THAT DAY

I read Richard Russo's Dreams Are Wiser Than Men. Lots of psychological blather. The only interesting dreams for me were a few Native Australian ones... that Russo promptly claims no Westerner can understand and no Western dreamer could dream and be judged sane!

His first claim's true enough--in this book! He presents only a snippet of text, without the dreamer's comments on what it meant: like that, of COURSE they're baffling! Mine would be too.

But his second claim's insulting. The longer dreams in this book are intense coherent journeys among nonhuman spirit animals--that is, they're just like MY dreams.

I'm a Westerner dreaming like that. So I'm insane. Russo has spoken!

THAT NIGHT

I find a book of Persian miniatures in rich color, textured papers, gold leaf, and collage. It's titled "The Horse Loves the Lady", but when I look at the back cover, the title there says "The Lady Loves the Horse". (When I woke I wasn't sure if it read back to front like a Japanese book or front to back like a Euro book.)

On the spine is a figure I took to be a palomino horse facing away, calligraphically abstracted; to the right, a mountain, massive, dark.

Look closer. Wrong! That's not a pony tail but a ponytail. The horse I saw is the Lady, in Japanese robes. And the massive Mountain is a huge black horse.

In my dark bedroom, the images are hard to see. So I walk around the house seeking better light. I avoid people--don't want them to see me looking at explicitly sexy material, and this, unexpectedly, is.

When I turn to a random page, find a loose paper slips around; dare not spread wide while walking or it'll fall out. Peer at a low angle in half-shut book. It's the Lady, nude, looking at a squared-off image--sort of a cubist bust--of the Emperor, her Beloved.

Huh? I thought she loved the Horse.

Or... is this the Emperor's wishful thinking? Maybe with a little help from his courtiers. He commissioned the book, and they slipped this in as flattery?

No, makes no sense; it's not flattering at all. I can't see how anyone could love this clunky figure--like a Halloween robot made of cardboard boxes.

The next page has wild beautiful textures--marbled collages, and angular indigo rocks--azurite ore? very Persian!--contrasting with pale gold squiggly background. But I can only see the edges of figures inside, because I dare not open the book--this page seems loose. If it falls out, others could see. And we can't have that!

The next page has several figures. On the right, the Horse and Lady are back. But now he's a unicorn--smaller than a horse, graceful, neat--and she's clearly part-equine herself--a demicorn? No wonder they're a couple. Or the other way round--couples grow more similar over time. It's just more physical, more visible, when they start out as visibly different as these two.

On the left are figures meditating. "Bonner The Fat" (my friend Jade's old dog, though the sobriquet "The Fat" is new; I don't recall Bonner being terribly fat) and Jade herself, both looking very Buddhist, in lotus poses (well, as lotusy as an overweight dog can manage).

Over Jade, a bird hovers, crosslegged, meditating, with similar Buddha eyes.

Oh. Of course. A birdiesattva!

Now the travel-journalist is here! He says "The pages look like yours because... they sort of ARE. You saw my journal in your dream, and when you woke, you copied what you dreamed. Like this hotspring sketch, here. I actually drew her not quite nude--back in the day, European censors would have had a fit, so I added a bikini bottom--and her proportions were a bit different. But your drawing's based on my journal, and the feeling comes quite close. Impressive, given that I had a model, and all you had was the memory of a dream. You can't translate perfectly--but you got the gist."

I accept his claim I dreamed-within-a-dream of his travel journal, of his experience... but I never think to ask what he meant by a model. "Did you only see her in a book? Meet her in YOUR dream? Or... on the road?"

2020 NOTES

• Source: Transcribing a 1990 dream journal, I found this dream text, plus an ink sketch of the nude unicorn girl in the hotspring. Colored it and penciled other illustrations, 2020. I know why I let it sit for thirty years: I lacked the skills to render its images. Still true; but now I don't care. Bad is better than not at all.
• Lady and Horse: probably mind (or soul) and body. In most Western thinking, these are in conflict--or the mind rules. Not here! A loving equality.
• Cubist bust of the Emperor: I suspect this is rigid Richard Russo. The Emperor not only has no clothes, he has no curves--unlike the Lady, who I assume stands for life untrammeled by conceptual boxes.
• My friend Jade, Bonner the Fat, Birdiesattva: Jade asked me to join a small meditation group; she was midway between peer and mentor. Not sure about that birdiesattva (not to mention doggysattva). Maybe they're evidence anyone can practice Buddhism if you just do it.
• Unicorn and Demicorn: love and equality cause changes--the body is no longer a simple beast, and that humanity Westerners value so much turns part animal and magical. The effect of long-term dreamwork?
• Explorer of strange lands saying "Not every detail's right but you caught the gist": I suspect he's my dreamwork itself! I don't meet personifications of my own dreaming often, but this isn't the first time, either. (If you've met such a figure, send me your dream! I'm building a list of dreams personified.)
• Silk Road syncretism, magical creatures: no surprise! I grew up a shamanic dreamer; it was Native American, Buddhist and Dreamtime worldviews that helped me--Western ideas didn't (well, human rights and good libraries are nice). The dream critiques writers like Russo who see non-Westerners and nonhuman dream characters as inherently alien/other (plus, he kinda made that otherness sound not cultural but racial). Since my dreams make me experience being other genders, races, cultures, even species, I naïvely assumed all experienced dreamworkers get forced out of racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, and specism--kicking and screaming, maybe, but dragged out of their birth-boxes.

  Silly me! Some dreamworkers--even published scholars--quite literally wouldn't dream of it.

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