Tim Barrus: Sustiva Dreams: Demonology

The boys of Cinematheque, all have AIDS.

They tumble downstairs bleary-eyed. The espresso machine has grown hot.

Some are dressed. Some in underpants; one is in pajamas.

This is the Sustiva group. Everyone here takes a nighttime cocktail that includes an antiviral drug call Sustiva. Sustiva is a very, very powerful drug. It is one of the fre capable of suppressing HIV within the brain. It's a horse-sized pill. Orangish-brown, spotted yellow, like a desert lizard.

It give us extraordinary dreams. Dreams whose only analogy is to LSD. It's not unlike taking LSD before you go to bed every night and you wonder if the trip is going to be a gentle one or one more like a wild ride on a Harley-Davidson with no brakes.

My own take on Sustiva is that it's one scary trip through hell. It is a trip down a river of things you know, things you do not know, and things you do not want to know; and all of it illuminated hot as an electrical snap with a whip that is cutting deep and deeper into your brain.

I know this: it help to talk about it with people who are going through the same wild ride you are. Most people could not even begin to imagine what it's like to drop a potent form of acid every night for ten years.

Not everyone with AIDS is on Sustiva. The rest of the house is noisy and they sort of roll their eyes and walk around us.

Last night I dreamed I was with Anna Mae Aquash when she was shot in the head and pushed into a ditch at the side of a road to die.

We go around the group. People turn into animals. Birds. Or they walk among dead relatives, dead lovers, or death itself which seems to take many forms.

We dream of internment camps.

It help to not watch too much television or movies. Books can be as bad.

The scientific literature refers to some intense dreaming. It seems to de-emphasize the experience. Some people become acclimated to the drug and claim they no longer dream at all.

It's rare that any of them -- being adolescent boys, whores, thieves, junkies, literary frauds, artists, nude models, skateboard heretics, S/M playwrights, dancers, photographers, poets, cultural castaways -- would bring anything to read to the group. But when they do it tends to be Genet or Coleridge. We talk about dreams and seas and mysteries and mariners who have been dead since the fall of Rome so what matters any of it.

We have reached the point now where we rarely leave either the studio or the house. Most have paired off into relationships. I have slowly eased out of the role of leader. I am not the captain of this ship. No one could even try. This ship has set its own course, through it's own turbulent seas, and whatever destination it might have, it does not tell us any of its secrets.

From the Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

The bodies of the ship's crew are inspired, and the ship moves on ;
The loud wind never reached the ship,
Yet now the ship moved on !
Beneath the lightning and the Moon
The dead men gave a groan.
They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes ;
It had been strange, even in a dream,
To have seen those dead men rise.
The helmsman steered, the ship moved on ;
Yet never a breeze up-blew ;
The mariners all 'gan work the ropes,
Where they were wont to do ;
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools--
We were a ghastly crew.
The body of my brother's son
Stood by me, knee to knee :
The body and I pulled at one rope,
 But he said nought to me.