Dream Journal
May 26, 1995
. . . I drink cocaine/amphetamines orange juice with these girls, then I go outside and play and feel weird. We play football and volleyball. (foggy)
Then I go exploring underground with GenX. We enter this immense rectangular metal room where the floor is entirely lava. There is a metal walkway around the edge and a ledge on one side. Polaris, Guido, and another hero join us as we go out on the ledge. Guido pushes Polaris in. Then he pushes in some other big guy. We feel scared and helpless. So I do the crazy thing and push Guido in. He tries to drag me in too, but isn’t able to. He disappears under the flames and I think “How can any of them survive that?” They resurface as alien skeletons as more and more superheroes file into the metal room. Eventually the ledge is filled. Some overlord guy pushes someone in from time to time. Forge goes into the lava, then Mr. Fantastic jumps in after. But he comes back up as Spider-man and escapes through Peter Parker’s corpse. Other heroes do their best to survive. Ghost rider goes in a man and comes back hideously powerful, riding this flame cycle along the ledge. Some reappear as flaming new characters. Things are getting bad when suddenly Iceman appears and freezes the lava solid. The superheroes go absolutely WILD. Everyone is saved.
The guy who wrote the story writes to Marvel and says “There. Now stop writing your crap.” I go out above and find Rafe and the others still playing volleyball.
References: GenX is a superhero team. Polaris, Guido, Iceman, Ghost Rider, Forge, Spider-man, and Mr. Fantastic are other Marvel super heroes. Peter Parker is Spider-man's real name. Rafe is a friend from college.
Lava: I’ve found lava to be a powerful transformative force. Forms become very malleable in it. While some superheroes melted into it, it transformed others.
Gateways to Rotes: The gateway here wasn’t clear, but evident in that I left the volleyball game to experience the superhero story and afterwards I returned to the volleyball game. It appeared to be someone’s story rote. If you don’t remember the exact gateway, sometimes you can catch it by watching yourself return to a dream after a subdream.
Writing Fiction: This is clearly a story rote written by someone rather than an experience rote.
Returning Above: I begin the rote by “exploring underground” — my rationalization of going down into the rote. After finishing the story rote, I “go out above”, back to the volleyball scene I was in before. This is my spatial rationalization of descending down into the rote and rising back out of it.