The Dream-Quest of the Unknown Sabbat

Oh man, what time is it? There are no clocks in here and I want to keep the shades tightly drawn and foil lined in case the sun is shining bright in the sky. My head is still throbbing from the vast quantities of Cursed Brew I consumed last week. I only remember snippets, just momentary flashes and a vague sense of a narrative. I’d be worried about brain damage is this wasn’t my normal state.

Anyways, last Tuesday night I took it into my head to attempt a dream-quest. This is an old sort of tradition that shamans and other mystical folks like yours truly have been participating in since like forever. From the iowaska powered visions of South America up to the sweat lodges of the North and from the fume-fueled oracles of ancient Greece to the guitar-noodling ablations of the modern Phish fan, people have sought insight through quests like these in order to provide clarity, introspection, and a lot of weird strange.

My vehicle of choice last week was a healthy dose of Cursed Brew, the special Reserve stock I’ve made with scrapings from my breakfast altar and the various fungi that grow in the family tomb. It took hold quickly and by early Wednesday morning I felt as if I was flying across the country to a mythic land.

San Diego.

For those of you who don’t know, San Diego is a wonderful place, a balance between the flat saltiness of the Pacific Ocean and the flat sandiness of the desert. It was, of course, discovered by German settlers back in 1904 who named it after a whale’s vagina. It’s a city that stays classy, even though it was mostly fictional while I was there.

I was not alone in my journey. Dozens of others flew around me, their faces lit with excitement and eyes red with the early hour. Things get slightly jumbled here - remember a familiar voice floating near me, a uniformed woman offering me a thin black gruel she called coffee, and then palm trees, palm trees, palm trees.

My soul was eventually drawn to a quarter of the city lit only by gas. There, the going got weird. I can assume I was seeing a version of the afterlife that awaits us all. Perhaps it was not our eventual eternity, but judging from all the lines it was certainly a stop on the way.

Characters I assumed were fantasies donned garish suits of flesh and reality. Was that really Wonder Woman I saw? Probably not for soon after I saw her, I saw another. And another. The same can be said of Supersmans, Spiders-Mans, and many, many Batsmans. Perhaps they were fractured facets of a Platonic ideal, individual aspects that represent a character? The 300lb Batman was a reflection of Bruce Wayne’s hunger to fight crime. The Wonder Woman whose ethnicity was more African than Greek in origin an example that feminine power knows no national limitations. And as for the Spider-Man I saw with the very great, uh, powers and responsibilities visible beneath his tights, I can only assume he stands for the virility of the character that has netted like 5 movies in the past 10 years.

At first I thought these visions were incomplete, sad parts of a bigger whole, but soon I realized that they were united by joy. I felt that joy too and realized that having that joy was really the only important thing - it did not matter what you looked like, what you wore, or how much you knew about ships used in a galaxy far, far, away. As long as you were happy to be there, you belonged there.

It was a zen moment.

And I needed that zen, reader (and some more Cursed Brew too), as those lines... those lines! Everything was a line. Want to see a face you normally only see when falling asleep infront of the TV on a Friday night? There was a line. Want to pay $17.50 for a tuna sandwich? Line. Want to wait in a line to get a ticket to wait in another line? There was a line for that too. Eventually you just start standing in lines on the basis that if everyone else is doing it, there must be a good reason.

Soon it dawned on me that it was from the lines that the future could be foretold. Just as Nostradamus looked unto the scrying mirror to gain insight into the present and future, I opened myself to the lines to discern the following:

• The Bat Shall Lie Down in a Bed of Steel.
• A God of Mischief Walks Among Us.
• Spider-Man is for Equality.
• The Imp Will Look to Robots.

Events began to accelerate. Perhaps it was the Cursed Brew interacting with all the drinks I stumbled into on a particularly apocalyptic bar crawl. I’m not sure how a spirit form can get drunk, but I know that life always finds a way. Things began to spiral. Was that really Mace Windu standing next to me at a urinal? Where did all these tee shirts come from? How does Steampunk get to still be a thing?

I needed grounding. I needed home. I needed Salem.

And I found her, reader, even in the depths of San Diego’s endless lines. Salem came unto me wearing a pair of very short shorts and the smile of a person who was being paid to promote something. She gave me a pamphlet, seen above, detailing a history of witches and witch trials in Salem. The pamphlet even included a web address to www.WitchesAreReal.org (I guess www.duh.com was taken way back in the Internet Stone Age) and a promise of ‘Coming in Spring 2014’.

I poured through the pamphlet and I suspect something is up. Not only is my family not mentioned, but the version of events seems ...off. If only I could get to the bottom of this mystery!