no. 5

on explaining how to read this thing.

from the after/hours archive: LOOKY HERE [February 18, 2022]

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A friend (and probably others, silently, at home) said the Mystery Reader’s question isn’t obvious in these letters. I really thought we were all on the same page! First a quippy title, an intro paragraph or thought, then the line break moves us into the question of the week.

But maybe I haven’t been explicit enough.

[For whom it may later calm:

The literal answer is that I haven’t been remembering my dreams of late. This has also coincided with three weeks of sleeping through til 5 or 6am, without middle-of-the-night downloads. I don’t know that these are related, and I don’t know that every season calls for active dreaming and generation, but perhaps they found each other in this cupping season and are making a go of it, my medieval sleep patterns and my inspiration.]

Speaking of keeping it awkward, we’re back on our podcasting game for another season of You’re Welcome* and one question we got was about dreams — their abundance, their overwhelming demand, the spaces they carve and abandon or fill or outgrow. Since we recorded, I’ve been reflecting on the concept of “biggest dreams,” and realizing that I do not know how to streamline mine. Every scenario for me is “and then, and then, and then!” I want more and then more when I let my imagination wander. 

I guess I thought that was the point of dreaming: to let it get wild. After all, it’s a stage play in my mind. 

So what exactly is a big dream?

Are our biggest dreams the ones most clear to us,
most specific,
most grand,
or most ardently held and attended to?

What makes a dream big, and why is it audacity? 

And in the end, is there anything to do but decide to hold ourselves accountable to the tiny and magnificent stories playing across our mind’s eye?

This is why I tend to say so little when asked my dreams: I have no period to place upon the sentence of my dreams; they are most certainly ellipses. 

HEY EVERYONE: THE QUESTION OF THE WEEK IS COMING UP.

Q: WHAT IS A RECENT DREAM YOU REMEMBER?

I missed a couple of periods in the fall of 2013 and was happy to find a home pregnancy test come up negative. But that second missed cycle made me nervous and I ditched my birth control to prompt a bleed. By Christmas, nothing had happened, a second test was negative, and the growing bulge in the pit of my belly confirmed a WebMD diagnosis of uterine fibroids. My internet research suggested I would need a specialist and so I took myself to urgent care for a referral.

The ungracious process began with a blood test and a spacey RN whose exam prompted her to exclaim over the size of the mass in my stomach. If she didn’t know better, she’d say I was sixteen weeks! When she returned to the room with my sample results in hand, beaming, screaming, “Congratulations, MOM!” I chalked it up to continued fumblings. I dutifully followed her to the table, and nodded when she remarked over the beeping doppler that, yes, that was my heart, and remained still and patient as she slid the doppler lower to a faster rhythm.

“And that’s baby’s heartbeat.”

The best part of this story is that I actually, literally shouted whose baby?! to this poor woman who, in hindsight, was trying really hard not to freak me out given that I was, indeed, sixteen weeks pregnant.

I knew gender in two weeks and was showing within four, and six months later, I departed the alternative birthing center with an infant, a determination for escape, and half a loaf of cranberry bread my midwife baked as I pushed.

I wonder sometimes if I dreamed her into reality; if my secret yearning to break free of a life I was waking up trapped inside conjured Pearl’s life. Or, maybe I dreamed the tests and blood drawings and the science that proved magic. I certainly don’t remember labor clearly because I would do it again in a heartbeat; was that the dream?

And what of these last years: the courts, yes, and the anxiety, and the foggy disbelief that loving her and being loved by her could be so healing.

What, of any of this, is real beyond what I choose to hold onto?

I’m thinking of my first play.
Of the Sistine Chapel.
Of the Mountain.
Of the chilly January night I made my break.
Of applying to schools.
Of losing my virginity.
Of finishing writing a scene.
Of submitting a poem.
Of holding a boundary.
Of hugging a missed friend.
Of remembering.

I blew [a friend’s] mind by validating it.

I mentioned that I read an article about memory that spoke to new research that inquires about our mind’s tendencies – the researchers are asking, “What if our minds are designed to forget?” I’m fascinated about how it might flow toward our understanding of diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s; how might we differently approach folks if we conceptualized their minds as hyperactively performing as opposed to malfunctioning? Rightly so, she took this as a signal her mind is just excelling. 

