World Dream Bank: Jelly Rebellion

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Jelly Rebellion

dreamed 2008/8/19 by Wayan.

I get to interview my own disease.
Who are these foot-high jellies--cells?
Or ectoplasmic cops, directing qi
honking along in gridlock me?
Tiffany lampshades quivering;
inside, waxy loops of string.
To my dream-eyes, bucket-big;
I have to be cell-small.
The cult that led me here inside my hide
postulates just four deep types
of illness lurking latent in the gel.
Mine, they warn, involves two sorts:
Sly usurpers: sullen servant-cells suppress
their regulators. The maid masquerades
as princess, and the princess flees
to herd the mitochondrial geese.
The other type I face: Jello Rebels.
"Gobs off the job!" This class of blob
just won't work. "Cells on strike!"
Wait--have they been paid?
Amid this moral murk, one thing is clear.
Armed invaders I see none! Or rare.
My forty-seven years of ache
appear a (not too) civil war. And there I wake.
Jellyfish with angry eyes; digital illustration of a dream by Wayan, based on a batik/shibori image of a jellyfish by Joy-Lily at www.joy-lily.com.

NOTES

This is Dreamverse #9. Every day, a dream-poem. Can I, can my dreams, sustain that pace? Yesterday, for the first time, I failed to write one. The day before I'd tackled two, and it was too much--all day I ached and felt feverish.
47 years of ache: I'm worried. Whatever my chronic illness is, it's slowly tightening the noose. For quite a while it's restricted play; now it's limiting work. (44 years, really, not 47; but that extra syllable sounds too good! Euphonious whining.)
Jelly beings: I've been reading Jennifer Diane Reitz's webcomic Unicorn Jelly, where human invaders oppress native jelly-people. Suggests my cellular rebellion has some justice on its side: I haven't been treating them well.
Have they been paid? That is, are my cells malnourished? The dream's suggesting nutritional supplements may help more than weapons against some imagined outside agitators (infection)

Usurpation, geese: I just read Shannon Hale's version of the old fairytale Goose Girl. An ambitious maid not only impersonates her princess, but (fearing exposure if anyone from her old court visits) she whips up war-fever against her native land. Quite the opposite of the jelly reference:

No justice in her cause at all. Usurpation pure!
Raised egalitarian, I find
command-chains hard to endure
(or even hold clear in my mind)
but our intricate bodies rely on this!
And letting cells just do as they wish
is no kind of reformist answer;
that's cancer.

Action: Look hard at diet/nutrition, and add anticancer foods and herbs; focus less on fighting infectious agents than on strengthening my immune system.

LISTS AND LINKS: surrealism - size matters - metabolism - diagnostic dreams - dreams of health-advice in general - hierarchy and anarchy - weird dream diseases - chronic fatigue and environmental illness - dream poems - another dream inspired by Unicorn Jelly: Croc Boy - Dreamverses project - the next Dreamverse: Not Our Hawai'i

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