Dreams

Notched

I dreamed I was a crew member for a reality television show in which a group of women and female-bodied contestants were trying to overcome their trauma and abuse by getting a very old man—who was close to death and just wanted to collect sticks on the beach and fashion them into wings before he died—to love them. The goal was to get him to lay down his pile of sticks and follow one of the contestants. In this moment, both the old man and the contestant would be healed live on national television.

I realized the man was being forced into a situation he didn’t want to be in and his life was being prolonged because he couldn’t leave Earth until he completed his wings. I saw that the contestants were becoming more and more traumatized. Their flesh peeled away from their backs like old papier-mâché falling from the form it was appended to, exposing their ribs. The contestants were carving deep notches in each rib for every day they were made to participate in the show. One woman had so many exposed ribs and notches that the camera crew couldn’t figure out how to shoot the final scene. I heard two producers talking off stage.

We wanted to show trauma but not this degree of trauma, one said. Who in America wants to see someone as crazy as this?

They adjusted the scene so all the contestants’ scarred ribs were visible but not too visible. I stood in a pool of red velvet drapery at the edge of the set trying to make everything go away, even myself. We were moments from taping the final scene. The old man was oblivious to what was happening. The contestant who’d been deemed the winner was elated that she’d finally be healed. Everyone thought she’d be able to get the old man to follow her as she ran down the beach and waves teased her bare feet.

The show’s final song played in the background.

              In your flowing sea-green gown
              Tempt father death and you’ll be found
              To have a body-mind unmoored
              To be life’s bride and not its whore

The old man found his pile of sticks, which had been stashed by one of the producers. He quietly began picking them up. I helped him. I wish I could tell you that made me a hero. It didn’t. I wish I could tell you the man flew off. He didn’t. I wish I could tell you the contestants healed or the producers learned something about empathy or the audiences who watched the show learned from the old man and the contestants. They didn’t. They didn’t. They didn’t.

Toy

I dreamed I invented the perfect body-positive, sex-positive sex toy that was also an actual toy for those who, like me, live in the let’s talk about books and spreadsheets and history fringes of pleasure than in the more traditional let’s put this and that together set.

We’re Here. We’re Poets. Get Used to It.

I dreamed I was in the U.S. Senate chambers, where a politician was spewing the hate of the moment as faithfully as a geyser, when a feeling started moving through my body. It began in my gut and had me on my feet before it reached my brain. I didn’t even know what I was going to say, but it ended up being this:

What’s the point of poetry?

Why does it matter when it can lead you down some unknown path, and you don’t even know how it will end?

When it gets you so lost you feel like you’ll never be found?

When everything ahead of you is a blank page, and there’s nobody there to help you fill it?

What’s the point of starting out on that journey all alone, maybe never to finish, never to come back the way so many who wander lose in the end to their wandering, boots into snow, knees into dirt, head into clouds?

The point is to go forth anyway.

To try.

To make that creative journey, which is an existential journey, because it can bring us back to ourselves and each other in the end rather than relegating us to seats where hate lives and breathes, where the air is sucked out of the room every time we open our mouths, because poetry is an act of living and an act of love, and politicians, hell all of us, need to lean into love.

Leaning the other way, into darkness, is not an option because it’s an extinguishing.

The human spirit will not be extinguished.

Living beings will not be extinguished.

The Earth will not be extinguished.

We’re here.

Poems are here to remind us why.

The whole thing was somehow caught on a live camera and played to a gaggle of teens who were visiting the capital. As I left the chambers, they all threw their arms up the way I’d thrown mine up as I spoke. In unison, they yelled POETRY! Poetry gave them hope that day, as it gives me hope every day.

I’ve written before about how dreams may be more our reality than waking states. I hope that’s the case and that dream logic seeps into all our waking states today, tomorrow, and as long as we’re all sharing space here in time. Happy fall equinox.

Dream Body

I dreamed my dream turned into a body and crawled out of my body so it could suffocate me. I dreamed this dream over and over. In some iterations, the dream whispered terrifying things in my ear before it stilled my breath. The dream’s body was made of the universe. It was weightless but all force.

The Cube

I dreamed I was in Kansas City and was back in school as a flute performance major. A poet and I were sharing a dorm room. It was great at first. I had the room done up like a little Hello Kitty store, full of the kinds of snacks and supplies we’d need, all presented vending-machine style. The poet was funny like he is. It was all good.

