Unearthing a Body in a Dream
My body's personal response to the world that consumes me right now
Today I glanced at my phone and saw naked bodies in rows on knees forming into balls and something dropped in me. It dropped down into that triangular space right under my rib cage. I couldn't watch anymore, so I looked it up. I looked up if those bodies are real. If the hands holding the vessel that is projecting these bodies onto me are real. What a strange concept, to find evidence of others. And not them as them but them as…something. Something like a combination of a pocket knife and the clutch of a distinct fist. That’s how my dad concluded that his brother was his brother. It’s a fleshy, odd collective of objects and body parts that sticks on my hands like dough and I knit a warm web that ends up under my nails and on the edges of my cheeks. Hardens in my hair.
The first time I sobbed and really sobbed about the war. About my families’ war. About a war. I was the only person in the Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide museum in Sarajevo and I saw things that complement somebodies’ bodies. Shoes. Windbreakers. Camcorders. Antennas. Relics of an 80’s dream reality. All the human inventions that are extensions of a body.
The arrangements seemed curated by a shaky adult whose childhood thoughts transmuted into small figurines and collectibles. I think of a very serious toddler bringing things to your lap. All of this in a small dark building with a set of stairs. There was an old, boxy TV in a corner where someone’s camcorder captured civilians as they ducked through sniper bullets. Above the TV hung a painted cardboard sign: “pazi snajper.” Bodies in colorful jackets would crouch and run across. I pictured capturing them softly into my palms and adding them to the mass that forms under my ribs. The place where my tears seemed to start to form.
Before, I never could really understand or explain my role in my dreams. Was it lucid, was it passive, was it… inactive? I often find myself being moved by a force outside of me and letting it. And when I wake up, I am only left with just a feeling. And now, as bodies roll across my screen and extensions of people rise under oppressive, genocidal pressure are extended through the internet, I feel myself resembling a dream. Because I am merely bearing witness. Because I am an aftermath of the end of a dream. And the beginning of a new one. But, I can feel something. Something beyond empathy. I feel a collective lesson in time. And I know what sits at the neck when you crouch for your life in what was once your favorite jacket. Maybe my mom, a person I also am, runs down my spine into a house in a forest where she places my sister in washing machines and under windows in a desperate…guess of fate?
What I want to say is, where does a body consciously go in a dream you are living? Where screens collapse and math tumbles, and your guesses keep you alive. Do we find ourselves under the doughy weight of others? I think of changing the direction of a dream, but to summon a new one I have to wake and doze off yet again.
I mourn many dreams. And maybe when I type “dreams” I know that means reality too. [Sometimes when I speak of past, present and future, I also mean to add dreams, consciousness and reality and maybe, also, mind, body and soul.] So, in light of it all, a blatant oppressive re-shifting combined with a collective thought resistance, I realize that dreams are spilling and slipping and found under rubbles of our webs of consciousness.
So, when bodies come together in the Earth in masses and they crouch under others, is it an end of a dream or is it a collective expulsion of energy to begin a new one? And, what does it mean to finish a dream to its end? Without an interruption. The bodies will find their way back to one another, but what does that mean for the dreamers they have left behind? Maybe standing on the collective. They are now part of the world building, and how do you use an Earth filled with bodies of unrealized dreamers? Will it shake in you when you eat its growth? Will your buildings stand a little crooked? And what if we wake up and completely forgot the dream? Lying in bed a little longer in the mornings because the dream is right at the tip of your thoughts, but you can’t quite pull it back in.
I think of my revelations with my own body. How I have always either looked at it or away from it as if I am a curious entity and it, something so subordinate to me that I have to constantly look at it and away from it in love. Like kids test the limits of reality- it is not good or evil, it is simply a manipulation to qualify a guess.
My guess is that we can’t stop a guess of fate. We will crouch and wince and forever understand a dream through a body. It is inevitable and necessary to exist as a mold of bodies. Don’t look away even if it is going away. Cry and knead with your body, and when you stretch please do it slowly and let your forehead touch your kneecap in a collateral commitment of compassion. Think of knuckles losing their grip at the edges of your fingers at the end of dreams. Take our masses and coddle them because they’ve let go already. Practice your dreams.
Things I have been consuming that are reflecting my interpretation of this dream reality right at this moment:
-Ismatu Gwendolyn’s essays and reading list especially her essay “There is No revolution without Madness”
-The novel “Dear Chrysanthemums” written in a series of short stories by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
-The posts that are coming in from Gaza by civilians and journalists
-Listening to my dad after he has had a few shots of rakija with a close friend
-Touching my body on Mediterranean beaches
-Reading obscure and intangible works of fiction
-My chronic lower back pain
-Talking to my body when we are alone
-The documentary film “The DNA of Dignity”
-The book “The Employees” by Olga Ravn and the exhibition it’s based on by Lea Guldditte Hestelund
-The movie “Quo Vadis, Aida”
☆ s from north of space
Resources for Gaza:
Beautifully written. It brought to mind the art of a friend of mine :: https://www.ofrafisher.com/#/in-this-together-3/