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Dreams of Youth
Chapter 1:
I am having strange,
recurring dreams. It isn't the same dream every night,
but it is the same shameful theme again and again. In the dream,
I go back
into the past and I visit my younger self. Then I seduce and
have sex with
him. The dream always ends shortly after I come, but although
I always come
in the dream, I don't have a wet dream in real life. In fact,
despite the
expectations raised by sex education films and lectures, which
led me to
believe that wet dreams would be a frequent, perplexing, and
often embarrassing
part of puberty, I still have not had one.
My most recent
of these dreams was perhaps the most disturbing of those I have
experienced so far, because the younger me whom I visited was
so much younger.
I'm not good with ages, and I didn't ask how old he was, but
I estimate after
the fact that he was probably ten or eleven at most.
The dreams start
very normally -- for dreams, that is. I am doing some unusual
dream event, engaged in one surreal plotline or another, and
I turn the corner
and come face to face with my younger self. And then the plot
of the dream
changes entirely over to this new plot of greetings, verification,
reminiscence, and then, ultimately, seduction of the most incestuous
type
imaginable.
This time I had
been having a dream based on a computer wargame I had played
earlier in the evening. I was in a stone castle, conferring
with my generals
(I think we were trying to decide what kind of pizza to order),
when I excused
myself from the table to go to the restroom. When I rounded
the corner, I
entered a courtyard which transformed into the playground of
my old elementary
school. I walked through the playground and up one of the empty
short-
ceilinged corridors of classrooms, when one of the doors opened,
and I walked
out, or rather a child version of myself walked out.
He sized me up,
and I said, "Hi, Billy."
He stopped. "Hello,"
he said in two very distinct syllables. His hair was
strikingly blond, but his face was the one from old pictures
and mirrored
memories. He was wearing Nike "Wally Waffle" shoes,
purplish toughskin jeans,
and a greenish polyester shirt composed of a collage of pictures
of
motorcycles. The embarrassment which I should have felt at the
time over this
choice of outfit, I felt instead now as an adult, coming uninvited
from his
future to judge.
He very obviously
didn't recognize me at all. Still, I asked, "Do you
recognize me?"
He looked at me
even closer, as if I were a distant relative he might be asked
to hug, and started to sway from side to side in his Wally Waffles.
"No."
(two syllables again -- "No-oh")
So I told him,
"I'm you as a grown-up, I've come from the future to talk
to
you."
"No way."
he said, but remarkably, he seemed willing to entertain the
possibility that it was true. "What's my name?" he
asked, to test me.
"Billy Lowgren,"
I said. I call myself Bill now.
"What's my
middle name?"
"Hugh."
"How do you
spell it?"
At first I was
puzzled by this question. Then I remembered that when I was
very young, I thought that my middle name was spelled "Hue"
(having seen that
word on a color chart at school or in a book). When I was corrected,
I for a
long time had the mistaken impression that the real spelling
of my middle name
was a rare and strange variant of how most people spell the name
Hugh.
"H-U-G-H," I said.
This impressed
him. He had never seen me before, and yet I could spell Hugh
correctly. This gave an air of authenticity to my strange story.
He then
quizzed me about my parents' names, and their birthdates (I think
he was
bluffing there. I don't think I knew their birthdays by heart
until I was
half-way through college). Then he told me that if I was him
from the future,
I should know everything about him, and if so I should be able
to tell him
what he had in his backpack. I did some bluffing of my own and
said that he
had some homework and books, but that was clearly not specific
enough for him.
"What book?"
he asked.
"Alan and
Naomi," I guessed.
"Wrong,"
he said, with two syllables, but by this time he really wanted
to
believe me.
"I don't remember
very well," I confessed, and then tried to change the
subject. It was time to start the seduction part -- a part of
the dream I
don't enter through an act of will so much as through the will
of the
mysterious dream playwright whose directions I am taking. The
interpretation
of the role, and even the dialog, is under my control; but the
general
outlines of the plot are tragically unalterable. "When
do you get out of
school?" I asked.
