Dreams

Split

I dreamed I told my brother what our father did to me. He threw me out of the house. The moment the words left my mouth, our father died. My brother blamed me.

Later, my brother split in two: one who believed me and one who didn’t. The one who believed was locked in a room crying and wailing, not just about what happened to me but about what happened to him. The one who didn’t believe was standing over the one who did. He was pointing and screaming. He started to beat up the one who believed but instead fell to his knees, bawling.

I was all alone in another room. I thought they’d come for me once they realized what had happened to them and to me. They never came. They were lost in a world in which they could only console each other. It was like I’d never existed. But I did, and I do. I believe they exist, too, in one body: half believing, half trapped in disbelief. One brother cordoned off behind a velvet rope in a bewildering cage our father made for him that’s now his own.

Nowhere Going Nowhere

Across the creek, cows have replaced horses. The windmill has given up on the idea of spinning. Rust keeps it still even on windy days. I dreamed I was beheaded, and Stephen Miller joined the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. He rented me a pastel house in the middle of nowhere while I grew a new head. I lived there with Jason Statham, who let me see the world through his eyes until I had my own. He wore all black and sharpened knives incessantly. Folks like to walk into the wildlands at the end of my road. They always come back, like my head did. It was the end of times in my dream. Thirty days of unspeakable violence. CBS was inciting it by cutting their stories in a way that made us hellbent on destruction. The end of times. The end of the road. A nowhere going nowhere fast. A head that grows back but why. Even a cow knows better than to attempt such a thing.

Rootball First

I dreamed I was in a seminar, and the speakers kept making jokes about a man’s appearance. He’d answer a question, and they’d say things like, That’s a pretty good answer for a bald guy.

Finally, I’d had enough. Quit saying he’s bald, I said. That’s body shaming and has nothing to do with his answers.

They replied, Of course you’d say something like that, Barbie Doll.

I was like, Take your seminar and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.

The seminar was “The Care and Cultivation of Miniature Palm Trees in the Desert.” They gave each attendee a miniature palm tree. I’d already managed to kill mine. I’d only had it for an hour. I pulled it out of its pot by its dead canopy and threw it to the ground rootball first like I was some kind of wrestler who was about to leave the wrestling federation on principle but wanted to get one more slam in.

My friend Rethabile Masilo was there. He grabbed the dead palm tree and said he’d bury it for me.

You just go, he said. Take the fight to the streets. So I did.

Barnacled

I dreamed barnacles were responsible for creating and destroying universes. Each universe was cast out into spacetime like one of the nebula projectors Bo Burnham uses in his performances. I was part of a group that was combing intertidal zones all over the world looking for the barnacle that was casting our universe. We needed to figure out how to make that barnacle live forever or how to transfer our universe to another barnacle before the current barnacle died.

The barnacles had been doing this handoff successfully on their own up to this point for the past 500 million years but, because of climate change, their ability to keep our universe, and therefore all the universes that our universe made possible through other barnacles, was in jeopardy. I know this makes no sense. It was a dream. There’s a lot more to the dream that I don’t remember. I did think, This is the most amazing dream ever, and I can’t wait to tell everyone about it, as I was having the dream. I’m pretty sure the parts of the dream I’ve forgotten wouldn’t make it make more sense.

Yes, I know barnacles are younger than the universe. That’s one big problem with my dream. Maybe some other system was in place before the barnacles took over. Or maybe the barnacles weren’t the whole story but rather a subset of a larger experiential phenomenon organized like a social network with an infinite number of dense, centralized, and fragmented components that are loosely tied to one another and maybe even jostle loose from time to time.

Maybe the barnacles were dreaming worlds much the way humans dream worlds while asleep and awake. Maybe every living thing is casting out universes every moment, ones that either do or do not die when they do.

Image: Acorn Barnacle Anatomy #1, a photograph by Science Photo Library that was uploaded July 12, 2016. Link in comments.

Exiles

Three nights ago, I dreamed I was living in a cultlike community that I couldn’t leave. I had no idea how I got there. I was just there, and I didn’t want to be.

Everyone had to do work to earn their keep. I tried to learn how to spin yarn, but I was so slow I barely earned any water, let alone food. The machine that dispensed the water was complicated. I kept putting my cup in the wrong place, so water went everywhere other than my glass, and I squandered my portion for the first several days.

When I finally got my cup lined up properly, a sugary bright-blue liquid came out. I was told it was better than water because it would give me the energy I needed to work faster. You don’t want to have to do what those who aren’t productive have to do, another community member, a little girl, told me.

Everyone slept in a basement that seemed to go on forever. Maybe it was a converted tunnel. There were no walls. All the furniture was honey blonde and part of matched sets that marched into the distance. Heavy headboards. Mirrored dressers. Worn, earth-toned bedding. All the beds were adult-sized, but there were no adults here. Everyone in this place, other than me, was a child.

