"HELLO DOLLY" by Steve Savage "King of the Beasts"

HAZY REMEMBRANCES OF AN UNEXPLAINED POSSIBLE ABDUCTION

I awoke in a large stark room - no rugs, no furniture. Nothing! Across from where I was, was a large opening, an entrance into the room. I was in a reclining position on the floor, in the far corner. Everywhere in the room, there were ropes or lines, criss-crossing like a "3-D" laser security system in a Mission Impossible movie, except that they were tangible.

As I looked across the room, I saw what appeared to be a little girl, all alone, having difficulty climbing up from below, into the room, and onto the floor, from the large entrance. I don't know why but, as the father of six boys-only, I thought that she was my little girl. I started across the room climbing over and under the criss-crossed lines to get to her. I managed to reach her and picked her up in my arms.

I wanted to ask her where her mother, my wife, was. When I did, I saw that she wasn't a beautiful little girl at all, but some really ugly, strange, alien, doll-like looking thing, dressed in little girl's clothing. The hair on her head looked like a wig.

Somehow, she slipped out of my grasp and ran out the large opening, easily negotiating the crossed lines. I tried to follow but I couldn't move through the lines fast enough.

I am always in the same quandry in these experiences, totally disoriented, somehow lost in a humongous, super-colossal Hotel Portmeirion-like setting that has stairs leading to nowhere, a labyrinth, no way out, no matter how hard I try.

On this occasion, for the very first time, I walked down a hallway and came to someone sitting behind a kind of lectern, in front of a door, with a sign that said "EXIT" above it. I asked the girl[?] if this was the way out. She nodded affirmatively.

I went out the door, into the night. I couldn't believe the joy of freedom I was experiencing, breathing the freshness of the cool night air, immersed in a recognizable reality. Looking to my right I saw, in the distance below, a row of houses alongside a railroad track upon which I saw a Steam Engine pulling a line of railroad cars.

I thought about the trains in my recurrent dreams that never make connections, and also about the roads that never get me to "where I don't know where I want to go;" streets leading to "no way back" in paradoxically familiar, "unfamiliar cities." Somehow, I was on the rooftops of the houses, easily leaping, jumping, doing half-gainers, then falling, but never hitting the unseen ground below.