World Dream Bank
home -
add a dream -
newest -
art gallery -
sampler -
dreams by
title,
subject,
author,
date,
places,
names
Drugged, Shrunk and Daubed
Dreamed 2008/11/1 by Wayan
THAT DAY
I'm sick. Joints ache, especially my back. I still go to Open Studios out at Hunter's Point Shipyard and talk with a couple dozen artists. Standouts:
- John Ager's simple stylized landscapes focus on texture, design, with sharp outlines of parts, suppressing detail elsewhere. Sparing yet solidly create the sense of place.
- Linda Fong--also big abstracty landscapes full of simple motifs that read as land, tree, sea, star... but that makes them easy to do and spacious-feeling. Drastic simplicity like this might help me illustrate the landscapes in Planetocopia).
- Mark Roller is doing a huge dream-related sculpted piece about his wife Colette. "Why so big?" I ask. Epic scale; seems like it'll be hell to store. He snorts "Because her images are life-casts; if I scaled down I'd have to sculpt freehand!" Oh. Duh. Talk about naïve! I assumed he had this incredibly accurate eye and hand. Just a mold...
THAT EVENING
My friend Artemisia drops by. She's going to Starhawk's famous Spiral Dance for All Hallow's Eve. I'm too sick to dance, but we talk politics. Our town has a ballot-proposition to ignore (non-nuisance) prostitution. But it also defunds organizations serving prostitutes. Why'd the writers add that? I'm for decriminalization, but why cut services too? Artemisia says "Because those charities have atrocious street reputations among the prostitutes I know. Controlling, judgmental, exploitive... defunding them doesn't bother me a bit." OK, she's convinced me.
My friends Mike & Nic call, inviting me to a Halloween/Samhain party too. But I feel too sick. Just fall in bed.
THAT NIGHT
On white sheets, a nude tan curl:
skin question mark, or girl.
Slight, small-breasted. A bronze
hair-fan frames her feline face
as flame bedecks a match.
Why's she burning on this bed?
Ran off, broke, hungry, whored,
snared now by a charity, who're
sans consent ensaving her:
injected a simmery hormone stew,
regressing her body five years or so.
Her breasts smooth: chaste away.
A caseworker-scheme to render her
a scaled-up child, resexless
so johns won't pay to play.
Worse yet
they brain
wash. Blandly make the claim
"You killed
one john
though he likely raped. But you
slew two
more a few
months back, effortlessly.
We guess
you're an ass-
assin with wiped memory."
|
|
And she believes their shit! Or's it
their drugs? Glumly she
says "I'm a total blank to me.
Who knows?" The possibility
shakes me. Do I love a mad?
But I feel skeptical a tad--
aliens run this charity,
and plan to fly her to a frontier
farm-world "to save her."
Whore to sharecropper? Sure
her life was unsafe--unsavory--
But this reeks of slavery!
We're all just characters cyberpunk;
our novelist carefully paints
the girl as amoral, corrupt beneath
her angelface. You readers are meant
to buy the benevolent aliens' tale,
and to her innocent killings thrill.
O what a bold text genderbent,
to make his (of course he's male)
only girlish character kill.
She's his posterchild and tool.
Brainwashed victim, and a whore
to be exiled, desexed.
His book might as well be Victór-
ian! I'm insulted, vexed!
|
IN THE MORNING
I wake. Reach to write the dream,
but every move is checked: back-pain.
Computer's far across the room.
Write in bed? But the pen and pad
by my bed are missing. Yet in
my left hand's a paint brush!
Black acrylic thinned to ink.
In my right hand...
A girl-doll, two feet tall.
It's her, to careful scale!
Naked in my fist. I paint
black words across her breasts:
"Her breasts shrank away."
But language bends to meet
her curves, by aureoles belied.
She has adult proportions, if
scaled down to just two-fifths.
|
So I bend her over, paint spine instead.
Smoother, but still a straggly text:
brushwork crude and slow. Dread
grows. I'll forget dream-facts.
Then she stretches arms and shifts
one foot to balance better. Alive!
But with her scaled-down brain
is she adult, child, pet or thing?
Did I mistreat her, taking small
for mindless, just like them?
I quit using Minigirl for text;
seek paper and pen instead.
She arches over still, face hid;
sighs, revealing sudden ribs.
What do I do next?
And then, and then
she's gone: I woke again.
|
IN THE MORNING. NO, REALLY THIS TIME. I PROMISE.
- Freckled soul-mate echoes a previous dream: Shy No More
- Agency drugs, brainwashes, kidnaps & enslaves clients: the dream confirms Artemisia's accusation that local charities abuse prostitutes.
- Girl accused of killing two johns months ago; forcibly regresses, desexed: my health's regressed to punish/control my being a whore--for having two girlfriends a few months ago! I'm keeping myself regressed, desexed.
- Farm work on distant planet: building the World Dream Bank and Planetocopia! Artistically productive, but all work and no play...
- False waking and second dream: common for me. Usually in such afterdreams I write Dream 1 down, realize what it means, then wake again. It's my dreams' way to force me to face messages I might stupidly or willfully misinterpret. But here, the surrealism spills into the afterdream.
- Scale model: at Open Studio, Mark Roller said he has to make his sculptures monumental--he uses life-casts. Can't scale down live models! "Oh no?" says my dream, and shapes a living 2/5 scale model. So what do I do with the miracle? Use her for a dream notepad! Can you spell 'monomaniac'?
- 2/5 scale: maybe... two senses out of five? Sight and sound, drawing and poetry, but not touch taste smell--no lover for real.
- Struggle to paint words:
- A: at Open Studio, Younhee Paik painted a wild sermon on metal--it looked compelling, but when I read it, bad spelling and grammar marred it.
- B: I'm finding my own dreamwork difficult now. Why? The dream hints:
- I sabotage myself. Hide basic tools and materials--pen, paper, time to write. So I...
- work awkwardly around it, thus...
- stressing my body out.
- She shifts uncomfortably: I struggled to find a bearable position in bed with my inflamed back and neck. So she's definitely my sore, neglected body.
- Victorian attitude: an online article said Victorians saw prostitutes as doomed: no forgiveness, acceptance or happiness imaginable! Sympathy once they die, but that's all.
- ACTION 1: Vote for the proposition to decriminalize prostitution AND defund charities.
- ACTION 2: To fight moralizing alien drug-pushing kidnappers, enlarge your model of your body and its importance two and a half times! And stretch a lot.
- This is Dreamverse #38. The Dreamverse Project is to write one readable, memorable dream-poem every morning. Insanely ambitious, now that I want to illustrate more of them in watercolor. More like a few a month. Got to leave room for the ones that don't want to be poems...
AFTERWORD
It's a month later now. I still feel regressed, not sexless inside, but latent. In hiding.
I voted as the dream said. The prop lost, but not by much. Progress is slow. We'll try again.
LISTS AND LINKS:
orphans, runaways, throwaways -
prostitution -
weird medical procedures -
metabolic dreams - more instant & vanishing breasts:
Dolly Parton's Tarot,
Catch-Up,
Breast Bandit,
Beryl's Dog Days -
breasts in general -
sex,
triangles, and
guilt -
false waking -
dreamwork -
writing -
giants and dwarves -
sculpture -
living dolls -
nudity in dreams -
politics -
watercolor - the
Dreamverses project - the next Dreamverse:
Discard
World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sk - Sl-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites