A dream by Faust Amoyo
and its explanation by Demetri
I could see the salesman inside notice how I gazed at that mannequin and he didn�t look so glad. Perhaps he thought keeping a wooden mannequin made his shop look old-fashioned.
After a long struggle I moved away from the shop. I remembered that my family was waiting for me. As I came inside my kids hugged me and I still loved them, but now I felt that the deepest depth of my heart didn�t belong to them, nor did it belong to me.
Next day on my way home I couldn�t resist anymore. I went inside the shop and asked the salesman to sell me that mannequin. He kept on telling me that it was a dress shop so I doubled the price and begged him with bitterness. Finally, he agreed.
The dream quickly shifted at that point. I found myself alone in my house. My husband and my two beloved children were not there. All the furniture and carpets were gone, too.
I made an altar for my beloved mannequin. I put it on the altar and surrounded it with flowers and lovely white candles. I knelt before it and kept on looking at it silently. I didn�t know what I expected it to do in return. But as I threw my logic away I knew I wanted it to love me in return. But how can wood love?
I started then to talk to it intimately. Telling it how much I loved it and what dear things I have left behind for that epiphany it raised in my troubled heart. Yet it never replied. I started to get angry. First I started yelling at it then I got up and went towards it with menacing solid footsteps. I held its throat firmly as if I wanted to choke it. I took few steps backwards as nothing happened. I then took off my clothes and touched it all over its body. I gently placed it on the floor and threw myself on it. I started kissing and petting it all over with growing tears. Then I shifted to the more evocative approaches. I firmly rubbed my body on it. As if my body was the key that could unlock its silence, knowing that it was the dearest thing that I could ever offer.
Time passed without the least responce. I got completely mad. I threw myself away from it and got a small knife. First, I started pricking my skin but then I was deeply cutting myself. As nothing happened I tortured myself in every possible manner, with whips and candles. At last my strengths faded and I painfully and tearfully pulled my bloody body on earth and brought a big sword. I knelt again and looked at the mannequin for the last time, then I gathered all that remained of my strength, posed the sword directly onto my chest and took a deep breath for the grand finale. I closed my eyes and with a bold stroke drove the sword right into my chest with immense pain. As I opened my eyes I saw the sword coming out from my back, but it did not penetrate me alone. In front of me was my beloved mannequin. It was kneeling in front of me giving me her back as if it were protecting me. I looked at it with overwhelming love but I was too weak to smile. We quietly fell on one side with my head gently placed on its. The dream concluded with both of us lying peacefully in a blood paddle in the spotlight.
�Now,� he said with a loud voice and stumbling hand gestures, �The self is feminine, all the Christian mystics referred to their souls as virgins in love with the Christ. That�s why you saw yourself as a woman. Your job, husband and children are all the pleasures of life. The mannequin is truth. Truth is dead, blunt, apathetic and expressionless. You didn�t experience the truth from inside. It appeared to you like a solid piece of wood, yet even when perceived from outside truth is unresistingly contagious. You just can�t see it, even from far a way in a shop window without falling in love with it and desiring it. Truth needs devotion, needs to be put alone in one�s heart. That�s why you found your family and even your furniture gone. If you want the divine bliss in your heart you have got to clean it first of eve-rything else, not just sins and evil deeds. You need to have your heart emptied so that there is room for the divine. Do you know now what Jesus meant with his parable of the precious pearl? To buy it one must sell everything else. Now Jesus said that one had to sell everything else to have enough money to buy it but I will go a bit farther, one must sell everything else to have enough room in which to put the precious pearl. You kept on evoking the mannequin. You have even fought with it. And that�s exactly what Jacob did with God. Sometimes God�s mysteries become so irritating to the impatient seeker that desires to solve no more koans, he just wants to fight like an animal. He wants to beat God and strip him of his divine veil. You have even tried to se-duce truth; you have rubbed your naked erotic feminine body next to it. You have tried to evoke in truth the sense of pity by hurting yourself. Only when you were dying that you did find truth. �To be perfect is to be dead� that�s how some people put it. Once the eternal quest is reached, the road dies.