Dreams

Flame and Ash

I’m toying with the idea that people are beings who live and die every moment, and any sense of continuity between moments is similar to the way our eyes smooth out what we see through a combination of physical and perceptual processes, such as saccades.

Memory persists to some degree between these deaths and births, though imperfectly and sometimes as complete fabrications that allow this or that narrative to earn its wings so it can soar across momentary lifetimes in order to either free us or whisk us away to ruin.

I don’t mean bodily birth or bodily death. I mean birth and death of self and of the worlds available to the self at any given time.

I don’t expect anyone to understand this or see anything of value in it. What this means, for me, is that I can only take people as they are in the moment—a moment that’s passed before I can even perceive it. It’s the best I can do.

We are flame and ash, flame and ash. Who we are today is not who we were yesterday or who we will be tomorrow. These are fictions. Even time is a fiction.

You are a person doing a thing in a place. I’ll meet you there to the best of my ability. Tomorrow, same. The day after that, same.

Is this nonsense? Maybe. Certainly. What isn’t.

Total Mass

I dreamed the editor of a literary journal accused me of writing cover letters that were unalive notes. She said, I’m returning your fine poems until you learn to say what your work is about without making me think you’re going to jump off that bridge you describe over in La Verkin, Utah, the one you say is all the rage right now, almost a rave if death could be a rave, bedecked in flowers and notes that read YOUR LIFE MEANS MORE TO US THAN YOUR DEATH MEANS TO YOU as if that’s not just another erasure of what folks who are about to unalive are going through.

There are always lights there, layers of red like beacons of death spinning horizontally in air, a party of futility, of resignation, of despair. Not Another One Bridge. That’s what the sheriffs call it, you say, but you don’t know. Not another one. Not today. Again? Then probably something about God or his conjoined twin Jesus if they’re into that. Then the call to the rescue crew who can fetch the body from the gorge below. Another crew. Another raising of the dead from the past, that unfathomably old rocky past they’ve leapt or fallen into.

Slipped, their family will say later, you say. They must have slipped. An accident. I don’t need to read things like that in your cover letters.

Say what you have to say in your poems. Say it there. Cover letters don’t have personas. We know they’re written by you. There are rules. There have to be. Poems are relegated to a certain space. They’re part of a tightly regulated total mass, like that laccolith you’re always writing about. It’s big, sure, but the whole of Utah, the whole of the world, can’t be a laccolith. Some of it has to be gilded jets for world leaders. That’s just the way it is.

Form dictates the content and reminds us of who we are and where we come from. We come from offices. From paper clips. From staplers. From clear, concise communication that’s business in the front and business in the back. No party. No pity. No pining. No pith.

We’re from formality and words arranged with an architecture that makes sense, that’s expected. Cover letters are like animals whose legs are where they should be, and they’re just walking, not riding around on skateboards or driving little cars like those hamsters you say you also dream about. Mr. Fuzzy, was it? And Tater McGee? They belong in a poem, not a cover letter. Stop making them drive off the bridge of your imagination. Cover letters aren’t Art Noir Quizno’s commercials from the 90s.

The cover letter should not be a form of psychological spelunking. Poems can be, depending on who you ask. You should know this by now. Just say Hi. Say here are my poems. Say thank you for considering my poems. Don’t bring up parasailing or Duran Duran or the Menendez brothers or loneliness or dreams about writing cover letters. Say hi. Here are my poems. Thank you.

Use a standard font. One-inch margins. Double space if you must, but keep yourself contained like someone walking across Not Another One Bridge all the way from one side to the other without incident. Don’t let your cover letter look into the gorge. It will do things to your cover letter, the looking. You know this. The cover letter knows this. I know this, and I’ve never even seen that bridge.

I won’t respond to any more submissions with unalive notes attached to them written by hand in red ink on torn scraps of lined paper the size of Post-its with arrows at the bottom directing me from one scrap to the next to make sure I read the whole thing like some failed Franklin Covey approach to professional communication.

Just say hi next time is the last thing the editor said before I left that dream and walked into a Home Depot where the greeter was an 80-year-old rocker sitting at a drum kit. But the editor followed me in there. She followed me from one dream to another. I couldn’t shake her all night. I kept saying it wasn’t an unalive note. It was just a cover letter. She wouldn’t listen.

I called her a Karen, which is how I knew I was dreaming. I don’t call anyone a Karen in real life unless they’re name is Karen, and I don’t use an article before their name. STOP BEING SUCH A KAAAAR-EN I shrieked over the drummer, whose riffs were technically impressive but unoriginal. Everything he played was played out long ago. He was dressed in leather from head to toe. His getup was as ravaged by time as he was. He may have been famous once, but not anymore. Not in this dream version of a Home Depot in Southern Utah.