"I am out.
I hadta stay after school today. Mrs. Habbat said I was talking."
I sympathized.
"Why don't you take me down to where you and Colin sometimes
go." Colin was a boy I played I'll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours
with
for a while in elementary school. I wasn't sure if it was before
or after I
was the age of little Billy, so this was a risky question.
He looked at me
more seriously this time, cocking his head to one side, and
balancing all of his weight on one Wally Waffle. A part of me
that was
detached from the dream was hoping he'd have the good sense to
say no, but I
knew that he wouldn't. Finally, he stuffed his hands in his
pockets and said
"okay. Let me get my bicycle" ("Bike," the
word that would have been more
natural, was taboo because there was a playground joke which
depended for its
punch-line on the fact that "Bike" was the name of
a brand of underwear.
Saying that you were going to "ride my bike" was always
worth a couple of good
digs in your direction).
We walked toward
the bike racks, me keeping my distance from young Billy, who
was swinging his backpack around recklessly. He unlocked his
bicycle and
slung the chain around his shoulder, then we started back the
way we came, he
riding circles around me as I walked back through the playground
to where I
half-remembered was mine and Colin's secret hideout.
Because I still
live in the town I grew up in, my cartographic memories of it
become supplanted each day by new ones. In my dream, then, I
was surprised to
find many familiar parts of the town, even among those few visible
from the
school, that were different or missing entirely. The barely-remembered
hideout to which we were headed was in a collection of large
mounds of dirt
and fields of wild bamboo that today is a very flat softball
field.
"Are you a
scientist," Billy asked me, now apparently convinced of
my identity.
"I'm a computer
scientist," I said, hoping this was good enough. My
elementary school vision of scientist (a role I hoped one day
to occupy) was
very much of the white lab-coat and test-tube variety.
His eyes lit up
-- this apparently was fine with him. He continued to whirl
around me on the bicycle. "Are you married?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I haven't
met anyone I want to marry yet."
"Oh."
When we got to
the mounds and bamboo, Billy got off of the bicycle and started
to push it by the handlebars among the maze-like hills of dirt.
I followed
him in. "Do you like school?" I asked.
"Yeah, sorta."
"What's your
favorite subject?"
"Science."
Of course.
"What did
you do in science today?"
"We drew the
solar system."
"That sounds
interesting."
"But the Sun
was too big, so we left it out. I made the side of the paper
all
yellow."
We arrived at the
hiding-place. It was a hollow where some of the bamboo had
been cut away to make an uncomfortable seat. We played a truth-or-dare
kind
of game where the winner sat in the "throne" and the
loser had to do what the
winner said. By convention, the winner couldn't ask for anything
too
outrageous, because the loser would eventually have his turn
to make demands.
"Could you
teach me how to play the game you and Colin play? I forget how
to
play it."
"You put your
fist out like this," he said and demonstrated.
I interrupted,
suddenly remembering it all. "Rock scissors paper,"
I said.
"Right! And
then the winner gets to tell the loser what to do. But you can't
do anything to make us get caught, or else... you lose really
bad."
I remember the
or else part as it originally went: "or else you have to
hump
Heidi Horton." But that was something we wouldn't say around
grown-ups, of
course, and young Billy didn't want to say it to me.
I put my fist out,
and so did he. Three times our fists rose and fell. I was
paper, he was scissors. He went over to sit in the throne.
"You have to pull
down your pants and turn around three times."
I unbuttoned and
unzipped my pants, and then exhaled and pulled my pants and
my underwear down to my knees. I stood there briefly, and then
clumsily
rotated in place three times. I felt as silly as I have ever
felt in my life. I pulled my pants back up.
Seemingly unmoved
by the spectacle (although I saw his eyes on my penis each
time I faced him and wondered what he thought of its size and
bushiness), he
offered his fist again, eager to move on. This time, I won (paper
against
rock) and, out of courtesy, gave him the same punishment.
