding some comfort leaning against his chair - at least here I can find some sense of connection and camaraderie, even if I cannot see him.
Then something starts to happen down the street, people start to run. I don't know what it is, but the guards are distracted and move to look. I turn to the man in the chair behind me "quick, now is our chance, run!" but he is frozen and does not move. I get up willing my own frozen with fear muscles to move and slowly I begin to walk away. Turning the corner out of the shop, I catch sight of myself in a window, I have a flat cap on and a tweed jacket. Poking out from under the cap is a long thick braid of brown hair tucked as if to hide it from view. I see a version of my own face, only much younger and I am a definitely a man.
I weigh up whether to run all the way down the street and round a corner, but opt instead to duck into a bank a few doors down from the barbers. It's a risky win or loose strategy. There is a woman moving off from the cashiers desk for her lunch break, I say to her "please can you help me, I really need to hide, I am in terrible danger, please help!". She is voluptuously shaped - like the venus of Willendorf - with luscious long brown hair, red lipstick and a kindly face.
I think at first she will say no, but in actual fact she smiles and says "Yes I will help you, wait and I will come and let you in ..." She disappears though a door behind the cashiers; I see a door over on the other side of the lobby. I run and stand by it assuming the door will open from the other side and she will appear. I stand frozen and waiting for her with the key to save me, wishing only to see her round smiling face - looking out the window I dread seeing the barber and his men ...
The dream ends here.
NB I feel like this dream has been stirred by the metoo movement. It seems to convey how men have been dehumanised, "eaten alive" by the capitalist machine, their bodies given to be consumed for the benefit of the few and directly to be benefitted from by the one in power. it seems to convey the consequences of a world in which "the feminine" has no place and has to be hidden. She is there right in the beginning in the names - Victoria / Queens.
The opening horror in the basement also hints at the cannibalistic undertones of the transubstantiation ritual in my church of origin - Catholicism - the man is clearly staked out in a cross shape. Does the dream point at the consequences of a material order built around a spiritual life that holds to a mono masculine God, having entirely eradicated the feminine? At the heart of everyday life, normalised structures of power and violence holding everything in its place?
Interesting though that within that system is also a distraction that gives rise to a moment of liberation, and the liberation is not to be found by turning a corner into a new street, but by stepping into the bank within the existing one. I recall now as well, that I imagined the woman when she comes to open the door, would lead me down into another basement ...
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