Was this dream-heaven? Dream-hell? Dream-purgatory superimposed on my sunny desert? I wanted a pen and paper so I could capture this dream in the perfect cover letter.

Dreams as Reality

What if waking is just what we do because we need to survive and sleeping (and similar states) are where we actually live? I’m serious about this. We may have started out as sleeping organisms and evolved into wakefulness for practical reasons: to evade predators, to mate, to eat seeds and spread them around so whole forests could shoot up around us.

What if wakefulness is a form of survival and reconnaissance, where we gather what we need, including sensory information, memories, and emotional experiences that we can distill when we’re not awake. How can we say sleeping isn’t the ultimate reality, or at least the richest one we have access to as human beings?

I’ve thought something like this for a long time. Hypotheses jostle in my head like sugar-plums, one of which is related to states like mania and is based on my lived experience. (I think extreme shifts in mood, energy, and intellect can cause or be caused by an entanglement of sleeping and waking states, especially in folks who already have more semi-permeable membranes between the two.)

Carl Jung was right about the importance of dreams and the states they allow us to enter, including those that both extend the self and extend beyond the self. The architecture of my life draws largely on my dreams: what I learn in them, what I understand through them, and how I become and become again through them. Of course, dreaming necessitates sleeping. The closest waking approximation would be deep meditation with periods of theta- and even delta-wave activity. Those are also important states. Unfortunately, they’re the equivalent of fly-over states for many of us in the United States, who are driven away from them because our culture forces us into the quasi-democratic late-stage capitalist framework turned fascist oligarchical business government regime that demands we be “on” all the time, hence we’re routinely shifted into gamma-wave riddled states of mind.

I’m in that state of mind right now, hence that last jam-packed, convoluted fifty-two-word sentence. My theta and delta waves are quaking in fear right now. They don’t know if I’ll ever come back to them. I will, you two. I will. Here’s my commitment to them and to myself: Today, I will collect what I need for the worlds I will inhabit in my dreams tonight. I mean, I’ll do this purposefully and consciously as part of a self-experiment in which I flip the script on what being awake and being asleep mean to me and what roles they play in my life. Then I will live in deep sleep and light sleep and REM sleep for eight hours or so before I wake to collect more for tomorrow night. Sleep, I’m out here doing what you need me to do. See you soon.

The Last Woman Experiments

I dreamed about a body of research that was established by the federal government called The Last Woman Experiments. They were studies conducted on women today to determine how the last woman on Earth could survive, repair the broken world, and repopulate the planet with flora, fauna, and human beings. Each experiment was designed to take the subject to the point of death. She would be pushed until she died so The Last Woman could theoretically, someday, live.

This was all a smokescreen for misogyny, for eradication of the majority of female and female-bodied people from this planet, and for giving the elite a blueprint for surviving the unthinkable: the apocalypse they are hastening because they think they can beat it and live rich, white, and large on a depopulated planet. They think it’s like a game of Legos where you build something, break it to pieces, and build it again. But they know they need women in that new world, and they’re strapping the women who survive with the responsibility of growing food, creating life, cleaning up the global messes they’ve made, and starting the human population over from numbers too small to recover from.

Who do they want The Last Woman to be? The Last Women? How many women would they sacrifice to get to the perfect model, the AI-enhanced Bionic Woman of our times, of the future, the one they need to do the work they can’t do, could never do, because they must keep four things alive in her that they don’t have, but in a controlled way: creativity, empathy, hope, and love.

I was in one of the experiments. I escaped and survived. Several women and female-bodied poets I know in real life came alongside me and supported me in telling my story and warning others. We did Zoom calls with women around the world. We got no support. The women in the calls said they needed us to be experimented on so they could survive. Stated another way, we needed to die so they wouldn’t. They told us this from their kitchens as they baked bread, from their nurseries as they rocked their children. They told us in all languages and all accents and from every country. We knew then that it was too late. Fascism had won. It had spread like a thin layer of paint all over the globe and seeped into everyone’s bodies, minds, and hearts.

They were scared, these women. They wanted to live—but at our expense. They didn’t realize they’d be in the next round of The Last Woman Experiments, that they weren’t what the powers that be wanted to survive any more than we were. So they gardened and wore the right clothes and obeyed their husbands even if they really wanted wives and prayed every day for God to make them better, to make them what they needed to be: something that could go on.

Here were some of the experiments. I don’t remember all of them.