He eagerly dropped
his pants and started to turn, holding his shirt up over
his white belly which was swollen out over his tiny, bald scrotum
and erect
penis. I was very ashamed, but I hadn't totally forgotten the
excitement this
game caused in me when I was younger. I tried to remember some
of the
punishments we designed, so that I wouldn't accidentally come
up with
something completely out of left field. I remembered that once
we commanded
each other to tie a blade of grass around our penises right about
at the
circumcision scar. By the time we got home, our tender skin
was swollen red
and itching from allergy. An embarrassing and uncomfortable
experience -- we
vowed the next day to be more careful from then on.
I won the next
round (paper against rock again), and commanded him to pull
down his pants, get on his bicycle and ride back and forth over
an
approximately eight-foot stretch of ground in front of me. He
complied,
although this entailed pulling his pants completely off of one
leg (which he
did without removing his Wally Waffle), something that was normally
not done
in the course of the game (it involved the danger of not being
able to pull
one's pants up quickly enough in case someone discovered us --
the added
danger also meant added excitement, but was rarely indulged in
nonetheless.)
By now, in spite
of my best intentions, I was becoming erect and excited. I
won the next round (rock against scissors) and made him pull
down his pants,
turn around, touch his toes and count to fifty. He clearly enjoyed
this
(although he counted so fast it was hard to distinguish one number
from the
next), but it looked like he hadn't wiped in a month, so any
added pleasure I
had expected from his fulfilling my command was not forthcoming.
I finally lost
(scissors against rock), and he wanted to subject me to the
bicycle. I did so, feeling and enjoying (to my surprise) the
danger factor of
having one leg fully bare. My erection was by this time at its
peak, and the
pressure on my perineum from his banana seat was exquisite (even
knowing what
I remembered about my boyhood wiping habits). When I pulled
my pants up I
made sure I was close to him, and I did it slowly so he could
watch for a long
time.
He won again (paper
against scissors) and wanted me to take off my shirt and
twist it up lengthwise and then wrap it around my erection (my
"wiener," he
said). I did this, but I could tell that it didn't have the
effect that he
hoped it would. He shifted back and forth in his toughskins,
holding on to a
bamboo pole and waiting eagerly for me to unwrap myself so we
could play
another round.
I thought for a
moment, deciding finally on rock. After two ties, he switched
to scissors and I took a chance, sitting down on the ground below
the throne
and ordering him to take off his pants and put his "wiener"
in my mouth. This
was a true break from convention, as usually the commands were
about display
and self-manipulation. Colin and I almost never touched each
other.
But Billy was a
sport about it, dropping his pants, and standing between my
outstretched legs. I moved forward, to sit gently on his toes,
casting an
uncomfortable glance toward the stain on his white underpants.
Then, quickly,
I put my hands on his bottom and put my mouth around his penis
and scrotum. I
couldn't see his face, so I don't know how he reacted. I genuinely
enjoyed
myself, gently caressing the incredibly smooth hemispheres of
his bottom, and
pulling back slightly to suck slowly on his small salty warm
penis.
It was really an
unexpected treat, and I lingered far longer than game
tradition called for. I was worried at one point that the wetness
of my mouth
might trigger urination in my boy self (A worry I felt as a youngster
as I
slowly absorbed the facts of life was that I might urinate when
ejaculation
was called for. I knew there was a difference, but I could not
even guess at
what the mode of conscious differentiation might be. I knew
that I wasn't
presently capable of summoning up fluid from different organs
at will, and I
was very worried that when the time came I might mistakenly produce
the wrong
type. It was not until my sixth-grade sex education classes
that that worry
-- and another one about whether the vulva was fore or aft of
the anus --
was finally resolved), but this fear was unfounded.
This oral experience
may not have been the sexual crescendo for Billy that it
could have been were he a little older, but it certainly expanded
his visions
of what his sex game could be like. As I broke away from his
body, he
hesitated to pull up his pants, and I guessed that rock scissors
paper, once a
vital ritual, would no longer be necessary. "Do you want
to see what I taste
like?" I asked.
