I'm walking through a cluster of museums on a narrow, arroyo-like, crooked alley, smaller than you'd expect for big civic palaces. An old woman yells to me that the museum she's standing before, on the north side of a fork in the arroyo, is the one I want. I'm not so sure. The one to the southwest has a big lumpy sculpture hanging over the entrance, 10 m across. You have to duck. And it looks like a cubist butt. Ugly, but I think the show I came to see is here. I duck and enter...

Yes! Here's the art show I sought! All furry sculpture. Statues of cat people, bird people, wolf and fox people...

The one I recall best is a huge piece of a wolf astronaut floating outside a sleek space shuttle, examining a colorful handsized fish-moth--but he has no space suit. Just his fur, in hard vacuum! Yet there they are, two life-forms, one a simple space-reef dweller, the other very complex indeed... but both equally space-adapted. Strange.

The statue itself is equally startling: the two figures and the shuttle all float, untethered, just as they would in deep space. I look closer. Where are the wires? None!

Funny how this technical miracle makes me readier to accept the biological one. Not that of wolf people--in deep time, are they any less likely than ape people like us?--but of a wolf so advanced he's comfortable in an environment Earth life can't tolerate: the coral reefs of space.

• Wolf person: my library was unable to get me an interlibrary loan book, Best In Show, just an early edition of an anthology I've already read, Furry!. But Best In Show was illustrated, and I longed to see furry art that an editor who knows the subculture chose as outstanding. Tons of furry art on the web, but most is crap. More simply: I'm so sick of humans! I want furs! The dream argues my furryphilia matters--ignoring my own identify and sexual orientation is a BAD idea.
• Is this why I've been slow to date again? My last two girlfriends had powerful animal auras, they felt like leopards. Met no one like that since--mere humans seem so dull.
• Museum sculpture, nudity, zero gravity: the dream distinctly echoed two giant Takashi Murakami sculptures I saw at SF-MOMA last year, of oversexed manga characters splatting bodily fluids around the gallery in gravity-defying spurts (below). The floating nude wolf sculpture in my dream was far less blatantly sexual, but there were definite echoes--floating nude not-quite-human figure.

  Ironic--most curators would call Murakami's images art (since they mock the fantasies and distortions of manga) but call my image kitsch, since I (and my dream) mean it. I can't mock furries since I am one. I find wolves sexy, and also likely to evolve into people soon--if they aren't already. Farley Mowat's research hints they may have language; they definitely sing, i.e. have at least one form of art we recognize. Not surprising; the brains of arctic wolves are already as big as apes' or many species of dolphin. Anyway, I can't mock what I really feel. Too bad! Ironic faux-deviance pays so much better than the genuine article.

• ACTION 1: Go to the museum soon and keep your eyes open. Maybe there are some kindred spirits out there.
• ACTION 2: Own my deviance! Look up local furry conventions. There's a big one here in spring called Further Confusion I think.
• ACTION 3: Sculpt a sexy wolf. I can't make it levitate, but I can defy gravity a little, can't I?

As I finish writing the dream my friend Cory comes in to invite me to the Van Gogh show at the De Young Museum this morning--2 free tix! Alas, no giant furry floating sculptures, though Rousseau's two huge weird paintings (The Snake Charmer with all her phallic friends, and War with that mad child on mad horse) come close... I like Rousseau. He's not very human.

But even Facebook still won't let you friend the dead.

A NOTE TWO DAYS LATER

Well, I'm sculpting a wolf-dancer with gravity-defying balance, and it provokes a second wolf-people dream: Wolf Exogamy.

A NOTE WEEKS LATER

I FINALLY looked up Further Confusion, the biggest furry convention near me, only to find it happened the weekend before I checked! Had I done my homework when the dream urged me (and Floating Wolf was just the best-recalled of a cluster, all prompting me) I could have gone. The dream knew--but I didn't listen. The least I can do now is draw it... and come out clearly as a fur. I'm more like that wolf than most humans. I need to find other furs.

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