Dream 5 - Chicken Coop
Your dreams welcomed you this week, warm like a morning sun. The people you met were family somehow, and brought you nothing but strangeness or joy.
You’re in a desert, walking along a long stretch of red carpet. The sky is an endless blue block and the horizon vanishes quickly, but you aren’t hot and you aren’t worried. You’re well dressed, with a white shirt, clean hair, and bright red tailored pants. You look good.
You come across three friends, building a house out of light-colored wood. As of now, it’s only the trusses and outlines of the house, but the plan looks sprawling, complex, tiered. All of them are young, but a bit older than you, like people who might have a better grasp of where they are going next in life. They don’t speak and, unbothered in their work, gesture for you to walk past them and look around.
They’ve dug out small areas in the ground and built different wood structures around them. These ones are more whimsical than the house: like little pagodas or tombs. You reach your hand in and feel worms moving around in the earth– it’s so much cooler, even a few inches below the crust. The little shelves that’ve been dug out have things like record players and dishes. It’s like they’ve set up camp here while waiting for their house to happen.
You stand back up and find yourself in something that is more like an apartment. Perhaps it is the house now that it has been built. The light coming in through the double hung windows is powdery and angled, and the ceiling is covered in movie posters. Someone famous walks by in the room next to yours and you start to look for a place to nap. You walk around the house. You’re a guest, but you wouldn’t feel uncomfortable grabbing a book off the coffee table or food out of the fridge.
On the porch, someone has put up a hammock, which you drop yourself into and start to doze. Someone joins you, nestling behind where you can’t see them, and rests their nose on the top of your spine. You look out over the rocky desert that stretches out in front of the porch, barren and biblical. A scene forms on this stage, guided by the touch you feel on your back, crowds of chalk-white figures, morphing like an animated fluid. They walk, sometimes moving, sometimes treading on air, they talk and argue, and go on their way, their costumes change, suggesting a movement through history only by their details, sneakers, hats, frilled collars, corsets…
When you end up on the hammock alone, you go look for the roof of the house. Your way there is pleasantly ambulatory. No room follows logically into the next, and you pass through sequences of laundry rooms, bathrooms, kitchens, closets, knitting rooms, each with different wallpaper, low and high ceilings, disparate furniture lovingly scavenged. It’s as if each room has been redone over time with the coming and going of slow-living people.
The roof itself is up an open staircase to the sky. You crane your neck to the sun and hold the skin-worn handrail, step onto the roof and look out onto the desert as if from a raft in the middle of the ocean. You’re going to stay here a long time.
You’re at the top of a hill as smooth and wind-touched as any stereotype, setting up a picnic. You are dressed for the summer, and nervous like someone who’s been telling themselves they have no reason to be nervous. There’s no one around for miles, and that’s exactly why you’re having this picnic here. Your only guest will be a fat, lemon-yellow, stripeless tiger, who you see arriving now over the crest as slow as a portly statesman having left his attaché. The tiger considers you, deciding on a place to sit. After a long silence in which you take care to let your train of thought drift with his, he looks down at the knitted picnic blanket you’ve set out for the two of you, which represents a red farmhouse against an electric blue sky.
Halfway through eating he looks at you and says, “look at my fur,” surprising you with his paternal tone. You oblige, laying your chin deep in the fluff of his back. In it you find a flock of minuscule chickens he is raising there, pecking briskly as if in tall grass. You also see your shadow, child-like and to scale with the flock, kneeling and cooing at the chickens with tender familiarity. You also know that further away in this field there is a limestone cave, with a couple hiding in it. They don’t dare step foot outside the cave out of fear the sun would burn them to a crisp. Your shadow, which you saw over with the chickens, is their taunting spectator, the angel, the Ariel, the Caliban of this scene. They’ve learned to ignore it, or ask it for advice, which is often fraudulent. Yet their desire to leave the cave has never quite gone, and for years the more demure of the two has been weaving colorful tapestries, orange and blue and white by the fire in the back of the cave. You see now that they have started to pin these tapestries up on wooden structures, creating a path out into the filtered sunlight, and finally, they are able to leave.
Your shadow catches them doing this, and, furious, starts to go after them, intending to tear the tapestries behind them so they cannot return to the cave, so that they will end up stuck, surrounded by the desert and blazing sun. Thinking quick, you speak up to get your shadow’s attention. You convince it that it shouldn’t go chase after the couple, that you can give it much more amusing people to torment. You produce from your pockets funny stone masks, white, crude and expressive. “These ones,” you tell your shadow like a street salesman, “will be afraid of the night. These ones of the ground. Much more cowardly than those other two. Let them go, they will see that the world is scary enough as it is on its own.” And your shadow is pleased, and goes off with your offerings.
Later, the tiger takes you to the city where the couple has set up after leaving the cave. It’s an ancient city, the kind you read about in fairy tales or scriptures, with thick walls and dusty streets. It’s in these streets that the tiger grew into the powerful beast he is now-- he has for them a weary kind of love. The sky is electric blue, like in your picnic blanket. Across the souk, you can see the couple, milling away at the store they have opened, selling tapestries, eager and lively, safe under the shade of their stand. You and the tiger look at them silently, but never come near.
In this dream, you slouch at the counter of a bar, the way that the owner’s child might do when no patrons are around. The bar itself is organized like a Tiki bar --little island tables surrounded by low chairs for chatting and drinking, round counters, easy stairs walking down to cheaply made stucco fountains in the shape of clams and flamingos-- but the bar is decorated like a swiss chalet, with walls thick, rugged wood, red velvet tapestry and piles of old ski trunks in the corners.
The bar is run by one man, at his three different ages. His young adult self organizes and decorates the bar, his older self makes the food and drink, and his child self entertains guests. The young man is over in the veranda, leaning over a maquette of a beach resort. At first he says nothing, continuing to work on the model. You kneel next to him by the coffee table and see the child in the garden, collecting what looks like handfuls of air into his cupped arms. The three of them look nothing like one another, and yet you know that they are one and the same.
“You have to help the old man,” says the younger man, turning to you finally. “He’s been terribly depressed. There is something he misses, but I’ve forgotten what it is.” He keeps his face collected but he is more sad and more concerned than he lets on. You realize that the boy outside is looking for that same thing that will cure the old man’s melancholy, but that he is on the wrong track, as children often are.
Each goes on back to their business and you sit for a minute, growing in confidence that you know what to do. Your eyes wander to the ceiling, which has pieces of a phrase written all around it’s border. Birds fly through the veranda and give you a further clue– you grab the young man by the hand, and look at his sleeve: it has another piece of the phrase embroidered around it. Sure enough, so does the boy’s sleeve, and so do the leaves on one of the rose bushes, and so does the toilet seat, and one of the kitchen plates, and the tip receipt left by the first tenant. With every clue you find, you find yourself going deeper into these bright plastic tunnels in the back of the bar, the phrases multiplying, becoming more bold, less dusty looking.
The phrases are a song, written by the old man. You wait until you are certain that you understand the song and, your hand on the wall of the tunnel, still going forward, you start to sing it clear and strong from the first note. The song is a long, strange and personal ballad about small yellow fruit, and the tree on which they grew. It touches on ancient things, wars seen from afar, love come and gone, the breathing of a valley, always coming back to the tree and it’s sour, yellow fruit. It might not be a song that ends. You keep singing, going further into the tunnel, and behind you, the song wafts into the bar’s sound system.