"No fair,"
he said (ignoring that I hadn't gone through the formality of
winning a round before I asked), "you're bigger."
His pants were still around
his ankles. I pulled myself up and dropped my pants down, pulling
them off
one leg to demostrate my willingness to become vulnerable. "You
don't have to
put all of it in," I told him.
He moved his face
slowly toward my erection, then pulled back, puzzled at how
to get his mouth around it. He reached out his hand slowly and
small,
tentative fingers reached around the back of my penis and pulled
it forward.
When he put his lips to the tip, I reached out and grabbed the
bamboo. He was
heavy on the teeth, and he didn't go down very far at all, but
it was heavenly.
"That was
very nice," I told him when he pulled his face away. "Let
me show
you something." I started to masturbate, fast, furiously,
probably scaring
him half to death. He stared, open-eyed and slack-jawed, probably
barely
breathing. When I came, he was astonished to see me ejaculate,
and backed up
so quickly that he tripped over his pants and dropped right on
his bare behind.
That was the last thing I saw before I woke up, ashamed, and
wishing, as I
always do after these dreams, that I had asked all the questions
I should have
asked, and not done the shameful sexual things.
Chapter 2:
==========
My first dream
was a guilty pleasure, yes, but was nothing as terrifying or
abhorrent as my most recent. The young me was around eighteen
-- very young
still, but a far cry from outright pedophilia.
He was sitting
in front of his computer in my old dorm room at college; before
I disturbed him (I was behind him, and had apparantly come into
the room
silently), I looked around, indulging in the kind of innocent
reminiscence you
can probably imagine. Rock and roll posters on the walls, textbooks
from
subjects I barely remembered learning, a picture of my first
girlfriend next
to me on the desk (she, alas, had gone on scholarship to a different
college,
and we had carried on a difficult relationship via roadtrip for
months).
I am never sure
what to make of the worlds I visit in these dreams. Are they
completely in my head -- incredibly vivid memories, complete
with former
incarnations of my ego and surroundings. That isn't too far
fetched. I have
had dreams in the past -- regular dreams -- which amazed me in
their
inventiveness and verisimilitude. But I sometimes wonder if
I am in fact
entering the past, altering it, as if there were a series of
selves, all
eminating from the past but all continuing in their present moment
like images
reflected endlessly in parallel mirrors, that I return to warp,
to alter,
frankly, to molest in mind and body.
It has occurred
to me that such reckless post facto mahem might send ripples
forward, and that perhaps in some science fiction sense, the
dreams were self-
generated out of the trauma that they caused, preserving the
law of cause and
effect in some hopelessly weird way, and leaving only the word
"WHY?" branded
searing and dark on the meat of my brain.
Another more hopeful
explanation is that I travel in my dreams to the dreams
of my younger selves. This would help explain the sometimes
unexpected
behavior that they exhibit, and the fact that I have no conscious
memories of
the encounters. As a case in point, when I announced my presence
("Hi, Bill,"
I said, in my normal tone of voice), the younger Bill did not
jump in
astonishment at the person who had appeared behind him, having
come silently
through his third-storey window or locked dorm-room door. He
merely turned
his swivel-chair around and said "Hi!" as if I were
an old friend he didn't
know was in town.
As this was the
first dream of this sort that I have had, I did not yet have
a
standard "I am you from the future" speech well-rehearsed,
but fortunately the
face he saw looked so similar to the one he saw in the mirror
that it was
clear no explanations would be necessary. He asked me my age
(although I, of
course, did not ask his. It is not as though I were forbidden,
exactly; it's
just that I seem to forget, and only wish I had asked when I
awaken), and I
gave it to him. He asked me if I ever graduated, I told him
that in fact I
had. He asked me when, but my brain was too fuzzy to do the
necessary
arithmatic or to remember the number on my diploma, which disappointed
him.