One evening, I went to a party in the library. All the conservatory students sneaked in after hours. It was getting late, and everyone was falling asleep in a tangled pile on some of the vinyl furniture we’d pulled together to make a giant sleeping pod. I decided to go back to the dorm room. When I got there, the poet started screaming at me, reconstructing the past in ways that didn’t reflect reality, accusing me of things I hadn’t done, and calling me sanist.

I left and went to a bedazzled cube suspended at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere. The cube rotated slowly on a horizontal axis, the moon coming in and out of view as it spun, like a restaurant called The Skies that’s no longer open in Kansas City.

There was a woman in the cube, my flute professor. She told me we could stay together if that’s what I wanted. I said it was.

Can I tell everyone, I asked.

I’d rather you not, she said. I want you to be my secret.

Secret. Othering. Erasure. Being hidden. The same old story, only this one suspended in time for all eternity.

That’s not what I want, I said as the cube started free-falling, heading toward Earth. This is the end of times, isn’t it, I said.

Yes, she replied, adding that I knew that on some level. You must have known.

Send me back to Earth, I said. I want to be with the planet and all living beings when the end comes, not here with you.

But here it will be painless. You will continue, she said. And there are humans there.

I know, and I am of them as they are of me, I replied. I belong with them, not you.

With this, John Lithgow appeared. He explained that, like the woman, he was God, who is distributed across everything but is also one thing. He would take me back to Earth because that was my wish.

As we floated down, he said, There’s going to be fire, heat. Stuff like that. Hot and not in a good way. Do you still want to go? The cube is very comfortable.

I still want to go.

Fine. Have it your way.

When we got to Earth, it was peaceful. It was beautiful. It was like I was seeing everything for the first time. Birds. Lizards. Water. Sand. No heat, no fire, no end of anything.

I went to my dorm room, and the poet sat up in his upper bunk. He said, Everyone is a draft of curses, before lying back down.

I woke up, recorded those words, then fell asleep and lucid-dreamed the whole dream again because I knew it contained important lessons my mind was working out.

After replaying the dream, a woman appeared in the dorm hallway. She was dressed like a Weeble Wobble and came over to me. I recognized her as me and me as her because each human is distributed across all bodies but is also one body.

She said, What I’ve brought to the new art is my name, known only by its syllables.

Day. Nuh. Day. Nuh. Or any syllables. Yours, for instance, dear reader. There’s no difference, not since that first name was recorded: Ku Shim. Ku Shim. Kushim. 𒆪𒋆

I woke up and called out to my husband. It was time to stop dreaming, though I could have gone on in that state all day. Such dreams are alluring, but they also call us back to the Earth and to all living beings.

My sleep score was a 90. I won’t lie. With that dream sequence, I was hoping for 100.

Brackish

I’m not going to tell you how my arms are tingling and why, how a patch on the back of my head is tingling, too. It was the dream. The dream would have been enough. But it was also the nightmare. I won’t let the dream become words yet. I won’t let the nightmare become words yet. They are both doing their work inside my body as crickets or something like crickets sing outside my windows in the Southern Utah desert.

The crickets sing on the other side of a world taken by humans, wrecked by humans, a brackish world like parts of Lake Texoma where nobody ever drowns except those who do.

In the dream, a girl felt pure love and lived for the first time. The girl wasn’t me. She was me. In the nightmare, children are gathered around my dog Fifi at my fifth birthday party. Ruthie is there. Her brother. Sara. Lola. Corey. I am there holding a stuffed bird who sings “Fly Me to the Moon.” I am dancing with the bird, spinning in circles. Sara is petting Fifi. She looks bored or scared or both. We all do. Fifi turns into my father. He’s doing karaoke. He’s drunk, gaze untethered above his mouth and nose. He’s looking down at us, on us, at whoever’s holding the camera. My party father. My gilded father. I want us kids to scatter like balls on a pool table. I want us to glide across the table and fall into pockets where we can hide. We don’t. We’re stuck, frozen. I wake up, leaving the other children there. I wake up tingling.

My nightmare is three photos from three different times. The birthday party. The bird. My father. The last one was taken long before I was born. It was another party, different children. Maybe no children. I’ll check the photos when it’s light out, when the crickets are quiet and the world has been returned to the living. These are the dead hours. They are for and of the dead. Too many dead. Too much unnatural death. Children in Gaza. Children in Gaza. Children in Gaza. My country ’tis not of me. Saccharin land of incivility. False freedom blings.

