3 søde drømme

(fra William S Burroughs' My Education. A Book of Dreams, den eneste Burroughs-bog jeg har up and about lige nu)

The breakfast dreams have only started in the last six years or so, since I became preoccupied with the Land of the Dead. The dreams refer not only to breakfast but to difficulty in obtaining any sort of food, except for strange outlandish sweet dishes that are eaten more with the eyes than with the mouth. At one time or another there have been a number of dreams about flies ... ususally biting flies.

I meet some Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger and others, when they get off a bus. Outskirts of an american city. There is a deadly plague that seems to drive people insane and violent. It is moving in from rural areas to the cities. One of the pop group says he is going back to pick up some friends and then will return.
  I say: "If you return."

Scene is now in NYC. I am on the Lower East Side and it looks like business as usual. I know the plague hasn't hit yet, but will hit at any moment. Now I am trying to find my way back to my apartment, where I have som guns stashed. There are several people with me including, I think, Mick Jagger. I say: "Stay together and walk fast." Even the pavements and subways are falling apart and I can look down a thousand feet into girders and rubble. The plague is everywhere now. People are raving and stripping off their clothes. Corpses everywhere, whether form the plague or violence I can't be sure. It is total pandemonium.
  When I get back to the apartment is is simply as mass of rubble. However two guns and a few knives have been salvaged and are on a wooden shelf. One gun is clearly antique, single-barrel, single-shot, with a breech that unscrews. The other looks like a .22 single-shot, but here are no cartridges. One knife is a large folder, but dull and corroded as if it had been on fire. The other, a small folder with wood handle. None of these weapons looks serviceable.
  Some of the group I am with have benn hit by the plague, which causes violent diarrhea and fainting spells.
 
Someone named John with a face like a mask. I could not see the flesh mask around the eyes. I poke a hole in the ground with a stick and there is water just under the surface. A slope, maybe a hundred yards down. This piece of land curled at the edges. Masked face with the eyes peeking out. Whos is this John? The slope is covered with branches of some tree or bush like evergreen. John tries to slide down the slope on these branches. I tell him it won't work, which indeed it will not,



cover: Charles Burns