Let Sleeping Dreams Lie

We're nearly a third of the way along our curvaceous Fun-A-Day road of dreams and dreamers. There are so many other awesome Fun-A-Day projects brewing right now and you can find links to a few of them in the sidebar on the left. A few that I must draw your attention to are: Ivan Boothe's sexy word clouds, Jonathan Mann's heavenly songwriting, Nick Lally's diligent photographs and sketches, Stevie Esteban Tadeo Lance Kelly's fervent mapping of blackness, and the passionate gay video cataloguing of Chris Vargas. Most of these people have new offerings of fun every day, and many more will strut it in full touchable, tastable glory at the actual Fun-A-Day shows happening in various cities the February.

Today's dream comes from one of these felow Fun-A-Dayistas. Jenn in Pittsburgh has been borrowing someone's camera every day and taking a picture with it, which she then throws online. Jenn also has dream-reading in her blood. "My father has done extensive dream-work related things all my life," she says. "Sharing my dreams every morning is almost as routine as coffee and newspaper for me." Same goes for me Jenn!Only this month it's taking up a little more of my time . . .

Jenn's dream:

I had a dream this morning, it was one of those quick almost awake morning dreams.

In my dream I had just come back from the bathroom (right around the corner from my bed) and stood at the edge of the bed and saw myself and my partner sleeping as we really were in real life. Stretched out in slumber under our warm, comfortable blankets we slumbered on. On top of our blankets was a layer of freshly fallen snow, about two or three inches or so. It was white, fluffy, beautiful. I knew it was fresh and could also see several small tracks in the snow. I woke up feeling good, rolled over, and happily spooned my partner.

And then Jenn adds:

I actually wandered about today doing errands hoping I would catch a picture of someone's discarded mattress or bed out for trash that had been covered with the most recent snow-fall so I could make my dream a little more real, but alas, no mattress . . .

Jenn, this is another one of those dreams that I'm tempted to leave in its bed (especially with your veteran dream analyst father looking over my shoulder). It is so perfect, the image and the sensation that it leaves us with is divine—why blemish its pristine visage with the words of a compulsive dream-blogger? Anything that I say may just be a muddy bootprint that disturbs your gilded somnambulance. Readers might hesitate here and envision themselves under that blanket of perfect, fluffy water crystals before reading onward.

Lately I've been having conversations about theater (I'm a theater-maker in my other life) and articulating that theater can be approached in two different ways: character-based theater, where the focus of a play is on its characters and what they do (like in Shakespeare), or image-based theater, where scenes are strung together more by the visual tableaus that they create (like in the work of the Bread & Puppet Theater, pictured above). This idea can also be applied to cinema, whose scholars and buffs may use the term "movies" for the character-driven Hollywood product that favors formulaic plots, and "film" for more artistic work whose elements of mis en scene and montage are given with greater attention. A play or film can of course have elements of both (e.g. Bertolt Brecht or Orson Welles), as can a dream. 

Jenn, in your dream the characters and their actions (you and your partner sleeping) carry great significance for you. As an outsider, I see this dream as an image: you step away from the routine duty of slumber and into the ritual of (ahem) powdering your nose, and return to arrive at a place of stillness that arrests your eyes like a painting—or a photograph. With one of your goals for this wintry month being to capture and publish a photograph every day, your dream fits you like a mitten—you are a photograph. You and your sweetie are so still and unmovable that the snow is in tact. Animals even scurry right over you and you two still don't budge. You maintain the image and your relationship, unshaken by the elements around you. It is supremely lovely.

In winter we tend to do so many things out of necessity. We insulate our windows to reduce fuel expenditure, we ingest ginger and echinacea to keep from getting sick, we shovel and salt our sidewalks to keep ourselves and others from slipping and breaking a tailbone or two, and we bundle up and make hot soup to keep warm. With all the extra efforts that the coldest months bring, it's important for us to maintain our equilibrium by just letting things be—to fully breathe into enjoyment of the world around us. Jenn, I've seen your photos and I think that you're doing this already. You can run your errands and keep looking for that mattress in the snow, but the pictures that you take in the shadow of its absence are just as poignant without that effort. Try applying this meditative serendipity to the other areas of your life, if you haven't already, and your dreams will keep telling you: "Yes Jenn. Keep doing what you do."

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For a more detailed explanation on the concept of Image Theater, skim through Augusto Boal's book Games for Actors and Non-Actors. 

