# [D26:2M] Vision: [[The Joke was Forgotten Long Ago but the Laughter Never Ceases]] Hexagram: [[Twenty Sixth Hexagram]] Trials: [[Twenty Sixth Trial]] August 22nd, 1913 1. The dingbat napped guiltily on the couch in the punishing scorch of a summer afternoon and dreamt his ignorant dreams. He put his craving eye in a keyhole and watched his mother dance in her room. His mother was a giant and spilled out of her nightgown and his unseen eye in the keyhole is what pushed her down. She fell to the floor with a thud and then heard his laughter and saw his eye from where she lay on the hardwood crying. 2. She would put her boot on his face forever.  He would laugh and laugh.  It was his own mother, in his own dream from which he would never wake, and so too then was it his own boot.  It was not revenge she bade him but a thing swept up into the vicissitudes of transference.  Had it been revenge, the dream might eventually conclude with the destruction of everything.  He'd have awakened in a sweat.  But even after he woke, the dream was still the dream, and his laughter did not cease, though he'd already forgotten the joke. He put on his pants, laughing, and made the coffee. He sat in his little wooden chair out back and laughed as he watched the early light lift onto the eastern slopes and listened to the chickadees and mourning doves.  His lawn was well manicured and the new willows were growing quickly.  It used to be only nomads came across these highlands, too arid was it to live here permanently.  The dingbat knew a little about the history here, the fate of the bison and beavers and wild turkeys and so on.  He drank his single-origin fair-trade coffee, a bean he had special ordered.  He laughed that he didn’t lament.  He laughed that he laughed.