Dream Blog Wakes Up

Two years ago I set out to unravel a month's worth of dreams, one per day, each dreamt by a different dreamer—31 Dreamers, to be exact.

Then I stopped. I stopped the unraveling and the blogging, largely because I'd stopped dreaming. All your dreams had supplanted mine.

Then, just now, someone sent me a dream, and so I've decided to shake the 31 Dreamer's awake. Why not? Let's find out...

This one comes from Jakey of New Jersey. Let see what Jakey's up to in Dreamland:

I had a dream this morning that involved late 1880's French aristocrats singing about how the rifle was the best invention ever, but the worst part of the dream involved walking by a farmers market on the Baltimore ave side of Clark Park, stopping to look at some beautiful dark green dinosaur kale and noticing that the woman had a skunk on the table. "A skunk!" I said, "May I pet it? It's fur looks so soft."

"That's not even the best part," she replied and proceeded to take a knife and slit it's skin from crotch to sternum and peel it's skin off to reveal a wet looking layer of dark brown fur with no stripe underneath. "Usually you can find skunk onions under here," she said, running her fingers through the damp fur and coming across a light beige circle that she gently worked out of the fur and revealed to be a mushroom. "Or mushrooms—they have a wonderful flavor when they grow in the needle fur." Needle fur was apparently the name of the underlayer.

She flipped the skunk over and commenced running her fingers through the fur on it's belly, looking for more vegetables. I was marvelling at how things can grow between layers of skin on a skunk as if they were in dirt when the skunk squirmed a little and made an unhappy noise. I was horrified. "It's not dead!" I exclaimed.

"No, I just knocked it out." she replied in a matter-of-fact tone.

"You just skinned a live animal!" I protested, loudly.

"No, it's fine, it can't feel it." she soothed.

"Yes! It can!" My horror grew with every second. "You have to put it out of it's misery! You skinned it!" I was still arguing with her when I woke up and I can't get the thought of that poor tortured skunk out of my mind.

What does it mean?!

Ah...springtime! An epoch of awakenings when we're treated to the return of birds chirping in the treetops and children laughing around the playground. 'Tis the season for planting seeds in the garden for a new crop of vegetables, and for waving hello to our favorite furry friends, freshly arisen from their slumbersome hibernations, prancing and scurrying about while wagging their tails at last after a long winter's nap. And let's not forget those tantalizing springtime smells—aromas banished to dormancy under a blanket of frost for some months, now waft on open air! Fragrant flowers and foodstuffs scatter their scents asunder, as do piles and heaps of dung and rubbish, festering and rotting in the warm, golden sun.

Now Jakey, I'm not too sure what your wakey life has been doing these past two years. We all know "skunk" as a noun, bringing to mind those plucky li'l mammals in all their distinctive don't-fuck-with-me nonchalance; their powerful perfume best smelled from a moving vehicle with roll-uppable windows; and of course the cartoonishly French (!) loverboy accent of Pepe Le Pew—no? As a verb, "skunk" is a cribbage term that's bled over into other card and board games, meaning one player kicked the other's arse by well over umpteen points, which, for the loser, is not unlike being skinned alive. And yeah, as an adjective, "skunk" means a cabbage you may or may not want to smoke and a weed you may or may not want to eat. Oh wait, I got that backwards. Whatever—on with the blog.

Jakey, you haven't been reading Derrick Jensen, have you? He's got this bit in his book A Language Older Than Words where he critiques the philosopher René Descartes (who happens to be—you guessed it—aristocratic and French!) for denying that animals are capable of suffering, simply because they are incapable of speaking or communicating on any recognizable human level. We've learned a lot about this since Descartes' day of circa 1645. Since then we humans have hepped bonobos on talkin' good English, done ASL with gorillas, and figured out how groundhogs alert each other as to what color shirt I've got on. Together we've come so far, and it is so good.

Linguistics aside, the Descartes/Jensen divide is one of ethics: how we treat other creatures defines how we treat our planet, our fellow humans, and yeah, ourselves. Is your little trip down Dream Street to the farmstand pointing at dietary/ethical choices in your awake life? And, by extension, do you query about the process by which said vittles arrive at mouth from merchant, from truck or trains or ocean trawler? And are them eats from farm or factory or some hybrid of the both? And what exactly went on in there—there, where your food sprung up from? Jakey, what are you eating and how did it get to you? Are you connected to that process and do you even want to be?

Perhaps your tale of gross skunk onion woe asks all of the above. Or perhaps it just beckons you to come on down to the farmers market on a nice spring day. There, a lady proffers up a mushroom, freshly picked from the dungheap. You examine it closely, and yes there's something (as many pronounce this next word) fur-miliar to you here. You can freak out and be overwhelmed by all circumstances that bring you and mushroom together in this moment. Or you can take a deep breath and then sigh the words, "It was only a dream."

