THAT DAY

I rough-sculpt two small cendancers--a centaur-filly made of two Staci dolls and an adolescent made of two Skippers (Staci, Skipper: two of Barbie's little sisters).

Then I add layers of acrylic to my clay sculpture, Lebbird.

Quit and watch TV. Naturalists struggle to rewild pet parrots and cockatoos. They seem to find it difficult to do. In the tropics. Funny, in my home town they just fly out the window, find other parrots, and get on with life. OK, I live in San Francisco, the world's ultimate refuge for misfits. But still.

THAT NIGHT

A hall 3 yards wide and at least a hundred long, with chest-high dividers making it an open maze--like a long, narrow, unfurnished office. From infinity, a buffalo wanders slowly down the hall. Sniffs me. I sniff back. Cautious. But it seems calm enough. We pass. A calf trails mom. Sniff. Pass...

At last I come to a double door. Much wider hall beyond. A gym? But out in the middle of the floor is a huge weird being shaped like a spindle four or five yards long, made of coarse brown fibers, each a yard long--hair, bark, a thousand legs?

Humans in this room--up on the bleachers. They fear this creature! Cameras click from the stands, but they keep their distance.

The alien humps over and snuffles at me. I chirp at it. We seem to find each other unthreatening. I suspect it's an alien intelligence, not just a big impressive animal like the buffalo. Such a strong presence!

Beyond the creature: a door outside. I step to it... and breathe fresh air.

Notes Next Morning

• Buffalo indoors: show on rewilding parrots and cockatoos
• Alien: sculpting alien people half the day!
• Strong presence: this, not a specific anatomical look, is what I'm aiming for. Dream thinks I'm getting it.
• ACTION: sculpt or draw this alien?

Nine Months Later

As I sketch and prep this dream to post, I still can't figure out what that brown spindle was, but it nags at me. I've SEEN it somewhere...

And then I remember. In the movie Where the Wild Things Are, Max and his monster friends build a fort of brush and scrapwood--gigantic, twiggy, brown, curved and tapered just like my dream-alien.

I still don't know why I'd meet a distillation of Maurice Sendak's vision of wildness in a school gymnasium. But I'm pretty sure now that's what it was.

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