There are centers of activity which serve the function of preparing the psyche for the marathon of its daily life. Dreamworld is one of these centers [1]. The preparatory function of the Dreamworld is threefold: one, it gives the analytical mind a chalkboard upon which to scrawl out all its wild perceptions and flat webs of causality, its pie charts of value and parabolic graphs of relational exchange; two, it gives the drama queen a stage upon which to explore the meaning of chaos, the symphony of emotion, the gestures and textures of engaged vitality, the delivery and feedback of interactive improvisation; three, it unchains the mind-body pathways so that the freeflow of instant correlation can efficiently inform the organism of its current space in growth and development. Without dreaming sleep, these functions cannot be adequately performed, no matter how fastidious the documentarian, no matter how over-achieving the stagehand, no matter how committed the custodian. Dreamworld is essential to our sanity. And, being insane, humans tend to overlook its value and dismiss its relevance.
Not so for Morning Glory Maycomb.
Regularly, she spent more than an hour of her pre-bus-ride, pre-breakfast, pre-bathroom awareness of daylight paying ample homage to her night life. Often, yes, before even swinging her little feet into the fuzzy slippers and scooting down the hall to relieve her extraordinarily patient bladder, she would sit up in bed writing, drawing, sculpting, singing the senses left to her by her dreams. One result among many results of this was that her room looked like a museum. It was chock full of little figurines and sprawling landscape collages, tall woven tapestries made of knotted sticks and shoelaces and glass beads all dropped about like dew, itty-bitty animal colonies drawn into the hair of a particularly commanding bust in the middle of the dresser, phantasmal tendrils of shredded fabric draping over the pseudo-canopy of her bed, bedposts fashioned out of squashed soda cans and good strong glue.
Often, there was not enough time to act on Glory’s dreams right away in that first morning hour. She would have a doozy of a dream, full of imagery and meaning and impact, but she only had time to capture the fullness of its feeling in blueprint form. So she would sketch its outline as accurately as word and paper could record, and then, after thinking about it all day long, she’d return in the evening and set out to giving the creation its sacred form.
She’d learned this efficient system after one particularly drenched Dreamtime awoke her with a symphony of new world to create. That morning, as the time to prepare for school ticked away, she became increasingly anxious, heart racing, palms and neck sweaty, eyes wild. When her dad yelled down the hall that the bus would be there any minute, she was still elbow-deep in paper mâché, and she knew something had to give. Being very private about her work at the time, she had run out of the room, washed her hands, and gone to meet her father in the hallway just before he reached her door.
The minute he saw her face, his fatherly concern clicked on, naturally asking if she was feeling okay. And the minute he asked if she was feeling okay, she recognized her opportunity to answer, quite truthfully, “No.” Now, the “no” had a certain meaning to a father calling his child in sick for school, and it had a certain meaning for a daughter gifted with the chance to work on fleshing out her dreams all day long. These meanings were completely misaligned, but it didn’t seem that way to Glory, even as she meekly greeted Mrs. Hanson from next door, her nursemaid for a Sick Day of Fine Art [2]. That morning, Glory had simply wished her dad a good day at work (“Eh, yeah. Feel better, MG.”) and accepted a glass of orange juice from Mrs. Hanson, who would promptly zonk out on the couch in front of her soaps (“Oh little one, look at you! Go hop into bed, now, and sleep that red out of your eyes.”).
Morning Glory did not sleep that red out. She poured that red out. She scooped that red out. She splattered it and crushed it and molded it. She morphed it into the smooth scales of a dragon the curve of the Nile and at least half its length. She coiled its body around her little dream station seven times, spiraling out from her bed to the edges of the room where the thing grown-ups call “wallpaper” shielded the thing they call “drywall” over the things they call “studs” leading down to the thing they call the “foundation” of the commonly known “house” sitting squarely in a small cavity of earth. Being a relatively new creature, not yet conditioned in dissociation, Morning Glory could feel the cradle of Earth beneath any structure. She could wiggle her toes in soft dirt even when hovering aloft in a second-story bedroom of a standard duplex in Everett, WA. She could feel the echoes of the heartbeats of the cedar groves that once flourished where her house sat like all the other houses and gravestones sat, memorializing ownership in an ocean of stars. The room dimension itself she called the Limitation, and as challenging as it was to work inside, she relished the joy of finding creative ways to fit her vast visions within it. Forty-foot dragon? Check. Dragon with a head of glass and fire, a head of sharp metal teeth, round gemstone nostrils, and red ping-pong eyes. Check. A beard of copper wire. A crown of broken bottles. Horns covered in jingle bells. Mouth fulla green lamé. Check.