In retrospect, it is probably best that I was unable to produce
the figure, as
it took me about seven years from my freshman year(s) to reach
the finish
line, and this fact may have proven dispiriting.
In turn, I asked
him how things were going with Amy (my then long-distance
lover) -- things were going "pretty well," but the
distance was, of course, a
problem as I certainly remembered. I asked him please to describe
the last
time they had made love (both as part of the seduction process,
and because
some of my best sexual memories are of Amy, and as I grow older
these memories
are becoming less and less vivid -- I wanted a better snapshot,
and this was a
golden opportunity). He was eager to comply; talking about sex
with my best
friend or two had been perhaps my second-favorite activity at
the time.
The scenario which
developed, after much prodding for details by my(older)self,
was of a motel room in L----- where we had met -- half-way --
one weekend
early in our first semester apart. We had had sex no fewer than
three times
that evening -- we didn't even leave the motel room to eat until
after noon
the next day. My memories became more vivid with the telling,
a handful of
details springing back to life with each one my younger self
revealed.
I remembered Amy
fondly as an lunatic bitch from hell who saved me from
graduating from high school a virgin. I loved her deeply, and
she loved me
passionately and almost drove me insane. We were both virgins
when we met,
which led to not one, but two nights of embarassing attempts
at accomplishing
what our parents warned us could be perpetrated upon us at the
drop of a hat
without our constant vigilance. Virginities we had been warned
not to lose,
we found difficult to give away.
But still, she
was either an amazing learner or a seductress of instinct. She
gave the best blow jobs I have had to this day, some dozen sexual
partners and
another dozen bizarre dreams later. My near-overdose of pleasant
recollection
was interrupted: "I didn't marry her, did I?" he asked.
It amused me that
I had ever even considered it a possibility. Marriage was
to me then (and still is to me now, actually) a spectre of mythological
fascination. It seemed to strike people down in the prime of
life almost
without warning, although in consensus reality it was assumed
to be a matter
of choice and deliberation. It frightened me, and although instinctively
I
felt that plunging into a steady heterosexual relationship was
probably a way
of putting myself in marital jeopardy, I did not actually know
this to be the
case and so was prepared to risk it and perhaps plead ignorance
at the altar
if the time came.
"No,"
I said, and almost added that they would be broken up within
several
weeks. I decided that this comment would somehow go over the
bounds of what a
temporal alien could wisely admit, and kept it to myself.
He initiated our
sexual activity, which surprised me a great deal during the
dream (I was still trying to decide on a seduction method) but
is less
surprising to me now, remembering my hormone level at the time.
I was
inclined, as a young collegiate, to want to jump on anything
representing a
possible willing orifice, and nobody is less likely to refuse
than yourself, I
suppose.
We stripped, separately,
and then I guided him over to the bed with a hand on
the small of his back. He lay down and I began to suck him off
-- he made so
much noise! I remember really enjoying oral sex when I was younger,
but I
don't remember being so loud. On impulse, I got up and looked
in each of the
two places I remember keeping the K-Y when I was in the dorms
(I found it
secretively stashed behind the thesaurus).
Lying on the bed
next to him, I continued to suck, and he joined in for 69
(which was, and still is, my personal favorite). Then I slowly
worked a well-
lubed finger up his asshole, a treat which in real life would
have to wait for
his second girlfriend. This was doing well for us both, but
I did want to
give him as many different experiences as possible at once (dream
invader as
faux-benevolent big-brother figure plays strongly in my ethical
overcom-
pensation both during the dream and upon awakening).
I removed my finger,
sat up and spread my knees apart on either side of his
waist. I then applied a dollop of K-Y to his erection, and holding
it firmly
behind me, sat down slowly on it. He was mostly silent, staring
at my face
and alternately cringing and gasping as I impaled myself.
It was wonderful,
and miraculously timed -- him coming with enormous
adolescent bucks as I pumped myself empty onto his hairless chest
and belly.
A real winner, even by dream standards, although my dream faded
away before I
could collapse into what I think would have been a pleasant,
though perhaps
somewhat fraternal, post-coital embrace.
