A strange dream

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a fresh sense of wonder, and wish the same upon you.

In my dreams last night I met a woman named Roza Doxxo. She had a strange, decadent innocence about her, a wide-eyed desire to explore sensuality and intellect, an uncompromising devotion to communicating her interior world of love for the human figure and obsession with its dark and visceral facets. A brilliant writer and a natural talent with pen-and-ink drawing, she showed me her ingenious work-in-progress -- an openly sexual murder-mystery novel that consisted entirely of pictures and descriptions and physical artifacts representing the clues in her imagined crime, which she had arranged so artfully that by merely looking from one piece of evidence to the next, I understood the movement of the story, the arc and weave of the lives and deaths she meant to describe.

I cannot remember ever having smelled in a dream, before last night. But I smelled Roza Doxxo’s hair in the moment she first passed close by me. And I did not just smell it -- it penetrated my senses so vividly that I could almost still smell it when I woke. Intoxicating, rich, as luxuriously human and also as deliberately constructed as everything else about her. She had worked to get her hair to smell as clean and natural as it did. But like all other things, the work appeared to come easily to her.

Entranced and amazed, I recognized quickly that the woman who accompanied Doxxo was her lover. And I also recognized quickly that Roza Doxxo found me, for whatever reason, more alluring and attractive than her current flame. We parted with a clear sense of promise, and I caught a vibration of resentment from the soon-to-be-cast-off girlfriend.

This dream spun off from a recurring stress-dream that I have: the return-to-school dream, in which I am burdened with coursework for an ill-considered revisitation of my college career. But it spun off into someplace ethereal and peculiar, as I searched in the library for a book to read and write literary criticism of. As I saw within the glass display case a hand-bound volume with a warning label applied in Doxxo’s eccentric handwriting: “Warning! XXX drawings!” As a colloquy of writers appeared to discuss the books they’d written and left on the shelves. And as Doxxo herself came strikingly into the room, raven-haired and dark in dress, her voice brash and accented.

And oh, the scent of that hair.

Thank you, Roza Doxxo. I am your humble servant.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee