Dream Work I

The Pigeon

Allow me to digress for a moment. To help me better understand my condition I need to talk without purpose. Directions should unfold without my seeing it. Hopefully I can find myself at a destination knowing full well how I got there. Because really we know all along—we have always known—we just forget.

Last night I dreamt of birds, one blue jay and one raven. Both were once human. The dream takes place in a school. In my dreams schools are like prisons, or they are abandoned while clandestine operations fill their deserted rooms. People live inside the schools too, impoverished families and runaways, as if the schools had been repurposed for public housing or shelters, but without any of the zoning codes met. One of the families lived in a classroom, the adults sat catatonic on stacks of hard plastic school chairs. They had a young boy with frail arms and light brown hair. Someone close to him died: masculine, tall, dark, warm. Possibly a father figure, but not his father.

Birds flew in, I suppose, through broken windows only to get trapped in the schools. They’d fly around, pick at fallen pieces of hash brown on the cafeteria floor, loose their feathers. The cafeterias were always open, dirty, and smelled like pig fat. You could see the evaporated oils polluting the air, a malign haze that lingered just beneath the heater lights.

I was floating, viewing through leaded window panes on the top floor. The boy was talking at his parents. A blue jay, one of nature’s reclusive creatures, was desperately, violently, smashing itself, the whole weight of its body, into the windows, making these useless circular routes, distancing itself from the window and careening back into them again.

Too many times, unwittingly, I witnessed the beg from animals in captivity. Especially birds. Birds are far more intelligent than we give them credit for. Our brains are similar to theirs; we evolved, along some line early on, with them. All animals have their expressly poignant way of asking for your help, but a bird’s asking, with their beaks like pointers, sends me into unkempt pity. There’s something insane about their gesture: the beak is exacting, but requires use of the whole head. And with the aid of the entire bodies cooperation, wings and all, they smash their head against the cocking which holds two panes of glass together, keeping them imprisoned. They do so, then, look at you. Smash and look. Smash and question you.

The boy sees the jay, then looks back at the family, sitting hunched over, soul abandoned, blinking slow. He says something like: “You just have to let him out”, while opening a rusted latch. The jay, once again repeating its mad course, miraculously didn’t have a barrier to smash into on his way back around. He disappeared into the cool azure.

To try the same approach relentlessly, without intervention or change of strategy, hoping to yield the desired outcome, is a disordered way of thinking. The bird tries to rationalize, “One more time. The pane won’t be there this time. This time I will fly free.” What is more disordered, though, is the idea of the window. It looks like air, like nothing, but it obstructs.

Clarice Lispector warned us about writing. The fear of finding yourself out through writing; of outing yourself. There is danger in describing. Landmines are the exact words to describe a feeling.

The last I saw of the blue jay was the monarch pattering of its plumage, caught freeze frame in the dream. The was boy sticking his head and arm out of the window, looking after it, when another bird appeared. It came dramatically revealed from the anterior side of the roof, wings raised above its head, black thick beak curved and pointing toward the boy. It was a raven. With instant recognition, mutually shared by the animal and the boy, they embraced. Reunited with him was the father he had lost.

I wake up.

What was this abandoned school? Who were the people in the classroom? The boy? Was it the jay for the raven?