That Day

I'm building the World Dream Bank--as I have been all year. Obsessed. Today I tackle a pack of nightmares: Arteria, Bill Cosby's Wife, and In El Rio, or, Drinking with Filler.

Take a break. Walk around our hill with my friends Patagia and Alder, seeing Open Studios (artists sell direct from their houses or workplaces. Fun, cuz you get to see how other artists work.) The most striking: Diane Estrin's sexy photos, manipulated physically, not digitally--she takes giant Polaroids and either monoprints from the gunk or the emulsion peeled off in hot water, the skin manipulated and laid on other papers. Girl with a zigzag gingery flower, the same girl flying through dreamspace, back arched...

Dream 1: To San Fernando Spring

Teen on a train on a quest. She alights at San Fernando Station. Not now, nor quite the past But a mythic fork of braided time--a pristine California undrilled--the black gold let sleep-- Flowering under blue, not our sad brown Sky time. She meets a young tribal girl astride A gracile doe. Her guide. A buck beside; Stouter guest-mount. On the two ride In a cloud of deer, elusive herd, a mere Shadow on pale sage. Over the hills And gone. Verdant. Paintbrush, poppy, lupine, lush Beyond the San Fernando of our time where just a remnant flash in spring. Here Chin-high grass and redolent herbs tuft Hill-shoulders. In every sweet oak-fold Creeks rush. Joyous they bound. Shade. Iris-blue. Doe and child lead the quester to the Dell. Bay laurels shade the banks of mint Cupping the wild-violet spring. Here they'll sleep tonight and pray To dream. Soul-work Eden isn't how I thought Of San Fernando. Yet if you pried wide Our tract homes, shy-shelled as their tortoise ancestors, to divine within... What slow hearts beat inside? What Dreams under skin?

Dream 2: Sleeping Beauty's Attitude Problem

I'm in the lobby of a silver condo tower Near Japantown Mall. In the marble center of the lobby stands a glass cube of water Dim-lit. No mere aquarium--looming taller Than me. Enwombs a teen we know. Her hair fans out lithe as smoke. Floats kelpish on her back, skin rippled gold, lids shut in slumber, Or meditation. Does she breathe air or water?

Some residents huddle and gossip about her. Warn me "Watch out! She has a foul temper. So catty!" Purrhaps. But whenever girl or tiger Swims, baring amber, how monkeys do chatter! I'm sure these antiflatterers sincerely hate her Attitude. Beatitude. But I sense a soul calmer, Serener than a Buddhist coastal otter. Think I'll trust the dreamer in the water.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

1: To San Fernando Spring

• Deer, joy, speed, green: Diane Estrin's joyful, sexy, hand-massaged photos had this feeling. But why deer?
• Deer, nature: felt like a weird blend of Bambi and Princess Mononoke--both cartoons marketed in the US to kids, yet quite stark films about how Nature feels about getting raped by humanity (both films are reviewed in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, an anthology I'm reading). But this dream was idyllic, happy, humans a part of nature. Why? Oh!
• This dream echoes Deer Lake, a dream I recently wrote up for the World Dreambank.

2: Sleeping Beauty's Attitude Problem

• Apartment tower: I went to Open Studio today, saw a lot of artist's spaces. But none looked like this.
• Aquarium girl: if I'm dreaming Disney tonight, this is Sleeping Beauty in her glass case! That makes the neighbors... the Seven Moral Dwarves.
• Attitude problem: My friends Alder & Patagia said I was standoffish, even snappish, on that Open Studio walk. My dream's a bit skeptical. They're never snappish? Standoffish, yes--I'm planning how to write dream-tales.
• Floating on back: here in California this hints at two specifics it mightn't elsewhere: in Esalen, meditators in isolation-tanks float just so; and in the kelp forests just below Esalen, sea otters rest just so, too. That otter wasn't just there to rhyme.

• What's in common? girls, water, nature-magic; opposed by air pollution, gossip (information pollution!), conformists (social pollution?)
• Dreamwork and meditation: building the World Dreambank takes focus--and focus requires withdrawal.
• ACTION: keep dreaming! Sleep by the magic spring. Or in it.

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