Rumprot

Content warning. I dreamed the leader I call Rumprot invented something called IUEDs, which stands for intrauterine explosive devices. He was booby trapping us, and he had a monstrous way of both placing and checking for these devices, which he passed off as absolutely necessary for national security and which he joked was like enacting a reverse breach birth. When he tried to check me for an IUED, I startled from the dream with an abrupt, layered utterance like a baby grand piano dropped from a penthouse the moment it hits the pavement. My strings are taut. They’re still vibrating. Good morning.

Stack of Heads

I dreamed I was attempting to find the seat of consciousness, which I believed was perched at the top of a stack of heads that sat on my head. Each head was smaller than the one below it, so I—or rather my awareness—could walk all the way to the top like I was climbing stairs. But I had to embody the understanding of each head before I could move up to the next one.

Finally, I reached the top. This is it, I thought. What I found there wasn’t freedom or understanding or release or enlightenment. It was a glass cube. My father sat enthroned within it eating dead worms. There was a lock with an alarm on the cube’s door. It wasn’t to keep others out and keep him safe. It was to keep him in and to keep others safe. If he broke the door or smashed the glass, the alarm would go off. Then what? I don’t know. He never got out of the cube. I never stopped having to carry him with me everywhere.

Nobody to Carry Me

I dreamed I was a finger puppet whose legs, at the knees, slid onto the index and middle fingers of whoever wanted to wear me around. Below the knees, my calves had been replaced by dangling tentacles. I had this dream at about noon because I was still sleeping. It was a hard day’s night into the next hard day—something you wouldn’t have picked up on if you’d seen me in what appeared to be excessive but otherwise unremarkable slumber.

I felt like an immobile creature with malfunctioning legs who had nobody to carry me around. The dream was spot on about that.

So in bed I stayed. And stayed. And stayed. Until some task or hope or apparition in the watery distance set my clock going. It wasn’t love, as Plath says. Maybe it was love. Maybe everything that makes us move internally and externally is love. I’d like to think so.

When I did get up, my pallesthesia, paresthesia, and benign fasciculation were in full swing, worse even than they were while I was lying in bed. My soleuses (solei if you’re fancy) felt like they were the inside of Demosthenes’ mouth, a pride of pebbles grinding against each other as I moved. My legs gave out beneath me as I made my way to the bathroom.

This may not be the content you want from me because I am not a content creator, though I am someone who creates using words for the most part. I’m thinking here of my dearly departed friend (a Facebook unfriending, not a death) who said this kind of writing isn’t what he needs at this point in his life. I hate to disappoint. I also hate self-censorship and won’t do it. If I dream about being a finger puppet with tentacles for legs, I’m going to write about that. If my legs give out on me when I try to move around my house, I’ll write about that, too. Writing about these things means I made it to my computer and I’m writing. That’s my win. That’s what I need at this point in my life. This all informs the greater writing. By that, I mean the poems, the poems, the poems.

Nobody to Carry Me

I dreamed I was a finger puppet whose legs, at the knees, slid onto the index and middle fingers of whoever wanted to wear me around. Below the knees, my calves had been replaced by dangling tentacles. I had this dream at about noon because I was still sleeping. It was a hard day’s night into the next hard day—something you wouldn’t have picked up on if you’d seen me in what appeared to be excessive but otherwise unremarkable slumber.

I felt like an immobile creature with malfunctioning legs who had nobody to carry me around. The dream was spot on about that.

So in bed I stayed. And stayed. And stayed. Until some task or hope or apparition in the watery distance set my clock going. It wasn’t love, as Plath says. Maybe it was love. Maybe everything that makes us move internally and externally is love. I’d like to think so.

When I did get up, my pallesthesia, paresthesia, and benign fasciculation were in full swing, worse even than they were while I was lying in bed. My soleuses (solei if you’re fancy) felt like they were the inside of Demosthenes’ mouth, a pride of pebbles grinding against each other as I moved. My legs gave out beneath me as I made my way to the bathroom.

This may not be the content you want from me because I am not a content creator, though I am someone who creates using words for the most part. I’m thinking here of my dearly departed friend (a Facebook unfriending, not a death) who said this kind of writing isn’t what he needs at this point in his life. I hate to disappoint. I also hate self-censorship and won’t do it. If I dream about being a finger puppet with tentacles for legs, I’m going to write about that. If my legs give out on me when I try to move around my house, I’ll write about that, too. Writing about these things means I made it to my computer and I’m writing. That’s my win. That’s what I need at this point in my life. This all informs the greater writing. By that, I mean the poems, the poems, the poems.