Giraffic Park

One week into this project and the dreams have grown from a trickle to a steady stream. We’re developing a rhythm that jumps around the map, slaloming between pipedreams and nightmares, epic narratives and anthropoems, fantasies and drudgeries around everything from bishops to blackface. Choosing the dream of the day is a bit of a balancing act. I was torn between some burglars from Chicago and a fœtal dog from Mexico, when this dream dropped in from Providence, Rhode Island, and I knew instantly that it was the pick for today. Our seventh of the 31 Dreamers is Xander, who dreamt:

This morning I knew that we had important business phone calls to make, but first I had to stop by the teahouse and everybody was talking about how exciting the show would be tonight. It was the first time in a long time that everywhere I went people were suddenly saying, “Have you heard about this band driving up from New York tonight; they’re really supposed to be interesting!” But I knew that I needed to talk to you first before I called the banker, so I decided to walk by the river. 

Down by the river there were animals. One was a horse and one looked like a horse but actually it was a giraffe and it was wearing an orange floral hooked rug! Then I realized that there were a couple of giraffes and actually there were giant wood carvings of giraffes along the river and I realized that this was the city’s new tourism scheme—giraffe park! So I sat down next to a wooden giraffe and decided that I needed to call you so that we could talk before I called the banker. So I had made myself comfortable and was calling you when these two guys, one older, one younger, came over and laid down a blanket to picnic by me and the giraffe and I was like, “I was just about to make a phone call,” and they were like, “We don’t mind,” and I was like, “Well I mind,” but I didn’t say that because I am generally strategic about what kind of confrontation I am willing to engage in. So then I got up and walked a bit further and sat near this wild house with curious wind chimes and called you and we talked about what the next things to do would be!

Giraffes are the stuff that dreams are made of. In the book Zarafa: A Giraffe’s True Story, Michael Allin writes of the first giraffe to set hoof in western Europe. She was shipped by boat up the Nile and across the Mediterranean, and then had to walk across France to get to Charles X in Paris. She was a gift from the Viceroy of Egypt, who hoped the French would be so absorbed in this novelty that they wouldn’t notice when Egyptian forces suddenly invaded Greece. But that’s not really the point. The main thing is that when the French countryfolk saw this lengthy-legged, stretch-necked, hairy-horned, long-eyelashed creature all covered in spots ambling up the road, what do you suppose they did? They flipped their lids of course! And they followed her for miles—thousands of people, parading behind the lovely Zarafa, as far as her big, beautiful eyes could see.

Xander, we all know about the comforts and pitfalls of city life. How the founders had the foresight to build the world’s great metropolises on the banks of majestic harbors and serene rivers, only to have urban planners come along and screw it up by dropping highways everywhere. For many of us who dwell in such places, we enjoy the aromatic comforts of the neighborhood teahouse, the whimsical convenience of having rock bands and puppet shows practically appearing on our doorsteps, and the fluid social atmosphere that such fixtures afford us. 

But the city taints our psyches with its stale bureaucracy—the business calls and the bankers whom we are obligated to oblige. Their routine shunts us into the cockamamie patterns of needing to do X, Y and Z before we can even think about A and B. We become so entrenched in the habit or juggling business with pleasure, that we can no longer distinguish the two—that which was pleasurable we now approach with businesslike concentration, and that which is business we seem to take perverted delight in doing. You do this in your dream by feeling burdened with the responsibility to chat with friends and see live music (activities that should be pleasurable) seeking instead an intimacy in the act of doing business, and so take refuge in a pretty place to make an urgent phone call.

The spot you find seems ideal—a veritable paradise—as if after all these years the city planners have realized that highways and shopping malls aren’t cool: the people want giraffes! You see that one giraffe—the one wearing the handmade rug—and you say, “This is for me!” It’s as if the heads of the departments of parks and tourism read your mind. But it’s not just for you, Xander. The city is a place that we all must share and all the coolest stuff eventually gets discovered and occupied by picnickers young and old. “Not fair!” you say, “I was here first!” But it’s not worth fighting about because you know that more people will arrive soon, spreading their blankets across the once virgin earth. And so you move on to the next untouched thing, from wooden giraffes to wild wind chimes, wanting to share the experience intimately with someone you love while simultaneously trying to get things done.

I wish I had the solutions to the dilemmas presented in this dream. How do we streamline our citified lives? How do we find solace and maintain spaces so that they remain the way we want them to be? The goals implied in these questions are sometimes at odds with each other. But it's bigger than you and me. The city plays Viceroy of Egypt with all of its structures and schemes that send us off on tangents like wild geese. We, like France, must be vigilant: to celebrate fabulousness without being distracted. Until we figure out how to do that, let us gather our orange yarn and take up our latch hooks to thread a floral rug by hand. When we are done, we will have at least a few square feet of space that cannot be altered by the winds of urban change. Come spring we may take our rugs out for a walk, laying them down wherever we please, sitting on them and preserving an area that is all our own. And when our giraffe finally comes ambling up the road, we will know just what to do.