Where do such vivid dreams come from?  I have them all the time.  They're like fully formed motion pictures in my head, and when I wake, it's as though I've watched a Hollywood production of a movie that I seem to have casted, written, directed, and produced, in my head, by myself.

But this... this.

The vast majority of the movie is pedestrian.  Playing soccer with a friend in a field in a new town.  Walking through its crowded streets, among the shadows of its tall buildings.  A travelogue, of sorts.  Then: a conversation with another old friend, who is concerned because she does not know the whereabouts of her daughter.  She is not panicked, but she is close -- and because the daughter hasn't been gone long enough to call the police, she has no recourse but to wait.  I hug her and tell her that my thoughts are with her.

When I email her the next day, in this dream, to ask her whether she's heard anything about her daughter, she sends back a terse, cryptic response -- one that reads like it came, in parts, from her daughter.  "She's ok. Working as a waitress. Please don't follow. Seems like sexuality is involved somehow, but I don't want to think about that now. She says she's fine, and I believe her."

A strange response.

So, intensely curious, I google the daughter's name -- and I am taken immediately to a video.  

Remember, this is all firing in my brain, and this video... it felt like the revelation of a deep, multilayered truth, one that I have always suspected but never experienced to this depth, in this way.

It begins with the daughter, let's call her Heather -- or H, in the time-honored tradition of such stories -- standing at the side of the road, or perhaps an intersection, waiting for a car to come for her.  H is a normal girl.  Petite, jeans, babydoll T.  But inside, something burns.  It is clear that she has somehow prearranged for the car to be there, by sending some message to someone, somehow.  But in the video, there is just the arriving car, and the young man who drives it, who holds the camera upon her.  

From the instant she climbs into the car, it is intuitively obvious to me that the camera will never be off of her until whatever ordeal she has agreed to accept is over.

I believe that H is eighteen.  But perhaps only just eighteen -- only just barely of an age at which she might make her own decisions.  Which means that she has known about this rite; one does not simply learn, on one's eighteenth birthday, that one has an opportunity to immerse oneself in depravity.  No, one learns about depravity well beforehand -- in our modern world, it's all around us -- and waits for that day to arrive when the Law decrees a person capable of making choices.  Even such an irrevocable choice as this one.  

Military service.  Consensual sexual slavery.  Maybe the difference isn't so great as we might think.  Uniforms, hierarchy, submission, discipline, comraderie.  The breaking down of the person who existed before, to be replaced with a person who is stronger, fitter, and dedicated to service, service, service above all.  And when your time in the service is done, knowing that you've made a choice, committed yourself to an ideal, and come through the fire -- and that only those who have come through the fire with you understand where you have been, how you have been forged, and what you have become.  A wild look in the eyes that never dims and never leaves you -- and perhaps some memories that you would just as soon forget.  

That's what I saw in the eyes of this girl, and that's what led her to climb into that car at that crossroads.  She saw whatever it was she saw, and knew whatever it was that she knew.

Then the video cuts to the makers of the video.  A couple of men and a couple of women, attractive but ordinary, who assure you that what you see is real.  That the girl in the video has made her choice, and that there are girls, and boys, all over the world who make the same choice, every day, swelling their ranks.  They show a girl receiving a piercing -- but not exactly a piercing, much stronger, maybe even something that attaches to the bone -- of the right index finger, the mechanism that binds her physically to them.  And then, the oath: that she has nothing, that she is nothing, until the day that she herself decides to be set free. Maybe in two days, maybe in two months, maybe two years.  Maybe never.  Her choice -- but if she makes before her first year is out, she is shut out, excommunicated, alone, with five hundred dollars to return to whatever life she decides will make her happy.  As though any of us know what life looks like at eighteen.  Or ever.

The makers go on to explain more details -- most of which have either already eluded me in my wakefulness, or which perhaps were never made clear in the first place.  I do remember them making it clear that the cameramen themselves are all men, volunteers into the same bondage, modern-day eunuchs with cocks under lock and key, mute witness to all they see, destined never to be participants, but seeing all and recording all.  Truly, all.  Every second, every minute, every hour of every day, recording the lives of those who serve, where they go into the vault: hard drives, racked and glowing blue, storing up every detail of life.  No moment missed, no detail overlooked, no memory forgotten.  The lives of the servants, laid bare.

And then the club scene.  Dim, lit by flame.  Where H begins to understand, firsthand, the nature of the agreement she's made.  Naked, bound, gagged, strapped to the table, as clubgoers gather and watch the Goddess -- Brazilian, I seem to remember, or maybe it's just because she's dressed like a feathered creature at Carnival, the Catholic epitome of exotic sin.  

And when the Goddess takes the flogger and begins her sensual assault upon H, what I see are the eyes. This is it, the eyes say.  This is what I have wanted, and now that I am here, it is exactly, and is nothing like, what I expected it to be.  Her eyes roll back, the flogger dances and snaps.

And then the foreplay is over, and she descends into the forge that remakes her. 

But that show is not for me, because now I am awake.

I am awake, at 4:44 in the morning, and I know that I have no choice to arise, right then.  No choice but to record what I have seen in my mind's eye, and to wonder: what place is this I've dreamed?  And if it is nowhere -- then was I chosen, by whatever gods or devils create dreams, to bring this place into being?  

I wonder.  And I wonder if such a dream will come again.