The following dream recordings are from 2015 and mark my initial encounter with 'hags':
Some dreams have the simultaneity of being under water.
Hag’s hands submerge into a round, black liquid table of infinite darkness. And they are feeling for ripples, or perhaps gauging the temperature. Cold until the hands are dead. Maybe to drop in temperature is to drop in other ways.
and now im Passing through darkness on some train-like transport, through a black city, suspended in space. The trauma elicited by a babies scream…a baby is thrown onto the tracks. Flashes of the desperate, anonymous mother who threw the baby. And in this I feel, completely, postnatal depression, without reference to a direct waking life experience. All the sadness in the world. Because what has happened is a hopeless thing. Brimming with distress I rush to a sink on the train. I am not vomiting but my mouth is producing an excess of saliva. Spitting it out into the sink I notice some blood near the plughole. And this is the baby’s blood. Behind me are paramedics with the baby. But I am pervaded, excessively salivating into the sink and as my mucous mixes with the baby blood, circulating, I can no longer distinguish between our fluids. And at the same time I am petrified to turn around because I KNOW I will recognise the baby. This fear of recognition, not of recognising a person you know, but a recognition of something much more vast and permeating. I cannot look.
And the hag’s hands in the water punctuate night and day.
The hags are very repetitious and frequent. Re-appearing. I know it is them even if they look completely different than before. They are particular because no matter how different in appearance, always female. no matter how different and unrelated the dream context from which they may emerge, I KNOW it is them, this particular type of stranger. What is this KNOWING? Is there something other than but next to prosopagnosia? I can just look at her, without any reciprocity and KNOW she is one of them. Immediacy.
These particular women, these hags, and whatever paranoiac feeling that makes possible the recognition of them, is forever changing in appearance but always full and warm with the same blood.
They sometimes play inoffensive parts in dreams, other times they actively harass me, and other times they are sitting around a table, never directly addressing me but answering my thoughts to one and other.
The table is set as a reoccurrence that seems to be im-between dreams. I cannot look at them in this setting, always an overhearing and corner-of-the-eye visual impression. Sometimes, at the table, they function as an elucidating commentary between more fleshy dreams.
That is, between dreams that maintain the structural integrity of the waking body. Clearly and linearly moving, I encounter a dream creature that, in contrast to me and its context, is fragmented, and not fully given to sight. As if emerging or/and receding into dust, made of feeling with unicorn horns for teeth and white coarse horse fur for tongue and gums; to ritualistically kiss its mouth whilst cutting our hands. And Luca said when kissing the mouth you invent the lips? And the hags around the table are talking about, reminiscing, this creature in taxidermist terms. Very matter-of-factly they are talking about its coming into existence via taxidermy.
And I regularly visit this table. And now it is like a body of water seen at night. And I am stuck on a close-up of a pair of hands in it, feeling. A slow process. Patience.
And now I ask about the pigs.
The different ways me and ‘J’ stroke the pigs. Whilst leaning over the fence. This produces different sounds on the chambers. Knock, knock. Skin.
Interlude, or layer, of the hags hands in water, getting colder and colder. That the water has fallen from…not the sky…we lack that logic. Where could it have fallen from? Forming mediumistic puddles.
And so me and ‘J’ wait for the water to reveal forms in front of us, suspended. To a voice that says: “…Or the threshold elements for keeping people up”-“and down the drown witch cauldron”=”where blood willed fornication”.
Close up of an eye abruptly opening, the pupil dilating. A drop of yellow splashing into the water… to the muffled sound of a ‘knock knock’… heard from underwater.
In a house that is cold and damp, the architecture of childhood memories. Vacant, in the bedroom I notice gnawed holes, ravaged materials and rotting food everywhere. Perspiration in the air. I see that ‘M’ has abandoned her pet rats Xander and Jasper here. The abandoned earth. The rats returning, semi-savage. Xander has attacked Jasper in an act of desperate cannibalism. And so in this derelict house I begin the process of nursing the rats back to health, mending the holes, refreshing the food, closing doors. And I fear infestation. People have left me birthday presents in the muddy garden. The mud that’s texture continues inside, underfoot. They must have passed by when I was not here, although I have always been here. This makes me feel like I inhabit this environment like a ghost. Silky layered worlds. I am pleased to see Raggedy, my cat, sitting, facing a door. She is waiting for it to open. Infinite patience. That doors can open through patience. She is simultaneously a rat. The door opens slightly, and s/he runs into it, slithering through the gap to a voice that narrates, “too much when opening the corporeal door”, and I struggle to grab her, “this is, in the infernal economy of being…the spectrallity of impotence” continues a voice.
Memory tells me that this was perhaps the water-saturated mid-world. Emptying the world of water. Or about to fill it up. Ankle deep, sinks, taps and cold moist air. As a means of locomotive, or of remembering and forgetting? Of the simultaneous of being traversed, submerged, of existing underwater.