Chapter 3:
==========
I have had another
dream. In a way this was the most upsetting one of all,
although, thank goodness, I was not compelled to reach further
into the past
and talk my infant self out of his diapers. No, this dream was
a freak, one
that I suspect I wasn't supposed to remember (and if it were
not for the
garbage truck accidentally backing into my house at five thirty
this morning,
I suspect that it would have passed ungrasped through the still
fingers of my
sleeping memory).
I was the visitee
this time, and was visited by a bearded me some five to ten
years my senior. He came into my bedroom while I was asleep;
I woke up when I
heard him going through my dresser drawers and closets. I said,
"Hello," and
he replied in kind, and asked me how old I was. I told him,
and then asked
him if I were still living in M----- and if I were still working
for C-----.
He said that he was not.
I tried to think
of other questions to ask, but the dream playwright cruelly
disallows the presence of mind that it would take to ask the
better ones -- Am
I happy? What would you do differently if you could start at
my age again?
Do you have any advice for me? I was lucky to have been able
to ask what I
did. I tried to remember what the young selves I visited asked
me when I came
into their lives, but all of the previous encounters blurred
into an
indistinct collection of memories I knew I owned but could not
summon.
"Turn over,"
he said, and I did. He went straight to the bedstand and pulled
out a tube of skin lotion that my girlfriend (who was not in
the room of the
dream) uses. I felt his knee push the mattress down. He pulled
back the
sheets and unceremoniously slapped a generous handful of cold
lotion in the
general vicinity of my anus. Before I had time to even wonder
he was on top
of me, heavy enough to make breathing difficult, and pushing
in heavily with
three painful thrusts.
I am a fan of (and
no stranger to) penetration, and in my dreams I find it
especially pleasurable, but this was no party. The older me
was thrusting
into me with a rape-like violence that I could feel in my spine
-- it was a
mean-spirited fucking that I never considered myself capable
of, and that I
could not imagine enjoying. Over and over, he was saying, "You're
a sick
fuck," or "You're a really sick fuck."
Is this really
representative of the person I'm going to be years from now?
Or, as in the classic time travel motif, is this just one of
many possible
futures, Ebenezer Scrooge, and I can choose another? Or is it
merely a man
tormented by the same dream night after night who is no longer
able to feel
the least bit of sympathy for the however-cherubic demons of
his nightmare
imagination?
What crimes has
he committed in his sleep? What tortures is he capable of,
each one remaining somewhere in his memory as the perpetrator
(and in this one
case at least, the memory of the victim), and building upon the
last, until
the victim and criminal are morally separated only in time --
the punishment
is the crime, but why? Some perverse William Burroughesque nightly
turn of
the karmic wheel -- an impassionate natural law gone bezerk visited
upon me by
chance or by divine fiat, like original sin or the condemnation
of ignorant
heathens, dropping bewildered from death into the inferno.
He was having difficulty
reaching orgasm, and had by this time varied his
mantra to "You're a really fucking sick fuck." I was
pinned by his weight,
and by the general inertia of dream world coenesthetic tunnel
vision, could do
little but time my breathing, and feel the ripping of my anus
and compression
of my prostate and ripples of pain and pressure up and down my
lower back.
He finally came
(by then I had become "a really fucking sick fucking fuck"),
and was probably transported out of his dream, although in mine,
he was a
sleeping dead weight on my back, dripping semen, blood, and skin
lotion down
my upper thigh. I moved slowly out from under him, and went
out into the
living room, where an animated, well-dressed crowd was engaging
in ballroom
dancing to the accompaniment of a big-band style orchestra.
I just wanted to
get some orange juice, but I wasn't wearing anything, so I snuck
around behind
potted plants and the grand piano (thankfully not catching anyone's
attention). When I got to the kitchen, there wasn't any orange
juice left in
the refrigerator, and then the garbage truck backed into my house
and I woke
up and remembered it all. |