white tiger reconstruction

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was daytime, a sunny-cloudy day, with clouds skeining across the sky and making the atmosphere all kind of yellow. I had walked outside of a big house with white siding. I hadn't been outside for very long, and I'm pretty sure I hadn't done anything, but I felt like I'd been out for a while.

It started pouring rain. I was hoping to get back inside before I got soaked. But I had to take a "hike" around the big front yard of this big house. Plus, before the house, two white tigers were lying asleep at the trunk of a (barren? headless?) tree. I knew that if I approached the house's front door directly I'd wake the tigers, who would get angry and attack me.

So I walked in a counter-clockwise square around a portion of the yard. The yard was large, but I didn't walk around the whole thing. I maybe only covered a hundred square meters, but I felt like I'd walked quite a bit more. I walked around two huge beasts that were as big as elephants but had faces more like rhinoceros faces, but with narrow, tapered snouts.

The beasts lay on a shallow slope that slightly obscured my vied of the tigers. But just before I crossed down in front of the huge beasts, I saw that the pouring rain was waking at least one of the tigers. The tiger was yawning lazily. But I could tell that once the tiger got all its senses back from sleep, it would be annoyed by being woken and soaked by the rain. If the tiger saw me, it would take out its annoyance on me, attacking me.

I reflected on the huge beasts as I passed before them. They may have been dead, or they may also have been asleep. But I wasn't afraid of them. I knew that if they weren't dead, and if the rain woke them, they wouldn't be as violent as the white tigers would. They would be gentle, and probably just wander off.

I was hoping to work my way far to the right side of the house, then sneak around to the front door. But even as I was heading up the small, shallow slope on which the huge beasts lay, one of the tigers was charging at me. The tiger jumped on top of me and knocked me to the ground, flat on my back.

Right before I was knocked over I began hearing my own (???) voice narrating, as if I were, somewhere, watching a documentary about myself having been attacked by the tiger. As I landed on my back, the view around me may have been of a new subway train, with the white interior.

My narration said that the tiger weighed five thousand pounds. When I heard that, I became afraid. I didn't want the tiger's entire weight bearing down on me: it would be too painful! But the tiger must already have been bearing fully down on me. The narration said that I hadn't felt the weight of the tiger: the pressure hadn't been as painful as I'd expected. This, I realized, was true.

But the tiger was tearing at me, probably with its claws and teeth. I knew the tiger was tearing my body apart. And now the documentary (wherever it was playing, wherever I was watching) was moving to the second part, which was how the person -- no longer me, but more like a young version of Jackie Chan (???)  -- had had large parts of his body torn apart and had to go through reconstructive surgery.

At first I saw a photo of the young man after his reconstruction. It turned out, however, that the young man didn't want a normal reconstruction. He didn't want the doctors to put him back to normal. Instead, he simply wanted to be made functional, and to keep the mauled portions of his body as mauled-looking as he could, as a kind of "lesson" to his attackers, but also as a kind of artistic statement. The photo of the man's face, in fact, looked like the leathery face of a long dead person, or even of a shrunken head.

I now saw the young man, as if on film or video, speaking to the camera and documentary crew. The man was in something like the control room of a very small TV station. The lights were warm and incandescent, and the walls were brick, but all lined with tall cabinets full of TV studio control systems and monitors. The monitors may all have been playing imagery of spaceflight and missiles, which may have had something to do with recent news events, maybe with some impending war.

The man, I now saw, had been reconstructed to look really strange. He had all kinds of dull grey, coathanger-like wires stuck through his body. Some reconstructed portions of his flesh were raw and slimy. Other portions, such as a couple of his fingers, looked more like raw fat or ligament than flesh. And other portions of him looked more like random pieces of plastic or machinery. His head was crowned or haloed with a band of wire, which stuck into his raw skull at certain points.

The man began showing the camera and crew the work he did around the studio. Apparently, like the phantom of the opera, the man isolated himself in his work. He was a genius at his work, and he wasn't as antisocial as the phantom, but he bitterly isolated himself in his work, again as a "lesson," apparently, to the tigers that had mauled him.

But as I watched the man at work, I realized that all of his reconstruction was also like an augmentation. His wire/plastic/technology hands allowed him to process data and punch buttons in the cabinets at an incredible speed. And the man seemed to be able to operate an incredible number of machines at once!

But as I focused on the man's fingers operating on one interace at immense speed, I realized that the man could be driving himself too hard. His brain and body, it seemed to me, may not have been fully healed -- maybe because the man had chosen to have such an incomplete, strange reconstruction.

The man may have been driving himself to cause his incompletely healed portions to break down. And maybe the breakdown was desired by certain parts of the man's body. It may have been that certain artificial elements of the reconstruction wanted more of the original elements of the man to die, so that more artificial elements could join the artificial elements already in place. But, I thought, it may also have been possible that a breakdown would shut down even the artificial parts of the man's body.