Pyramid Of The Alchemist Dream

By Author: Eric N. Peterson, PhD
Total Articles: 1
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I used to keep a little spaniel. He was my good friend. Back then I had a large property in the country near the village, fenced around with a gray, plaster wall eight feet high that extended to the village fortifications. My curious, little dog used to hunt small animals and sniff excitedly along the perimeter of the wall.

One day he used his claws to break open a hole in the plaster. I strode over to scold him but before I could, a horrendous visitation, shocking to behold: a pair of silent lynxes, almost identical, slinked through the hole and sprang on my dog, as though they had been stalking him.

I broke into a run and chased one of them off, growled, puffed myself up, threw a display as fierce as I could muster. It worked. The lynx was intimidated and streaked inaudibly through the hole from which it came.

The other lynx was still on top of my dog. Oddly, I could not even see my beloved spaniel anymore, though the predator eclipsing him was not large and hardly moved his golden body. My domestic cat had joined the fight, having pounced awkwardly on top of the lynx in a comic betrayal of her own feline ...
... heritage: the lynx took no notice of her. My cat might as well have been a fly for all the good she did. I meanwhile panicked and paced back and forth like an idiot, unable to organize anything, no defense.

Because of my dog's foolishness in stalking the great Stalker--the Lynx Nation who descended like denizens of the stellar realm--I was conducted that night to the underworld. It turns out those lynxes were friends of the hideous wine god, Bacchus. They used to draw his chariot on his boisterous, orgiastic rampages--the ones on which his barbarous Maenad women used to always tear some pitiable young man limb from limb in their wanton frenzy of worship. With shudders of horror did I used to hear the din of the worshippers' shrieks from within the distant forest. Shaking like a child, I would throw heaps of green juniper wood on the fire in an attempt to cover with popping noises and smoke the harpy-like clamor of those witches' screams and the wicked trills of the Pan pipe played by their disorderly, goat-horned master.

But after the wall was breached by his lynxes, they captured me. Who exactly, I don't know. Bound and hooded, I was borne on the shoulders of what seemed in form to be men, but utterly silent and without compassion, for I moaned and cried plea after plea through my hood to no avail and no answer. They threw me in the bottom of some dungeon, or so I thought.

Shaking with terror and cold beneath my hood, I cursed my dog through my tears at first--but how could I hate him? I could not. I would never see home again; of this I was certain. Yet my dog was innocent, guilty of no more than exuberant foolishness. Or perhaps he had wanted to sacrifice himself. I had heard such tales of insanity on the lips of old village women. It was said that there were madmen about who would give themselves over to the Outer Darkness, whether for cause or because the wind whispered divine things to them over their shoulders. Such a madness might have seized my poor dog that day, for all I know.

But all was not as I thought. For though they lash me and stab at my chest daily with a dagger, they do no real damage, and through intentional liftings of my hood and by their words, they now tell me that I am in the burial chamber, in the Hall of Maat below the Great Pyramid. Dragging me round and round like this, they tell me I am impure and unfit to remain.

I know longer know who I am. Truly, I am dead, for all that I was and all that I thought I knew is gone. Yet something here resounds and tingles the back of my neck like a flutter from childhood: for this is the very pyramid of what I call my "alchemist dream"! Since a child, I have been visited by a recurring, kaleidoscopic dream of this very chamber--grand, torch-lit, and filled with terrible, strange gods who guard strange secrets. It is real!

Shall I die like a dog? Or shall I walk abroad in the sunlight once again, as what and as who I don't know?