Toys and children’s books were piled high with even higher drifts off to the side. I tried to make room for the belongings in a small bag I had with me. I somehow knew these toys and books were important, that we needed them, and that I needed whatever was in my bag, but there was nowhere to move anything to make space for my things. I propped my bag on one of the dressers and thumbed through a box of photos, pausing to look at several of my sister when she was young. I wondered when she would come see me, come save me, knowing she wouldn’t.

I held up a photo of myself that was taken at my grade school when I was seven years old. I had bright blond hair pulled back on one side with a barrette that had cherries printed on it. My dress was burnt red and made of velvet. My front teeth were oversized and still had a gap between them. I looked happy and desperate.

Someone who seemed to be both of and not of this place called my name and took a Polaroid photo of me when I turned around. The entity appeared to have a degree of omniscience. When the photo developed, it looked like the one from when I was seven. How can this be, I asked. I’m an adult, not a child. I looked in one of the dresser mirrors and saw myself as I am today. How could I be one thing in the mirror and another in the photo?

That’s when I realized, with the help of the entity, that everyone in this place was one of their exiled parts. None of us were children. We only looked like children because our exiles are children. This wasn’t even a real place. It was a liminal space we inhabited collectively as exiles. I didn’t know how to leave, so I woke up and left my exile there with the others.

White Salamanders

We invented numbers, then we assigned meaning to them, both everyday meanings and special meanings when they show up in a certain way, like 11:11. That’s how everything we do works. We make something up. We agree on what it means, or at least some of us do. We find aberrations that appeal to our cognitive biases and imbue those aberrations with magic, extraordinariness. We can’t just accept that everything is extraordinary all the time, no sleight of hand needed. No tall tales.

But we love stories, don’t we? Stories like the white salamander letter. (Look it up. You won’t regret it.) Even I love that story and am terribly sad it was based on a forgery. A real untrue story, fully committed to, is better than a con, I think. It’s close to poetry. Maybe it doesn’t matter: origin, intent. Something in us needs stories, and we’ll get them one way or the other.

I dreamed I was in a large, tiered, auditorium-style room looking for a place to sit so I could read a book and drink some tea from a demitasse teacup. I was dressed like Alice from Alice in Wonderland. Everyone else in the room was male or male-bodied. All the seats were leather and moist from the glandular skin of those who’d recently sat in them. None of the seats were right for me.

I suddenly felt scared and ran out of the room into a long hall. It was a secret part of the library in my hometown at the university where my father worked. Red carpet and decor. Brown spines. Brown wood. Books covering every wall all the way to the ceiling. The smell of dust and leather and cigars. The air hazy.

A man in a tophat and his rabbit held open the curtain to an adjoining room. The curtain was maroon and heavy, with thick twisted gold fringe, the kind where each twist is under constant tension from being held in its contorted shape. I walked through it. I have no idea what happened next, but I know something happened next.

I write stories in my sleep, that rich world I visit every night. What comes to me is essential, life-giving nonsense. I couldn’t live without it. That world is loose, vivid, surprising, and informed by every moment of my life, all outside of time. Ah, time. Now, we’re back to numbers, their rigidity and our desire to break them out of that box they must live in most of the, ahem, time to serve us and let them walk through the curtain into who knows what, who knows where. All we want to do is follow.

Dream Language

Dream language: Two who mirror can mirror each other, but when one moves behind the back of the other, the second loses their reflection and must recreate it from memory as vision. This is how we learn to worship the self as other when other always is and has been self.

Also from last night’s dreams: A retreat. Cloud decor giving way to wheat sculptures. A grotto. Hallways full of doors. My vision board torn down hastily as the retreat ended. A half-finished project detailing radio stations airing vulgarities that I wasn’t able to take with me. Retreat organizers grinding their words like spices as the life partner and I packed up. We’d overstayed our welcome. Cloud time was for us, not wheat time. They beamed at the incoming group while waving us away like flies. The landscape crew mumbled. They claimed they’d watered things they hadn’t watered. Nothing was real anyway. They’d seen it all before and would see it again. More incomers. More enameled hope, the ill-placed hope that keeps the nightmare alive. Our dog ran off. The organizers made us leave before we could find her.

Death Is Not a Jinn

I dreamed the poetry community was a psychosis-inducing haunted mansion that all the poets had to live in together. My room had a closet with a secret panel. Behind the panel was information about a poet who’d died in the 1800s. Behind that panel was another panel with warnings about not ever opening the second panel ever no matter what. The second panel popped open on its own. Behind it was the corpse of the poet laid out in an open casket. It was Emily Dickinson in her white dress. Behind the casket was a tunnel that led straight down to hell. I bumped the casket. Dickinson’s corpse slid down the tunnel. I almost followed but braced myself against the tunnel’s walls. Once I was back in my room, I sat on the bed and vowed to tell none of the other poets what had happened. The panel covering the tunnel had no latch. I waited for whatever was going to come through to come through as fear crawled up my spine. That fear was the devil. Downstairs, the other poets laughed and drank and carried on, unaware.

              Death is not a jinn.
              It’s a hollow limb snapped off
              the tree, a portal.

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.