When I wake, these legs of mine ache, like I've been running in dream-time. Dreamland.

I can't trust anyone who says they have 'boring' dreams, especially if they say it is because their waking lives are oh so interesting. Dreams, they muse smugly, are simply a method of wish-fulfillment, reflecting what one doesn�t have. If these dreams are boring, then you must have a waking life that is so fulfilling emotionally and materially you don't need anything but 'boring' dreams. Why fly a zeppelin in dream-time, when you have flown around the world already? Why look for true romance, when you can sample any piece of ass if you have just the right amount of money? Why play on secret stages, when you can have tiny surveillance cameras installed in your home?

But in dream-time, another world entangles itself with this one, the waking world. Here in dream-time, I will meet the people I have loved and hated, as well as the people I have only encountered in books and films. �Boring� dreams seem evident of ennui. The inability to openly receive stimuli (and to be thus changed. Imprinted.)

Quantum theory supposes that where there are "things", there are infinitely complex relationships. These things we see and feel (the computer screen, my hands, your body) are not; they are relationships occurring among many fields of activities. My body is a field of organic activity interacting with other fields of activity (your body, a book, film). There will always be a mutual entanglement between my atoms and your atoms (and the atoms between our atoms), between myself and you, between observer and observed. Perhaps this can explain why dreamtime happens. Why dreamland exists. Even if you can't take a photograph of it.

Unless relationships dissipate into nothingness (forgetting, perhaps), we will continue to engage, entangled because our atoms and desires must support the other, each other. Even after slumber or death, who we are (relationships) will co-create and re-create ourselves and others (relationships). Dreams realized. (And no person is ever alone; no person is always still.)

The dreamlanders can be friend, stranger or enemy. I have spoken to my dead ones. I have traveled through donut-shop and Paris and colonialist haven. I have been chased in a forest by a former lover; he sought to imprison me in a little crystalline cage. I have manned the rotting helm of a pirate ghost-ship and, one summer, rode a little scarlet Schwinn through the Palace of Versailles during a midsummer night�s ball. Perfectly pronounced French tumbled effortless from my lips.

The dreamlanders are small like me. They are big like me. They are fat and skinny and awkward and graceful like me. They scream and they cry and they laugh, too. They are good and they are evil. They ride skateboards recklessly and they ride bikes sober and drunk, in pointy-toed witch shoes. Their faces look like they will melt. Their faces are stone.

Here, you can water stone. Here stone can flower.

...

Because it does not grasp at time in a way that is linear, progressive, voracious. Because it is not a wholly materialist understanding of space, to be demarcated by barbed-wire and leases. Because you cannot sign on the dotted line for it. Because relationships (you, I, whatever is between you and I) should not be commodified but have been because certain people and certain institutions have made this waking life the impoverished reality that it often is, allowing for 'boring' dreams to happen.

<<