Strange dream last night. I�ve been having some really vivid dreams this week, which I haven�t been having for a while. This one just stuck in my mind on waking.

I don�t know if we were prisoners of war in this dream or what�me and all my nearest and dearest were gathered together to do some kind of war mission. We were being shown all the equipment we had to use, and also there was a weird staged demonstration of how the economy worked and moved in Iraq. It showed like, raw materials being taken and processed, then moved, then how it got into the homes of families and they furthered the process. The part I remember most clearly is there was an Arab mom who was preparing boxes of sweets to sell, and I recognized having bought one of those boxes. She was shown at home, so she wasn�t in her burqa, but she was wearing black. She was sitting on a stool and talking to us as she laid out the little paper cups she put the sweets in. She seemed like a very nice woman. All this was going on while we were being given our equipment. Then we walked around to the other side of the wall and it was like a stage, like we had been backstage, and all our equipment was prepared for us in individual units against the wall. My dad was there, my sister was there. There was nothing strange about that this was a stage, I guess we expected that. And then Saddam Hussein walks up to the stage and says some stuff to us, and he looks highly amused, and we start donning our gas masks. They�re like this two-layer affair, the under one being orange rubber with a blue filter over the nose and eye- and mouth- hole cutouts and the top one being this thing that looked like an all-black welding helmet. I put the second helmet on just in time before this grey misty gas started filling up the room. My sister ran back around to the front (she hadn�t been able to find something) and then said something to me about something in her mask not working properly (she was wearing it). I turned to her quickly and said, What is it?? I remember thinking that there�s not really anything I can do about it now, but if my sister�s going to die I at least want to know how it happened. But then I saw her and dad grabbing straps on the wall, and I thought I better too, to brace myself, because the grey gas was rushing at us now, and we weren�t sure if these things worked, and my mask wasn�t quite tight enough, so I pushed it more onto my head, and I fumbled for the straps, and I didn�t feel like I had a good enough grip, but at least I had one, and the gas was all around us now. I could hear sounds of coughing, and I myself wasn�t registering any pain or anything, but I needed to breathe through my nose, and I could hear myself breathing, and then I woke up.

I woke up to the sound of my breathing, which was the same as in the dream. Not panicky or especially labored, it just sounded as though I was breathing through a gas mask. I was actually very calm throughout the whole dream, not stoic, just calm, as if this were another thing I was doing in my day.

What�s extra strange, though, is that I woke up in the position of The Hanged Man, trump 12 in the tarot deck. Here�s an example of the hanged man:

though that�s not the exact position I was in. My left was crossed under my right, and my hands were as though they were bound above my head. Upon waking, when I realized how my body was, I thought, oh my god, I�m the hanged man.

Here are some of the things crazy old Aleister Crowley has to say about the hanged man:

It is the card of the Dying God � It says, �If ever things get bad like that again, in the new Dark Ages which appear to threaten, this is the way to put things right.� But if things have to be put right, it shows that they are very wrong.

It�s funny, because I haven�t done the tarot in such a long time, but immediately I recognized it when it popped up. I even knew right off the bat which number trump the hanged man was. It was just, interesting. I don't feel like going into it right now, but I tend to have very good, very practical understandings of oracles. It was nice to remember that I'm still conversant in that language.

12:55 p.m. 2003-07-29