Experiment 1: Be sexually assaulted and don’t tell anyone that it happened.

Experiment 2: Grow a child in your blown-out uterus.

Experiment 3: Repair your body when all you have to drink is heavy metal-laden water.

Experiment 4: Learn to love being tied down for days, weeks.

Experiment 5: Survive radioactive fallout without it affecting your beauty.

The Deconsolidation

I dreamed there was a mass psyche-extinction event in the United States called The Deconsolidation. It scrambled people’s memories, jumbled our understanding of time, and decimated our sense of self. In an effort to reverse the damage, a government project known as The Reconsolidation was launched. People were taken, one by one, into a room that looked like the interior of a moving train. There was a window with a table and two short booths in front of it, all under a warm spotlight.

Each participant was seated across from the interviewer, who asked simple questions with simple answers. The participants listened and responded as fake hypnotic landscapes whizzed by the fake window. The interviewer was kind, his voice low and reassuring. The interchange was designed to make us feel safe and bring our minds back online.

When it was my turn, I recognized that we were on a set, that there was no train, no scenery, that the world had been deconsolidated along with our psyches. I could see the dark corners of the space, where everything trailed off to nothing. I was one of the few who had not been successfully deconsolidated for whatever reason, so I saw through all of it. Why were they bringing everyone back, our minds back, to a world that was gone?

Our belief. They needed our belief in them, in ourselves, in what was, so they could keep taking and taking and taking everything from us. They wanted to keep their precious power even in an illusory world. They would turn the whole planet into a Potemkin Village to get it. We, the villagers, dazed and wandering, were their only hope.

Petrified

I dreamed I was dead but didn’t know it because my husband used petrification to preserve me perfectly. I looked like I was still alive. I couldn’t see or hear or smell or taste or feel, but I thought I could. I experienced the world as if I was still part of it, not realizing my husband was carrying me everywhere: from the bed to the sofa, from the sofa to my desk, from the desk to the car for long drives in the wildlands.

Everything I sensed was a vivid memory, not reality. I’d mined these memories to invoke the aroma the meals my husband cooked, the feeling of his hand holding mine, our dog’s fur tickling my shins, and dawn’s light glinting off vast cliffs and deep canyons while ravens flashed their oiled bodies and I turned to face my husband so I could say “I love you, I love you.”

We went on like this for months or perhaps years. Maybe nearly eternity. I had no concept of time. Every day seemed like past, present, and future all at once until, for whatever reason, I realized my body was a tomb that I was locked inside. I was dead and I knew it, but how could I know anything, even knowing I was dead?

Once I knew I was dead, I could no longer imagine I was alive. The dream of me was on the other side of an inescapable enclosure. Did my husband still carry me around? Did he prop me up next to him so we could watch movies together? Did he take me out to see birds? Where was our dog? Our house? The wildlands? The world?

When would my knowing leave, whatever vestiges of awareness this was? How long would I refuse to vacate this cold black thing where my mind was a fly frantically hitting every ceiling, every wall?

Realms Beautiful and Terrifying

Awake is my least favorite word when I don’t want to be. Our water purifier started making a high-pitched noise a few minutes ago, a steady ewwww like a piece of industrial equipment humming in the distance, at once piercingly but almost inaudibly. I unplugged it, but the sound made me hyperfocused on my tinnitus, so now I’m just a body that screeches and won’t stop.

I took some sleep medicine, something I rarely do. As I wait for it to kick in, night thoughts do their dark work. I don’t ruminate about minor issues like some folks. My waking nightmares are about my father, my family, Oklahoma, me, the ways in which I’ve been purged, and the things I feel like I need to purge that find me at night when I’m closer to my personal unconscious and the collective unconscious than I am during the day.

I had an unthinkable thought that was immediately ushered by my circuitry to every central and distal part of my body. My feet. My hands. My tongue. My scalp. My shoulders. My gut.

What if, I thought. What if it’s true?

This particular thought is a hard one to put on a shelf until I can process it in the light of day. The “what if” feels less like a possibility than a haunting, a visitation declaring what the world is and who I am in it. I don’t like either. I hope I’m seeing an old lady that’s really an owl, like in one of those optical illusions.

The unconscious realms are beautiful and terrifying. I’d prefer a different ratio of beauty to terror right now. I’d rather experience both while asleep, not while sitting in bed awake, my warm dog pressed up against my calf doing what I can’t do: slumber. I feel her breath on my foot. I feel her chest rise and fall. I feel how soft and small and fragile she is. I feel how much I love her and how much I don’t want to be a monster in a monstrous world.

