The Batman signal and the year of the dragon

Dream: March 5, 2006.

I am wandering around an unfamiliar city; it is my one night together with Faith and we have broken away from my crowd of friends to explore. The city is nightlife intensive, almost as if Mardi Gras is taking place - people yelping down the sidewalk with sparklers, the whole town buzzing with energy.

Faith and I are much more quiet, slipping between the crowd knowing that this is our one night together, and that we will have to wait a few more months to be in contact with eachother again. This is our regular pattern, but luckily we can always transition back into a comfortable state each time we are alone with eachother.

We stop at a hotdog vendor on the front side of a trailer - the food is still hot but no one is watching the stove. I knock on the door of the trailer, and when I don’t receive an answer I enter cautiously to see if we can get someone to serve us. The lights are off in the front room. I find a bedroom and open the door to find two sleeping girls on a couch - they look at me surprised, fearing the worst …. but I just tell them that they left the stove on. They look relieved and I feel guilty for having disturbed them and making them feel like I was a predator, so I leave without getting any brautwurst.

Faith and I slide down next to a brick wall and take in the scenery. I think to myself: “Though we have never slept together, I feel as if we are the greatest of lovers … ” and look up to see a bat dancing in the sky, barely visible in the moonlight.

But before I can even nudge Faith to tell her what I am watching, I see a black dragon chasing the bat, swirling and dodging between the clouds. It is very active, not necessarily violent - but there is no doubt that the one is in pursuit of the other.

I am in a state of utter shock. It takes me a minute to gather the courage to utter what it is I am seeing, but I finally manage to get the words out. She looks at me calmly with no external response, so I say “Isn’t that fucking weird? What the hell is going on? There is a fucking black dragon chasing a bat up there!” She takes my arm and says “It’s hard being a person that sees those sort of things, but it is so common for me. All that it really means is that we should get out of here, ” - and she leads me away.

We continue on to a house, and I see the sun is starting to rise at this point. We are out on a balcony and I can see Mt. Rainer in the distance. Something doesn’t look right though. Just above the peak I can see these swirling cloud formations that look like intenstines and my mind starts racing through all of the possible conspiracy’s to match up to this kind of fortean phenomena. I have no answer. Then someone screams “VOLCANO!” and I look back to see the black crushing clouds rising towards us in slow motion. Faith and I go underground into the basement of the house and I wake up not knowing if we survived, trying to guess at the possible outcome of the flowing lahars above us.