Alice
When the Giants Come

The warm light winds of South Kona would typically wake me from my slumber on the lanai in those days. Coqui would chirp me to sleep under the watchful eye of my star relative, Ursa Minor. I was working quite a bit at that time. I baked at a banana bread shop, was a clerk at the natural food store, landscaped, hustled ganja. On the side, I would moonlight at whatever local jam there was to share my songs. A couple of my friends from Alaska had moved there, and I was renting their back porch as my abode. There was enough space for a small mat, guitar case, and a hikers backpack. It was all I needed. One morning, however, on that peaceful lanai, I was abruptly awoken from a dream. Heart racing, sweat dripping from my brow, and tears pouring from my eyes, I vividly remembered what I had seen in that lucid state. It was my first waking dream that I can recall. Up until then, remembering dreams when woken consisted of mainly being chased by bad guys or catastrophic events and escaping nature's deadly path. Quite frankly, I die a lot in my dreams. This particular dream wasn't scary, necessarily, but definitely revealing and confrontational.

It began with a chase through the coffee fields, a place I had been spending plenty of my time in picking and planting. My prey was a friend of mine whom I'd had no beef with in real life, but in my dreams, we were volleying for a woman and apparently he had stepped onto my proclaimed turf. So a chase was in order. When I finally caught up to him, we battled with... rocks? He managed to slam his into my hands, and in a moment of terror, my hands turned black. I held up my black hands in horror, and the entire scene shifted. Then I was walking quickly through a crowded street. The tall skyscrapers reminded me of New York, and as I passed two police officers, I tucked my head and ducked into a bustling mall. This scene will always conjure a Where's Waldo page. So many people, where's Bear? Weaving between the suits and dresses, I walked right into a very long table in the middle of the mall with a man and woman sitting at it. They were dressed in suits and seemed to have been waiting for me. There's a chair in front of them, and they gestured for me to take a seat. This was my judgement day. Sorrow came over me as I realized I was here to be reckoned with. My black hands were put on the table, cuffed by a guard, and just then I saw two men walking by smirking. I screamed, "You'll get yours!" in anger and sadness. The woman tsk'ed and shook her head. "So much anger... a shame." The man promptly took over and asked me, "Do you know why you're here?" It was without question that I knew I was to be punished for my violent retaliation towards my friend in the coffee field. I could barely raise my head and replied, "I've done a lot of bad things in my life." As the tears began to well, a man out of nowhere appeared from the crowd. He bore no recognizable face, just wearing a brown trench coat and a briefcase in his left hand. He walked directly up to me, I stood up with a little surprise and quickly walked into his arms. He held me with such understanding and comfort that the tears welling fell reluctantly. It was in that forgiving embrace that I woke abruptly from my slumber, tears falling from my cheeks, sweat swallowing my sheets.

It's always so fascinating to me what our REM cycle pulls from our daily waking life. I use to hitchhike from my house to my work at the natural food store. Every week, at least once or twice, the same dude would pick me up on his way home from work and give me a lift. My stop was on his route. It was there in the passenger seat of his old VW bus that I learned about the giants and the key in which the universe resonates. The sun would be setting as I took a pull from his pipe and his words would go on and on about the philosophy of time and the prophecy unfolding. Imagine being high as a kite and hearing stories about giants. Giants that created the earth and buried themselves beneath it eons ago. Soon a war would come here we would fight alongside angels and giants as the 12th planet returned to reclaim what man could not hold sacred. I would say, "Far out, man," and drift off into a resonance of thought and wonder. He'd say things like, "Y'know the universe is in B flat, and its color is deep purple?" I'd say things like, "Ho, bra, no way... mentals." We would laugh and then it was "shoots, see you next time." The magnificence in his story about the giants sat deep with me. After all, when I was adopted, I was named after a king in the Bible who fought a giant. I believed in them, not because of that story, but because it only made sense that our bodies had changed with the planet over time. All the superhuman powers could still be accessed with the right teachers, but perhaps they had been lost for centuries. Regardless, I knew not that this was the beginning of my mystical teachings. But, I'm so happy this song still lives because it is a direct connection to the beginning of my work in the multidimensional field of songwriting and dream telling.

I'd gone down the rabbit hole. I begin the song by telling Alice I'm well aware of the strange and complex world she lives in, and I will not be visiting. Not so wonderland, after all, the weird and mystical. However, I am no coward. Courage becomes me as I journey through the maze and tap into my awakening power. Superhuman. Not immortal, yet I survive Alice's puzzle and rise from my slumber with ultimate respect for her design. In closing, I bow. A world without doors is not a home. A world without the maze is a nightmare. A world made of riddles is a dream come true. For what do we live for, but solutions and answers.