Dragon with eight legs like the Spider, with each leg taking the shape of a different earthling: one bull, one goat, one caterpillar, one catfish, one cat, one beaver, one fox, and one mongoose. Feet were for the ground and below, said her dream: feathers for the sky and above. This is why her Dragon’s tail ended with a fan of feathers, one of each bird she knew on earth and one for the bird of the ethers. Phoenix, eagle, peacock, scua, bluejay, cardinal, owl, hawk, crow, chicken, sparrow, bluebird, starling, piper, pheasant, canary, parrot, crane, turkey, vulture, duck, duck, goose, swan, flamingo, pelican, swallow, chickadee, chucker, quail, heron, spoonbill, falcon, goldfinch, turtledove, grouse, albatross, parakeet, cockatiel, hummingbird, woodpecker, loon, and pigeon.
The back of the Dragon, atop the scales, was host to a strange metropolis that introduced the Jetson family to model train enthusiasts. There were boxy high-rises, weaving rollercoasters of transportation, spiked space needles that put Seattle to shame, tiny bars and firehouses and coffee shops, streets with no cars, cars affixed to thin buoyant springs so that the vehicles quivered in the mystical atmosphere rising from the Dragon’s form. It was all red—fire hydrant red—every last nook and cranny, except for the fire hydrants. The minuscule thumbtack-shaped fire-safety implements were painted a luminous gold, and from them, as if they’d been hit by a tiny bandit with no good sense and no respect for water conservation, flowed a steady gush of glittered gold. It burst gaily in every direction, eventually converging down the Dragon’s back into a golden river that gave way to the trees. The tail was a technicolor forest. Trees with golden trunks rose as tall as the buildings, offering every color of leaf into the air—good thing Dennis had bought the megapack of tempera paint: hot pink, royal purple, chartreuse, teal, lemonade, grenada, goldenrod, bittersweet, apricot, mint green, lima green, spring green, olive green, algae green, cyan, creamsicle, copper, bordeaux, tangerine, turmeric, lavender, black, ivory, smoke, silver. A veritable cacophony for the unruly synesthetic.
Beneath the glitter of the forest floor, where the golden spring gave way to what might, on land, be soft abundant earth, there were tiny scrolls of paper. Each one inscribed differently, the word-vines flowed out in curly-cues which draped over the edges, wound up the trees, and snuggled together in tight ropes. What they said… well, they said what the dream had to say.
Glory worked so hard that she actually did fall asleep at long last, one hand full of paste, stuck to her scratch paper, the other covered in gold sparkle and a few stray jingle bells. This is how Dennis and Mrs. Hanson found her in the afternoon, the late November sunset casting its glow across the landscape of her strange little planet.
Grounded. How ironic. After making a blessed monster that could fly a hundred times the world over and beyond the sun before breakfast.
True to Dennis’ disciplined calling, his sense of honest hard work, and a bit of the wounded pride of a first-time-duped father, he worked out a fair consequence. He made her sleep for a whole Saturday—a whole Saturday!—in exchange for the day she took.
“You can’t just do whatever you want whenever you want to,” he had said. “You know, there is stuff, important stuff, we just need to do. Times to do it. Ways to go about it. It’s time to face facts [3].” She cried herself back to sleep every time she awoke, convinced there was something evil murdering the air between herself and her father. Never before had he been anything but supportive of her artwork. And yeah, maybe she had overdone it with the truancy part, but to sleep away the whole Saturday, that was going too far. Maybe he was growing cold to art. Maybe he was afraid. Maybe he was mad he never got that quilt done. Glory sullenly fretted through these thoughts while receiving her meals in bed, as Denny delivered soup and sandwiches with a measured calm, trying to keep his gaze downcast so she wouldn’t see the twinkle in his eyes. She fell asleep hating him for the first time in her life.
The next morning, sentence complete, Dennis helped her anchor the dragon to the ceiling. The squeal Morning Glory set loose upon seeing him with an armful of tools was enough to clear the atmosphere of grudge. They worked until afternoon, finishing the ceremony with goblets of red fruit juice. She agreed, from then on, to work out her art muscles around the simple structure of mandatory school attendance. Sometimes the reparative acts of family simply require pneumatic tools, gorilla glue, and patience [4].
Now Glory awakes in dragon-dripping brilliance with every sunrise. She feels the gold curls shimmering above as she swiftly scribes the shapes of her dreamscapes, and she flourishes it a deep bow before scurrying off to school where facts are given faces.
-**
1. Babylawn is another, but that’s a different type of preparation and a different type of service.
2. For a Fine Day of Sick Art: see Museu Picasso. For the Fine Art of the Sick Day: see Ferris Beuller.
3. And other such parental nonsense justifying compliance within the structures of a dubiously unstable society.
4. As well as a heroic feat of willingness to get covered in gold glitter.