Last night, a series of nightmares plagued me. During the long night of the Harmonic Convergence, three green apparitions kept reappearing. During the first nightmare, I screamed. And woke myself up. But I could still see the greenish apparitions.
The second time it happened, I was irate and wanted them to go away. But as soon as I fell asleep, they reappeared, coming at me until I was up, awake, screaming, and running around the bed, scaring the crap out of John. It was as if I was in a fugue state. I was tired and just wanted to sleep.
I showed John how one of the dream beings came to the foot of his bed —how it stood there, and how it moved. An older woman with grey hair in a loose ponytail, dressed in a jeans skirt, a baggy turtleneck, wearing Birkenstocks. Very Berkeley. I mimicked her stance and mannerisms so perfectly, John said, That's Kayla, whom I didn't know.
By that point we were both thoroughly wide awake, so we spent the rest of the night sitting cross-legged on the roof. We sat back-to-back, with our elbows interlocked—facing east and west like mirror image Chaak-mools. The roof became our ceremonial square, the center, its navel. Forget the ley lines. We needed a midnight curandero ceremony to set the world right.
We watched the Milky Way whirl overhead, dazzlingly brilliant, watery stars—no light pollution. We worshipped the moon. We watched dawn break over the mountains, and the path-sweeper, Venus, fade on the horizon. Then we stumbled down off the roof to reclaim our murdered sleep.
The second presence was someone I thought knew, someone saying goodbye. (Later I would find out it was Dave Evans). We weren't sure about the third presence—it felt both insular and ancient, it was both good and evil. A dark animalistic Tzotzil Mayan entity? A bat god? Tzotzil means "people of the bat,"
I had trouble convincing myself (or John) that I wasn't making this stuff up. Or was it merely a dream, the aftermath of fever? Harmonic Convergence? I think not. The Katibak, the world of the dead was upon us. I dreamed of quetzal feathers, and wondered who my animal spirit was. How to reclaim my soul.
But there have been so many murders in Chiapas this summer. And it seems most of them were women. There is palpable tension between the Indios and Ladinos and the gringos. The unrest of the indigenous peoples is gaining strength, even among the Lacandón, said Trudi Blom, the Swiss anthropologist of Casa Na Bolom.
San Cristóbal de las Casas carries a heavy psychic burden. It is not a place for the faint of heart.
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