Wertz!
Dreamed 2023/10/14 by Wayan
for Julia Wertz, of course, with a
tip o' the hat (& a cameo) for Amy Kurzweil
THAT DAY
At the San Francisco Main Library, I hear a panel of cartoonists discuss their graphic memoirs: Thien Pham (Family Style), Julia Wertz (Impossible People), Amy Kurzweil (Flying Couch & the just-released Artificial), Fred Noland (Steady Rollin'), and moderator Nira Ayuyang (The Man in the McIntosh Suit).
Later I look them up online. Wertz has one page on her website telling her entire dreamlife--The Thing About Dreams. Full of scary, surreal, lucid, and recurring dreams; lots of weird creatures. It's a bold thing to summarize your inner life like that...
But that's esthetic admiration. What about personally--with lifelong dreams like that, how would I feel? What do my dreams think?
THAT NIGHT...
Dream 1a: COPS HOLD VIPERS
I'm an English girl about seven years old, traveling with my dad in eastern Brazil. Lush forest at first, but as he drives north along an arm of a muddy reservoir, it shrinks to a ditch, then nothing, and the woods get steadily drier. Open ground, even--clearings full of yellow-flowering brush. The Northeast, with its droughts. Rolling hills, patchy woods. Dusty roads.
A small lake ahead, on the left. Two cops in the road. They pulled a car over, and the two cars block the road. The cops have scary grins. Not holding guns, but... whips? Squirming whips held by the neck. Snakes! By the head shape, vipers. A cop walks toward us, holding one. The window's open. We both shudder in panic as we realize he plans to throw a poisonous snake in our faces!
NOTES
Dream 1b: CREATE A LAKE SHRINE
Next thing I know, I'm down on the muddy lakebottom, terrified. Did Dad drive into the lake to avoid the cop-snakes? Don't see the car or Dad or cops or snakes, but fear they're after me still. See my dad's laptop, with all the photos of our trip, sink deep into mud and vanish. Dare not move, to retrieve it. Stay still as long as can hold my breath...
At last, I have to surface. Silent, still. Alone. I swim to a stone turtleback islet a few yards wide, and crawl out. Sit by a black rock, the only feature on the islet. Alone in a big unfriendly world, I pray helplessly to it...
Suddenly I see several years ahead. Am I twelve now? I was saved. Miracle! So that rock in the lake becomes a shrine; locals swim out to pray and leave flowers. After just a generation no one recalls how it started; they say "It's been there forever."
Feels now like South Sudan, not Brazil. Then... this is the Nile!
NOTES
Dream 1c: ARM IN THE POND
Whew! I'm safe. The attack is long past--though I'm a teen now, not an adult, so only five or ten years passed, not a generation. We're at a film festival back in England, lying on a grassy bank. A pond's to my left, my dad's to my right. He's showing a travelog of our trip to a dozen people.
As it shows the worshipers at the impromptu roadside shrine I inadvertently started, I'm distracted by a disturbance in the pond to my left. An arm floats up. A body in the lake? No, just the arm--not bloody, but severed. It floats.
I fish it out, and poke my dad, hissing "Hit pause--look at this!" He ignores me. I poke and speak up--"Stop the film, you need to deal with this!" He ignores me. I WHACK him with the arm and yell "STOP!"... and he ignores me.
I shake him, in alarm now, and he lies there inert. Unconscious or dead?
I wake up at 3 AM. Rare for me to get nightmares strong enough to wake me before dawn. I think Wertz inspired my dream gremlins to lay it on thick...
NOTES
Dream 2: DICK DISCARDS
I'm male now, not Julia Wertz. I feel horny in the night, and sleepily fuck my girlfriend Ailura.
She's a talking leopard.
I have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, so my connective tissue is weak. After I come, rather than my cock shrinking as blood withdraws, the erection buds off at the base, sealing instantly to create a detached, erect cock! Happened several times recently--not too alarming, as a new one grows on my blank crotch overnight, looking normal by dawn. But it's creepy to find these discarded dicks in bed.
Is this normal for EDS? I dunno--no role models! It's a rare genetic mutation, and few live to my age.
I composted the first castoffs quietly, blushing & burying them like bad sausages deep in the bin, but the last time I put the erection in a drawer next to the condoms, and this time I do the same--and compare.
They're so different! The older one's short and thick, 15 by 5 cm (6"x2"), while this one's very long but skinnier, almost 30 by at most 3 cm (12x1"). Like two different men. You'd never guess they had the same source. Wait, maybe the shape varies (by mood, position, what?) but the volume stays constant. No, volume of a cylinder's length times the square of width; the short one's way more massive. Yet the skinny one's... really long. Pornstar long. Odd.
I'm not much worried about this budding-off, weird though it is--the cocks regrow so fast. But it's one more secret I feel I have to keep. For when I tell doctors even the most basic truths of my condition--like my steady growth in height over decades of adulthood, not stability or shrinkage--they dismiss it. "That can't be right, you must have mismeasured." So I never proceed to tell more exotic basics--like my (weak) magnetic sense and (stronger) aura-sense.
Tell them about my weenie collection, and they'll decide I'm really an octopus budding off spore-packets, or I'm a sleepwalking dick-thief (eek!) or... who knows?
It occurs to me shedding and regrowing my cock nightly could be a weight-loss program--a few ounces a day, but steady. Wasteful though; lots of iron & protein being lost, not fat. If this goes on, I'll need a higher-protein diet!
NOTES
Dream 3: THE SMARTFIELD
I inherit or find (ethically, I think) a magical device that generates a limited field, just a few yards across; not a smooth curve but a knot or dome, steady in strength for a yard or two from source, but then a fast drop-off. Inside it, brilliant logic. Powerful enhancement to the mind.
I need to keep quiet about it. Lots of twisted thinkers out there crave clarity; they'd love this enhancement and might do nasty things to get it.
I convince a college on Monterey Bay to sponsor a small research project by a beach near Sand City, on the former Fort Ord--there's an old beach shack we can use for a lab. Cartoonist Amy Kurzweil is used to kooky projects, from growing up with her mad-scientist dad Ray Kurzweil, so she agrees to help cover up--pretend it's an oceanography project. I trust her not to bump me off and steal it... she already HAS a clear head, and if she were greedy, she'd never have turned... cartoonist! The least lucrative profession in the world...
NOTES
LAST WORDS
Hypothesis confirmed! Artists really do have more bizarre dreams, on average, and in predictable ways--more sex, surrealism, creatures, magic... A night of dreams making me live through Wertz's Thing About Dreams seemed a bit scarier than my usual. But overall... our dreams are weirdly similar. (Go skim that older UC Dreambank, a database of normal dreams. Wow are they dull! Not a Wertz or Wayan in the lot.)
Though our art's different. Wertz, like most indie cartoonists, works with and publishes ink drawings--color's just too pricy. Here I stuck to her black and white to render my night of Wertz dreams. But though I tried diverse B&W techniques--ink, pencil, scratchboard, digital--I felt so confined! I see color before I even see shape. Born to paint, not cartoon.
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