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.

Black Box

I had an exciting thought about a poem at the tail end of a dream, and now I can’t go back to sleep. The fact that poems thrill me after three decades says a lot about poems. Perhaps it’s not just the Earth and sky that last forever, as the band Kansas asserts. It’s also the verse, the line.

I will never remember what happened to me two years ago today because I was overmedicated in the emergency room at Intermountain Health after being turned away when I went to the mental-health access center there for help the day before, but not before the access center kept me in a loud, brightly lit room for 24 hours with no bed, where I was left alone with two male nurses. What a terrifying thing for someone with a history of abuse at the hands of men to endure while in a state of trauma about her childhood abuse. Also, sleep deprivation and exposure to lights and noise, including music, day and night are more in keeping with prison torture tactics than with mental-health care, but sadly, the two are often one in the same. Shame on Intermountain for engaging in such practices.

To top it off, they failed to give me my thyroid-replacement medicine for hours, thereby exacerbating the state I was in by disrupting my endocrine system, which in turn negatively affected my HPA axis. That axis is key to emotional regulation. I don’t have a thyroid thanks to thyrotoxicosis and cancer, so my thyroid-replacement medication is critical. My TSH was already 11mIU/L when I got to the access center. It should have been less than 1mIU/L. The access center made my hypothyroid state even worse by not administering my medicine in a timely fashion.

The ER overmedicated me after I said Joseph Smith was delusional. What I actually said was, Sure. It’s fine when Joseph Smith does it, but not me. I wasn’t being hyperreligious. I was deconstructing religion, in that moment Mormonism, as well as the unwritten social rules that appear to govern when someone is seen as insane, divine, or both. Crazywise, as some call the latter. But not, largely, Southern Utahns, and certainly not ER workers at Intermountain.

That’s the last thing I remember. I blacked out for more than a day, this one: September 9, 2023. It’s a dark, rough-hewn box I can’t open, but I think Sharon Olds’ devil from her collection Satan Says might be inside it. By that, I mean my father.

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.

Proof of Something

The dead have a way of killing the living, as do the living. That’s what I woke up thinking at 3:30 a.m. when my rodeo neighbors flew their helicopter over my house and the walls vibrated and the bed vibrated and I vibrated.

I’ve been dead and alive for months now, maybe years. Maybe since I learned about the sex trafficking in the communities my father moved in and moved me around in.

Maybe since I learned that [REDACTED]. They’re rotting aspens, my family, carved with graffiti and missing bark, their leaves falling dead to the ground. All dead. All hollowed long ago but still demanding their remaining branches reach the sky somehow. For what? A sun that heals? A sun like a dead god who will help them forget how they’ve lived, if you can call it living. What do you call all that fluttering in the air above rot?

Definitely since my brother-in-law began dying from early-onset colorectal cancer last fall. Definitely since then.

Then there’s the call of the living who are dying or think they’re dying, the living I love, the call I will answer whenever it comes, even if it comes in the dead of night like a helicopter tangling the desert sage as it passes over. Or in the form of my husband. Or in my neighbor in Tucson, whose eyelashes are gone from chemo, and more, and more.

I’m tired. I’m sad. I’m scared. In Tucson and elsewhere, Indigenous people are being detained and told they aren’t citizens. And that’s just one atrocity that’s been happening over the past week. You can read about it in the news. I’m not the news and don’t want to be the news. I’m barely a person right now and am certainly in no shape to be reporting on anything.

Last week, I got the results of an extensive genetic test back. I’m not viable. That’s the bottom line. Yet here I am. I’m in the 99th percentile of fucked or fucked up on just about everything that matters. But genes aren’t everything. We know that. Whatever keeps me going isn’t my genetics. I’m in the 99th percentile for atherosclerosis, so yesterday I had the interventional cardiologist review the CCTA he ordered for me in 2022 when I was having heart issues. The test wasn’t done to determine how much soft or hard plaque I have in my arteries, but the cardiologist was able to pull it up and interpret the results. Jon and I stood in the exam room as he scrolled through the images from the test as if my interior was one of those flip books children make. Nothing. No plaque anywhere. My first thought was great. My second thought was why not me, why him. Him being my husband.

Risk doesn’t mean you have disease, the cardiologist says.

It’s good to know risk, but what we want to know is if you actually have disease or are on your way to having disease.

In this case, I’m high risk, no disease. Jon’s low risk, disease. Fuck risk factors. I mean, I don’t mean that. I don’t know what I mean. Just fuck maybe.

I had a dream two nights ago that took the form of a prose poem. Trump had dismantled the EPA and shut down all environmental cleanup sites, telling builders contamination won’t matter once the sites are developed.

It’ll be buried, Trump said. The waste will be buried. Just bury it. What’s buried can’t hurt anyone, almost as if he was talking about his own father, as if dead family can no longer do harm. I’m here to tell you they can. Look at my father in his grave, nothing now but bones caving in, obeying gravity like a falling apple only rotten all the way to the seed.

In the dream, I thought of Midvale, Utah, and the outrage locals felt in the 1990s when more than ten million cubic tons of toxic slag by the Jordan River were haphazardly covered in plastic with no lining underneath, vented, and later turned into commercial and residential developments. Folks in Utah wanted the EPA to do more, not less. They fought hard for more to be done but lost that battle. What would they fight for today? Less? Little? Nothing? Probably nothing. Just cover it up. Abolish the EPA. Who needs them. Who needs water and soil and air and viability for living beings.

In real life, not in the dream, we lived on that slagged land when we first moved to Utah, just down the street from Overstock, which was owned by the now-infamous Patrick Byrne, whose round concrete building with a peace sign on the roof was also on that land. Byrne got a deal on it, and he liked a deal. Jon worked for Overstock and for Byrne. This was right as he, Byrne, was transitioning from being a three-time cancer-surviving neuroatypical genius to whatever he is now. Maria Butina. Voting machines. Deep state. Trump as savior. Bars of gold and hunks of cheese stashed in Utah caves so he could feed and pay his employees in the event of an apocalypse. All of that. We’ve seen a man move from brilliance to chaos. We know what that looks like. We recognize it in others. I recognize the potential in myself. I certainly have the genes for it.

I’m afraid of myself. I feel like I’m full of slag, like my teeth and mind will loosen and fall out any day now. I don’t know how the Trump thing was a prose poem in my dream, but I know my mind was telling me to write. For me, writing is the way through, the only way through. Through to where, I don’t know. That’s the thing. What are we. Where do we start and where do we end. What is starting and ending, even? Some way to explain why we taper into fingers as slender as unlit candles that continually graze what is not us, or so we believe.

Almost as soon as the helicopter made the house rumble, it was quiet again. The house, I mean. Also the helicopter, which had landed on the neighbors’ helipad. But I was still quivering, my organs like china on a glass shelf in a display case nobody can open or illuminate other than a doctor who uses a mouse to drive through me one image at a time showing me how perfect I am, how goddamned perfect I am, despite everything. Proof of viability. Proof of life, at least for now. Proof of something.

You are also something. I can tell you that much. It’s all the news I can muster.

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.

Unthinkable

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?

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.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: