Part Time Person

It begins with a barbeque. I’m at a park with an old friend of mine and we need to clean a grill in order o barbeque. So I suggest that we take the grill to a building close by. We try a couple of locked doors before one finally opens.

Inside there are long rows of paintings. This is some sort of art gallery, although there are not visitors milling about. We ask someone who looks like a staff member where we can clean this grill, and he directs us to the other side, where we exit into a large industrial yard, with welding and activity going on. We enter another building, which is a warehouse, and are then directed by another staff member further away to a concert hall. We have to climb through a broken window to go between the buildings. Then there is a very narrow elevator with three floors. We try in vain to find the floor with a cleaning sink, and finally end back up where we first entered the building. The worker who had helped us then walks us down the hall to a large kitchen, which is filled with activity. My friend cleans the grill.

By now, however, I am feeling a growing rage, an insane anger. It’s not directed at her, but at everything around me. I can feel my heart pounding and my pulse quickening. I don’t know why I feel so upset. I feel like I’m going to explode. So I duck out of the kitchen to try to walk about a bit to calm myself down.

This hallway has painting as well. They are almost all portraits, nineteenth century portraits of well-dressed people. Now something is different about them. I had missed it before. Now I can see that every few paintings, the eyes in a painting come alive. They move, follow me. And they glow. Most paintings have dead, painted eyes. But inexplicably every third or fourth painting stares at me.

I find myself in the concert hall, which is empty except for a television. I click it on and see the middle of the movie Jaws. I watch it for quite some time, because I am relaxed and surprised when one of the original workers who directed me here bursts into the auditorium and orders me out.

Now the halls are bustling with activity, and I try to warn every one I see about the eyes in the paintings. No one listens. I am becoming very frustrated at my utter inability to spread the word of this menace. Then a very tall, elderly black man grabs me by the arm and pulls me aside.

He announces that he is a paleontologist for the Smithsonian, which is evidently where I’ve been wandering about. He directs me to a cluttered alcove and together we remove crates and boxes in order to access a locked cabinet tucked far in the back.

This cabinet is full of fossils of oviraptors—dinosaurs who ate eggs—and fossils of dinosaur eggs. As the paleontologist leaves me to explore this cabinet, he explains that as a child in Haiti his mother had laid an extensive curse on him because he had stolen some chicken eggs. It was this curse he had also put on the paintings, and this was why some of them were coming alive now, infecting visitors, and reaching out from the paintings themselves to grab and strangle people.

I find myself out on an airport tarmac. A continuous stream of jets lands close to me. People are assembled, awaiting the arrival of some VIP. I am fearful that whoever it is will visit the portraits and hence become infected with rage, as I have been, but looking into the eyes of the portraits. I have to stop the plane from landing.

Nothing I say or do has any affect. I am distraught with frustration. Then out of the plane comes a female singer, whom the crowd identifies as my wife. She is very famous. I am continuously complimented by the crowd for being married to her, but as I look at these sycophants in the eyes, then I see that they too have become infected by the paintings.

I have no idea what this dream means, but it disturbed me greatly.