From The Fleece Of An Iron Sheep

I'm a little obsessed. Just a little. Ever since fellow Fun-A-Day blog-o-phile Stevie Steven Esteban Tadeo Lance Kelly (nee "Patrick") hipped me to the sites Strange Maps and Very Small Array, I've had my designs on delving into my own franchise of niche cartography. I managed to go back in time and make a map documenting gentrification street art in a neighborhood with a disputed moniker, somewhere in the wilds of the northeastern U.S. And then today I started mapping the 31 Dreamers (a cartogram that I haven't been able to figure out how to post just yet) so that we could see where exactly our dreams were coming in from. There's one from Texas, one from the Pacific Northwest, one from Japan, and then a whole mess from the northeastern U.S. and neighboring Quebec. Some statisticians might analyze this data and exclaim to those living outside of this concentrated dream region, "Come on people! Wake up! What are you, sleeping?" But at 31 Dreamers, we worry that the contrary is true and instead advise you,  dear reader, in the most soothing of tones:  "Please, get some rest. And if you remember your dreams, send them our way."

In 1968, science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick asked the world, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" The query was the title of a book, best known as the basis for the film Blade Runner. The backstory of today's dream pushes P.K. Dick's question a bit further (as does, in typical Kwang-tse/John Cage fashion, the cover image of a Japanese edition of the book pictured left: "Do electric sheep dream of androids?") Too bad someone already wrote three sequels to Dick's original book and boringly named them Blade Runner 2, Blade Runner 3 and (drum roll please) Blade Runner 4. Maybe we can insert the dream-of-the-day somewhere in the mix like those animated side-dish movies they made to supplement The Matrix and Star Wars sagas. It'll have to wait till when the 31 Dreamers swell to 31 Million Dreamers. Then we can make a pitch to Time-Warner.

Today's dream was dreamt in a cabin at the dawn of the New Year near Gualala, California (finally—some California dreamin!) Its dreamer is someone whose full name is so fabulous I gotta break ranks and use both first and last: Kestrel Plump, come on down! You're the next contestant on 31 Dreamers! Kestrel's dream:

I’m walking around some co-op house in my neighborhood. All these people I know are there, including my roommate Graeme. The house is amazing and sort of looks like the Mütter Museum of Medical Oddities in Philadelphia. There's a big staircase and a balcony with a wooden railing. We’re all there to see some kind of art show. The rooms are all filled with bizarre and incredible art.

At some point I go into a basement and I start messing around with steel wool, trying to make or fix something. I hold a piece of the steel wool in my mouth. It starts to fill up my mouth, almost like I’m winding a bobbin that I’m holding in my mouth. My mouth is getting full—soon the steel wool will cut me, but I tell myself that I have to finish whatever it is I’m doing and press on until my mouth is completely packed. The steel wool cuts into the roof of my mouth, cuts into my cheeks, starts to go down my throat. I am scared, but I calm myself and tell myself that I can pull it all out and I’ll be okay. I pull it out in clumps. It’s so tightly packed that it rips like a cotton ball being ripped in half when I try and pull it out.

I wander around the house, looking for a bathroom or someone to help me. There are people about, but they don't help me and obviously I can’t ask for help with my mouth so full. No one really even sees me, they just move past me. I keep pulling on the steel wool. It’s stuck into the roof of my mouth, but if I pull hard enough it comes out. It feels so good to dislodge it form my flesh, and it leaves cuts that don't bleed. I begin to worry if there is any of that weird blue soap stuff that is on Brillo Pads in my mouth, because, I think to myself, that could make me really sick. I find a little bit of it on some of the steel wool from the very back of my throat, but not very much.

The left side of my mouth is free of the wool now, but it hurts. The right side is still full. I find Chris, my partner, washing dishes. I show him my mouth. He acknowledges it, but keeps washing the dishes. I stand next to him and keep pulling the wool out, pulling out a piece that is very far back that has bits of lung and blood vessels and other tissue on it. It looks like algae that grows on rocks in the ocean. I show it to Chris. He absentmindedly says it is gross, then gets really upset, saying that a shard of the wool flew into his eye while I was pulling it out. He is really mad and leaves. I wake up.

I lay there in bed, realizing it was a dream. I run my tongue over my mouth in relief. I thought, in the dream, that my mouth would hurt for the rest of my life. But it won't. I am mildly comforted by this thought, but still disturbed by the dream and it's implications. I fall back asleep.