Awake is my least favorite word when I don’t want to be. Terror is my second least favorite. Monster is my third least favorite. To be an awake, terrified monster inside of what is monstrous is nothing I’d wish on anyone.

Dead, I Wanted to Live

I dreamed I died. I saw my body lying on its side on a gurney. I was wearing a blue hospital gown. I was sort of in the fetal position, but my arms and legs were positioned unnaturally. I’d been turned and folded into myself after my death like someone trying to fit more garbage into a can.

I watched myself from above trying to figure out what happened. My mouth was partially closed around a laryngoscope. A tube had been inserted partway down my throat. Then I felt it: the heart attack that killed me. I remembered the shock, the pain, the flooding warmth like contrast dye used in CT scans, my belt-tightened chest, the last wild hoofbeats of my heart, then nothing.

The staff didn’t try to revive me. This one’s not worth saving, I heard one of them say. They rolled me into a side room that wasn’t monitored and left me there, where I was now watching over my corpse.

I don’t know how long I’d been dead, but the part of me that was disembodied began to feel cold. Everything went starry and black. Time wasn’t gone, but it was everything together all at once, not sequential. There was no past, present, or future. And it wasn’t a human time scale time. It was the universal time scale.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to be cold forever, and I was pissed that the doctors and nurses let me die. I fought my way back to the hospital room where I was lying. The next step was to get back in my body the way I’d always done in lucid dreams when my consciousness became untethered. I laid down inside my corpse, but I wasn’t connecting with it. When I moved, it was just my disembodied self that moved, effortlessly and mass-free. Finally, with great concentration, I was able to move my arm. Nobody noticed because the room was empty. My heart began beating, but there where no monitors to alert the staff.

I was pretty fucked. I knew I didn’t have much time before I died again. I used all my inner strength to throw myself off the gurney and drag myself to the nurse’s station using my fingers. Boy, we’re they surprised. They immediately picked me up and fussed over me. “We did everything we could,” they told me as they dusted me off. I knew they hadn’t.

I knew then that I cared more about staying alive than anyone else cared about keeping me alive. Even when I was dead, I wanted to live, so I did.

I also knew I couldn’t tell the staff I remembered what they did. If a knowing look even momentarily hardened my face, they’d see it, and I’d never get out of the hospital alive. I had to pretend they tried to save me when they actually discarded me. I had to let devils be angels.

There was one hitch. I’d been dead long enough that I could no longer speak or write without every word being replaced with a different one. No matter how careful I was when I communicated, the wrong things came out of my mouth or appeared on the screen. That’s when I realized I should have stayed in All-Time rather than returning to Earth. Living is nothing if it’s gibberish, if every important word is replaced with a meaningless one, like vole when you mean love or oval when you mean love or leave when you mean love.

Living Through Destruction

I just woke up from a dream that I was driving through Canyonlands while Harold Budd and Brian Eno’s “Not Yet Remembered” played in the background.

The wind has stopped. It’s raining. It’s dark. I’m here in the dark-sky Toquerville blackness, in the no-wind dribbling rain, crying about yet another place I love.

May we all remember a place we love today, even if it’s gone, even if it’s been destroyed, even if we’re living through its destruction. May we all survive and help our places survive, too.

The Shrine

I’m dismantling the Kris Kristofferson shrine on my timeline now. Parts of it, at least. I must be reasonable. After all, I’m still alive. There will be more time for despair when I’m dead. I’ll keep a few photos up, my favorites, and try not to add any more as the day wears on.

Last night, I dreamed I was inside a frozen water droplet that was also a cell and an egg and the earth and the multiverse and the brain and the mind. It was the past, present, and future: all the possible pasts, presents, and futures. It was sliced horizontally all the way through as thin as sections of the human brain before examination in an electron microscopic.

Each section was an alternative reality or a past or a biological process unfolding or a sunrise or a volcanic eruption or a building full of people doing telemarketing in a sea of cubicles. There were openings between the sections, hidden passageways. On one side toward the bottom, there was a hemangioblastoma that was red and throbbing. It grew a little anytime something new was added to the droplet.

The droplet and the tumor had to grow at the same rate, otherwise the droplet would be compromised and eventually break. They grew together when individual worlds grew, new universes were born, humans and animals evolved or made new discoveries, things like that.

But trauma was different. It made the tumor grow but not the droplet. The tumor was growing fast, much faster than the droplet. You could see it encroaching on the rest of the droplet’s space, like retinal blood vessels into an eye’s vitreous body.

There was too much trauma in our cells, in our eggs, in our earth, in our multiverse. There was too much trauma in our waters. I woke up before the droplet burst.