Heidi Saha: Supreme Goddess
So I finally purchased a DVD, meaning I paid for it, in 2015. It was The AckerMonster Chronicles! (2012). I was spiraling in despair and needed a retreat to the last time my life made sense, which was when I was 14.
The video was great. Interviews with Harryhausen, Bradbury, Dante, Joshi, Matheson, Nolan, and Landis! It also had the first live footage of George Clayton Johnson I’d ever seen, and extensive commentary by the Dan O’Bannon.
Well, during the opening credits I saw something felt like a stab through the heart. It was a face—an astoundingly gorgeous face that was off the beauty scale. Oh, and she was dressed as Vampirella:
The mystery that started this whole stupid section.
Was this the model for the first Frank Frazetta Vampirella painting? Was this amazing girl the original model? Is that why she was hanging with Forry?
I did’t stop and rewind; I let it pass. And after a few minutes I figured it was probably a hallucination, or a projection, or an augmentation due to unconscious desire.
Some hours later, I scrolled back and looked again. The pain returned. Her face wasn't just gorgeous, it was copied from the two Damsel Dreams I had at age nine.
HOVER: When I first saw that face. Loli and Jodi and Russian and Asian … all wrapped up in a New Orleans vampire dominatrix package.
When I was nine, I had a vivid dream that can only sound cliche if I recount it now. I went to a complex building, snuck inside, found the stairwell, and went down, down, down. The basement was a dungeon, or a jail, and inside was a young girl in tattered white gown and soiled face and stringy hair. She recognized me. She told me that she loved me, and had been waiting for years—nine years, to be exact.
This dream was so monumental that it was the reason I started keeping a dream diary.
Our maid “found” it (in the top drawer of my dresser) when I was 14 and after realizing that these were dreams freaked out and “cautioned” my mother that this was dangerous. Yes—learning about dreams is dangerous, by which she meant that it would open my up to Satanic influences. So my mom actually threw the whole fucking thing away while I was at summer camp, age 14. I had actually avoided looking at them in order to enjoy a future surprise.
The dream was special not for its content, but because it was a lucid dream and my communication with the girl was an authentic second-person encounter with a real other mind. What caused this intense dream? Some say it was the childhood sexual eruption of puberty. In boys the testosterone explosion begins at age nine, when serum levels jump from 7 to 130 ng/dl (18.6 x)—and then again at 11 to from 130 to 800 (6.1 x). Could a sudden flood have caused this paroxysm whereby my anima materialized as a real second person accessible by my consciousness? (Also, I should add that she recognized me—that was the shocking part. She knew me, and had known me for a long time, including previous lives.
If ever there was a face to match the one from my Arthurian damsel rescue dream dream, it was this! “Who is this model,” I thought. “And where does her DNA come from, that she could be so perfect? And why is she hanging out with Forry?” Yes—her face was the face of the waif in the dungeon. (But the body had changed from lithe elf to buxom New Orleans vampire-domme. But I didn’t know about reverse image searching back then so I just gave up on the idea.
Here’s a better rendering.
Then a week later, I accidentally found out.
Heidi’s the name. Heidi Saha.