I find a Tarot card showing a beautiful centauress--a four-legged girl, maned and tailed. She's from a well-known Tarot deck that records the artist's waking visions of such beings. She's not like a Greek centaur, though. Too gracile for a horse, slender as a unicorn or doe; only her long tail's marelike.

I search for the rest of the deck in a tall cabinet of card trays like an old library catalog; hundreds, no, THOUSANDS of cards from diverse Tarot decks! No order I understand--not yet. Riffle through, scanning for her sister centaurs. I want to add them all to the World Dream Bank.

Yet... they were waking visions, not dreams. I've included a few dreamlike visions and hallucinations in WDB, but adding the whole deck would mean dozens of off-topic images. Making webpages for each one would be a lot of work, too.

But if they're all this beautiful, I may just suspend my rule.

• Set of light, gracile centauroids: I've been sculpting a dance troupe of lightly-built centauroid dancers out of Barbie dolls, as natives for a planet-model I'm making: Kakalea.
• Dream of non-dream art: my own non-dream art makes itself dream art by invading my dream. I then fail to recognize it as mine! So the art then points out it's not dream art... when, for the first time, it is. Dream humor at its most convoluted! But also...
• Are they Platonic forms demanding embodiment? Well, these cendancers seem more modern and multimedia than Plato's reality-casting-material-shadows. They're auditioning for the World Dream Bank! Auditioning hard, too. "I can be taller, I can be dreamier!" Whatever it takes... (Actors never change)
• ACTION: Give in. They've earned a place in the World Dream Bank. They made you dream them. That's some audition!

I'm at a class in Redwood City, down by the new harbor. Show-and-tell day. I present the Cendancers, the troupe of centauroid modern dancers I'm sculpting out of two Barbies each.

I make a political joke about them, and this somehow wakes up one of the dancers! She grows, hops off the display table. Full size now--and alive.

I feel no shyness at all. In fact I rather enjoy shocking my classmates.

I wake before I come--but oh, I was happy.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• sexy happy mood: surprises me, since I'd stayed up sculpting Cendancers till midnight, till I was exhausted and shivering in my unheated room. My best guess: though I overworked, sculpting went great all day, and when it's going right, art feels as sexy as... well, sex.
• ACTION: keep sculpting! Using yourself up is no sin. Spend the coin of your life! After all, in the end you don't get to save it.

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