Kestrel, I'm less disturbed by the implications in this dream than I am by the canker sores that suddenly sprang to life in my own mouth while I was reading it. (This happen to anyone else? Leave me a comment and let me know.) The loose network of cooperative houses that annexed certain neighborhoods around the U.S. in the 1970s have gone through many phases and some remain a bustling bastion of counter-culture today. What goes on in your dream doesn't really seem that out of the ordinary for what really happens in the day-to-day in such places. Pay a visit to certain urban localities (and some rural ones too) and you'll find ad-hoc collectives who are always having art shows in grandiose Victorian group houses replete with a majestic balestrade here, a mahogany-rimmed veranda there, and enough oddball junk cluttering the whole damn place to give Philadelphia's Mütter and Mummers' museums a run for their under-funded money (though I don't think the punk palaces can a hold a candle to Philly's Masonic Temple—that jawn is or-nate!) I personally have been to the art show in your dream several times (our own beloved Fun-A-Day began in just such a place) and yeah, it was awesome with everyone there having had made something totally unique and beautifully strange.

But amongst all of the lavish wonder of innovative art, one may feel overwhelmed and even question one's own worth. "What am I doing? How am I contributing?" A person may need to get to the bottom of things . . . or hide from the other people around them . . . or go where all the useful junk and loud musical equipment and power tools are kept. Whatever the specifics, we rally ourselves to the basement where all of items of a utilitarian bent have been conglomerated into one abrasive fibrous mass. You know what I'm talking about: those fine, metallic hairs, shorn and spun from the fleecy coat of an iron sheep (pictured at the very top of this entry). Yes, I am of course referring to that substance of substances known to humans as steel wool.

Some little-known facts about steel wool, not found anywhere on the internet until now: Steel wool's texture, density and coarseness may vary. Sometimes it is found in thicker, looser, more wiry fibres that form a sort of mesh ball. These are usually from the fleece of a wooly steel mountain goat, the product of many generations of billies and nannies whose diet has consisted primarily of tin [sic—they're actually mostly steel] cans. These animals' digestive tracts have become so developed that they can actually absorb the steel and convert it directly into steel wool. The finer, denser steel wool "pad" is derived from the iron alpaca, and the "weird blue soap stuff" (mentioned in the dream) is, in fact, the lanolin secreted from this animal. Purveyors of this product assure us that this "blue stuff" is perfectly harmless, though some have a sensitivity to it.

Okay Kestrel, enough sheep shit. Whether or not this is a credible creation myth for steel wool, the question remains: why the fuck are you putting that crap in your mouth? There are echoes of the timeless threat that we allegedly heard when we were wee kiddies: "Say that again and I'm gonna wash your mouth out with..." With what? Most commercial soap is made from cow fat (cloaked on the label by its chemical compound name "sodium tallowate") unfit only for vegans and Hindus—hardly a punishment for any beef-eating American girl. Something stronger is called for, but bleach or ammonia or Drain-O or sulphuric acid might lead to your parents/teachers/nuns/whosoevers having a handful of lawsuits to play out. Nope, it has to be the steel wool, only this time you're doing it to your own offending maw—not in self-punishment for something that you actually said, but for fear of something that you might say. You're censoring yourself, spinning this wool of steel into a massive ball of dense, entangled yarn, like a mouthful of mega-mineral-fortified cotton candy that—oops!—won't melt in your mouth. And as you indulge in this act of self-silencing mental censorship, you simultaneously regret it. But the damage is done—you are injured and unable to speak as you once had.

Realizing that you're in dire oral straits, you turn to your peers, friends, neighbors, housemates for help. But they don't bloody fathom, or care about, or even recognize the problem. These others are so wrapped up in their own quagmire of self-absorption that you turn to the one person with whom you are closest: your partner. But he's too distracted by his own work to take you seriously. And when you show him the gorey bits he finds your internal complexities too icky and disturbing to even truly look at you. It isn't until your problems interfere with his own comfort that he pays attention. But instead of helping he throws a hissy fit and stamps off. I mean, how dare you flick your own innards in his blessed eyes? And mixed with the blasted fur a metal llama no less? The nerve of some people!

Kestrel, I might be as abrasive as the steel wool of your dreams here, but your story raises some issues that deserve a little consideration and confrontation. So I'll ask: Whatever did you say—or not say—that made you decide to scour your words and debilitate your ability to speak? Are the ears of your peers so sensitive to the ideas that might spurt from your lips that you feel that your oral cavity must be scraped clean to such a degree that you become both injured and silenced in the process? What kind of cult . . . er . . . "community" are you part of exactly that would allow this to happen? And who is this "partner" of yours anyway? Do you two run a law firm? A detective agency? A line-dancing studio? Whatever the arrangement,do you find the relationship to be truly equal? Or is he fixated on the dishpan-handed challenges implicit in domesticity while you are literally spilling your guts out? 

Kestrel, everything that happens to you in your dream is an invitation to do the opposite. Try taking some individual space that affords you the room to be independent. Spend time with people who really see you and listen to you rather than dis and de-prioritize you. And, most of all, open your mouth and let the words flow freely from it. Don't be afraid to create and agitate. You can leave the steel wool where it belongs: on the coat of an iron sheep.