I take it as permission to stop fighting myself so hard.

Remember in Clueless when Cher says that Tai is like a Botticelli chick? I think often about how I am misunderstood in my time. My deep connection to Renaissance women only increased in my languid, hedonistic early pandemic days, and maybe I just haven’t seen the time when my stuff (thinking, style, creations, hopes) make sense. I’m saying: 

I can’t know how or why I’m built like this, but my work isn’t to find my maker and ask for explanation, so much as to meet my maker and tell how I came to make meaning of what I was given.

Damn.

Sometimes I start writing the sentence and find it goes on without me. Perhaps that’s another metaphor for what I am percolating on today: Dreams, like writing, are boxing matches; once in the ring, there’s nothing for it but to fight with all your might.

I don’t think any dream, in sleeping or waking, is as serious as life or death, or as frivolous as the cloud-like tendrils that escape my grasp despite my efforts. Indeed, whether in dreaming or in recounting the dream, I’m saying we must land on the second half of Mystery Reader’s question:

What is a recent dream you remember?

It matters what we hold onto above all. No dream, however intricate and magical and beautiful or terrifying and gruesome and avoidable, is worth it's salt if it's gone when you reach for its edges.

What I remember of discovering Pearl was the surprise and the immediate yes to embracing her. What I remember of that recurring dream I’ve had since middle school is the brilliant colors. What I remember of the longing for an MFA is the permission to be with and amongst words. What I remember of loving was the potential for satiated need of touch.

I have, despite circumstances, built a life of embrace, color, words, and touch, even if the picture looks quite different from any dream I could muster up. 

Dreams and remembering are not synonymous, but if we are built for forgetting, it matters what we refuse to relinquish and live into existence.

[this is Pope.L + that's a name worth exploring]

I have to look up the word “schadenfreude” every time. Not just the spelling, but the meaning; it’s as if my brain cannot accept that such a thing exists, and so my mind has chosen to excuse the definition from all memory. I like that about her; gutsy girl, to set a boundary so fierce, my mind.

Sure, I’ve fantasized of vanquishing mine enemies, and I like the fantastical reach of my gorgeous mind, too! but I think delight and joy for all in their days is both achievable and, like, fun, so I’m about that.

When my daughter was born in the golden glow of not-quite-sunset in July, I knew two things instantly: I didn’t know I could feel so much so wide all at once, and two, I probably didn’t even know how much more than that I didn’t know. It was the first moment I began to imagine a life for myself that wasn’t atonement for my slutty 20s, professional achievement that would make my parents proud, or somehow please please discovering the quick fix to the paralyzing relationship I seemed to wake up inside.

To imagine myself as a woman who escaped, as a woman who returned to herself.
To imagine myself a joyful single parent, content in the weight of the work.
To imagine myself clean and free. 
To imagine myself in my own home, making my own art.

These were imaginings that far surpassed my daydreams. Indeed, they were the whispers I couldn’t shake, and thinking of them now makes me wonder if perhaps our biggest dreams are called obsessions.

I am obsessed with being an artist as I grow up.

I don’t have to dream it up or try to remember; it’s a desire so strong, it has glued itself to my very throat, and I cannot whisper words without its touch & the only thing that has shaken me free from the daydreams is the reality of distance between me and my obsessions. To imagine myself as anyone beyond my circumstances was to reckon with the ego’s wounds: how the fuck did I get here?

I wager that most dreams are an oasis calling from a paradise of our own makings.

& I dig an adventure! but I’m not trying to run for the sake of running.

I do not wish to escape to anything, even if something true compels the desire to bolt.

I wrote last week that I left New York because I wanted to like my day; that sentence could be stretched to its most forgiving distance and applied to why I left my ex, and New Orleans, too. Forget joy, there is no dreaming in barren lands.

Here’s my summary – we awake to pulsing hearts within that demand our attention and grow dormant when ignored, and we can choose to remember that, those of us obsessed with loving this life, and ourselves inside it. This life that will, most certainly, break me and fail me and give life to my fears and give birth to aliens so wily as a dream.

I guess that’s what I remember: 

I have wished and then wound myself deeper in love with the life I have, and I fucking shall do as often as I please.

All images featured this week were found on the internet, specifically on a storyboard I've building for, oh, a decade, called “the film.”

xx Adrienne