On Magic and Dreams
I have been having the craziest dreams recently. Last month, I went down to New Orleans for the Giant Puppet Festival, and Simi and I shared a bed. They told me I woke up every night, on the hour, softly shouting “ahh ahh ahhh,” and they would ask me five or six times, “Are you OK?” I’d nod, and flip over. The last night of the trip is the only time I remember this happening; I woke up, not knowing who I was or where I was or who they were. I woke up half sitting up, staring at them. I woke up drenched in sweat. “Are you OK?” they asked. Yes, I finally nodded, once I had exited ego death. This week I have dreamed about drowning in a submarine full of Titanic-style European immigrants. Drowning in a bedroom below the water line in a cabin. Being beaten up. Beating someone up. Daisies. Apocalypses. Time travel. Some big fears of mine.
I have lots of irrational fears that drive me to make silly decisions, but perhaps none so silly as my fear of time travel leading me to take a soap-making class. There are so many things I could not do in medieval times, but at least now I could perhaps remember how to make lye from wood ash, and soap from lye. My knowledge of history is poor, and I have no skills that would survive so well without electricity, except perhaps weaving. And still, I fear if the cholera and black death didn’t get me, I would be burned at the stake.
Sometimes I wonder about the far future, and wonder what beliefs of ours will be mythic to future generations. Gender? Capitalism? Religion in general? If the Greeks had Zeus, and the Egyptians Ra, will the Abrahamic religions appear silly to our far-future descendants? If one could time travel, what would make them appear magical to people out of our time? Even a flashlight would feel holy to someone who had only known fire. Perhaps all technology, all thoughts and practices become mythology eventually, once nobody remembers how they work or why they came about.
I cannot imagine magic, cannot imagine it as real, as a force. And yet it is undeniable that energy moves throughout our world, our systems. From the sun to the grass to the animals to us, all the way up and down the food chain. From our cells to our organ systems, all without our knowledge. So it is conceivable that other things move that way too. Weather systems inside of us, between us. I am a normal normal girl, and yet I have sadness shooting out my fingertips when I am in deep sadness, fighting back tears or in the midst of weeks of melancholy, when it has had the chance to pool like blood in my dangling fingertips. Emotional pain so intense it bleeds through its walls, takes over my nerves, shoots out of the tips of my fingers like magic in an early 2000s movie. Pink fairy dust beams, growing from your veins like roots, planting themselves and you into reality, onto the spot.
People say we all see color differently. I see pink fairy dust beams where you see green fairy dust beams. Po-tay-toe, po-tat-toe. I imagine a horse galloping and think of the wind blowing through its hair, sweat collecting on its hide, the micros of the picture. You see the long strides, hear the thunder of its gallops, the swishing of long grass. I smell the ocean on a muggy day and think of bone broth, of the sewage treatment plant at recess during hide tide. You think of salt on your lips, sand in your shoes and staining your skin. I live for emotion. It is my driving force. I am driven by desire, by pain pulling my hand forward and back, by boredom and jealously and curious joy. The fairy dust shoots out of my fingers as a tracking spell, trying to find some respite, something I have missed. To think that others do not filter life through an emotional lens, that they see green and I gray, is alien to me. I cannot even imagine what other drivers there are than emotional ones. It is mythic.
