Do you dream?
I am a dreamer. Both when I am awake and asleep. I have landscapes and days I return to when I’m awake. I have places and eras I am returned to by night. There are a few repeating themes that cling to me. Maybe it is me clinging to them.
Either way, the traveling dreams have begun.
Simple enough. Packing a suitcase. Planes and places. Sensible absurdities as only dreams can do. I will not blight our time here* with the details. I know it is said people don’t want to hear about your dreams but to be clear, I do not feel that way. I would listen to people tell me about their dreams all day.1
What I will say is I think my dreams echo what my waking self is concerned about. There is a sense of being limited, of lingering, of being misplaced.
There is so much I want to do, to be and I feel as if I could never make my life big enough to fit all of me. There will never be enough time and the worst of it is, I wasted so much of it myself. I sat gripping my gravestone, ensuring no one else would take it. I was blue and ancient. Now I feel light like the silver threads of cotton grass. Just as delicate, just as occasional. I have to become me before everything freezes again.
Even here in my desert.
I have it all backwards, going to Iceland to thaw. But I am still not sure I am real and alive. I don’t know if I will learn in time.
I only know that island is where I took my first real breath.
That is why I feel I must go back. That molten land can explain my magma soul to me. It started to tell me last time, I followed what I could… better than my dreams anyway.
I think people misunderstand Iceland. I did. I don’t believe we understand how fragile— how in flux it is. We see the eruptions and misconstrue them as violent. We forget the earth is being born. I remember having just given birth. The flux and fissures we bent through, the portal I was, that my child was.
The island is the same, except I am the child: I want my mother.
An equal misunderstanding is buried under the ice. We see glaciers and think of ourselves. How small we are. It is our thoughts that make us so small. When we think that ice is only bitter and harsh, too immense to be ruled we miss the story. It cannot be ruled because it is time. There. Love and laughter, heartache, death. All are locked in the ice. All the days laid down in sheets preserved and waiting to be read.
A saga.
That island is layers of ancient history and burning births— and I am the same.
It is these recent dreams that make me feel small and quiet again.
I am desert sand. I am cactus needles. I evaporated. I could never last as lava or glacial waters do.
It causes me to doubt I belong where I want to be. I hear whispers from myself in the night, such sweet nothings. Nothings from all the days I lived waiting… for nothing.
Nothings…
I’m done with it. And so no matter what I see or think in the night when I am weak, I want it off of me. This notion of ‘not for me’ protected me while I was so uncertain and felt I wouldn’t be understood. I know that isn’t the case anymore. Or maybe I don't care like I once did. Perhaps most accurately it is a different care. Before I held a grudge, and I assumed I was alone. Now I want to explore where I was, maybe explain what I can.
I might make up the rest.
I am back in flux. I am bending through a portal.
I would like to come visit if you live somewhere where dreams are permissible conversation. Maybe stay. The brain is telling stories without our conscious involvement… why are we not talking about this? Why are we not ONLY talking about this? What are we talking about?!
side note: I love books where the writer does include dreams
& I just finished swimming in the soping wet of Kathy Acker’s fever dream, My Mother: Demonology. It is a vault of inner thoughts— all written on a page. If I could breathe while reading her, I would live inside of her books.
(Imagining the bravest me, I don’t know how I could write with ‘half a parenthetical’ of her truth, daring, or style.
(*I blight our time here)
I am on a plane. Impossibly built of too much glass. We are over the ocean. I am leaving. I know I won’t be returning. My heart aches. I can feel the hurt radiate down through my palms, in between my fingers. I look down at my hands and see water.
I am folding clothes. They are plush and white— like the lambs, I think. There is a suitcase nearby. It is filled with things that are not mine.
I am standing on the shore. My feet are buried— deep, deep in the sand. No one knows where I am. I know this. I do not move. I do not want to.
I also dreamt of a raven. You may think I dream of birds frequently, but I do not, so this one I will keep to myself.
"The island is the same, except I am the child: I want my mother."
Got me right in the feels.
"I sat gripping my gravestone, ensuring no one else would take it. I was blue and ancient." so much of this piece reads like poetry, but i feel like this image especially wants a poem.
looking forward to meeting you at IWR on the mother island