The hags are overheard. The way they communicate is something akin to dropping, and stirring, and dissolving. I cannot read their dialogue. But it does not have the intangibility of a foreign language. There are no translations. It is a sensuous sound.
Far, far underground transport system. I am late for the trains. Travelling with a friend and many cats in carriers. I am panicking. The tracks have water on them.
In a sparkly purple dress and heels I am given a story from a series of horror-fantasy and it is a mystery to solve.
A caged chickens head is deceptively a hunt saboteur’s hand in puppet wear. A hand puppet. Where are the real chickens!? I am impatient. We are running out of time!
A City. With ‘J’ and his wife ‘R’. And they are discussing political strategies. I listen. It seems to make good sense. But I fill with an impossibility to communicate, to respond, and I feel like I am starting to understand the coming-into muteness. And it is hopeless. It is like asphyxiation. That there are right things to say…I feel juvenile and violent. And mourn something.
The discussion continues, the walk has lead to the edge of a body of still water, at sunset. But the previous impossibility and frustration is somehow resolved via this water. Through a succession of symbolic gestures, that I cannot recall, I try to communicate something that isn’t even tangible to myself. And whatever the movements they are exhausting and rigorous. Maybe hysterical. They require intervention. I am partially restrained by ‘J’ in what is some sort of gestural exchange that involves a baptism into the water. But not too much. A splash. I almost fall in. I am calmed and soothed by an “ahh, I understand what you mean”. And I feel in this a generosity, for a moment.
I cross this same water, but now it is moving, turbulent and ominous, over a frail bridge.
In a haunted-house nightmare I am the mother of a generic American family. Night falls and we anticipate something is coming for us. Though we regularly forget what this something is. A car pulls up in the drive outside. As the car stops the driver jolts forward and a kitten regurgitates out of his mouth with the violence of an alien tongue. His body a host.
The hag hands persist, getting colder and colder. I think they are memory.
I lock myself in a restroom, lean over the sink, I am exhausted and do not want to participate in whatever is going on out there!
A man is talking. More and more convincing. I run to him, clasping my hand over his mouth, with such force we fall. But my grip does not slacken. Eyes wide open in panic. Sssshhhh SShhhhh! The hand over the mouth produces honey. Sticky and bubbling from his faint breath. We are both almost not breathing for sake of keeping as quiet as possible. Looking in the same direction, we do not want to be sent away. What is this production of honey?
I invoke, I try to envision the hags hands in water whilst I am going into sleep but I feel my eyes try and spin to the back of my head to avoid them.
As a question I drop the pig photos into the watery hag table.
Searching for the response in an eerie city hotel at night. Quiet. I walk down to the basement pool. The room full of steam. There are caution signs and areas cordoned off as there seems to be construction work going on. But vision is somewhat impaired by the warm steam. I make out amidst this fog a lifeguard towering above the pool, he stares at me blankly. I see that two older men are silently doing lengths in this pool. These characters are cold and apathetic. Sinister; like this entire scene is an unconvincing characterchore disguising something much more unimaginable. I am afraid. I hesitate to go into the pool, but I go in. I almost forget how to swim but get to the centre and just float there on my back. To the movements of the warm water. Staring at the ceiling a revelation comes to me: “I am at the centre of the myosis path.” (Greek: to close the eyes)
Outside, night, under the stars, sparse bits of remaining architecture. A place that has been desolate for some time, but its abandonment was abrupt. It feels like an evacuated party and me and a stranger whom are left throw our drinks at each other, laughing, and take this opportunity to ask all the questions we didn’t get to ask in waking life. We come to the conclusion that there is no resolution and we laugh more and more. Then our laughter is interrupted by what sounds like a bellowing in the night sky. We look up and see swarms of dancing blackbirds outlined in phosphorescence. We are overwhelmed by the beauty of it. Colours flashing we stare, transfixed; the birds are lowering in their circling dance, coming closer and closer to the earth. Closer they take on the appearance of landing penguins. That is their bodies transform from grace to something fleshier and upstanding. They are not threatening at all. Though we worry the odd one may land on us. They appear not to see us, completely disinterested, completely enchanted by their adventure as a harmonic whole. They are equivalent to warming sunlight on the face. They feel like kindness. Outside here in this field of crumbling architecture the landing birds knock over a few stone animals. Life-size stone mammals, a lion I remember. I lift the fallen back up. These stone animals are earthly creatures, mortal animals. It is only that here they exist at what feels like a different pace.
On leaving I pass my cousin ‘E’ on a path. She is drunk, depressed and dressed as though returning from a violent night out. At first she looks at me in a way that invites a fight, but then her eyes change when she recognises me through her drunken haze and we walk together. She stumbles, I walk slow chewing blackberries. We pass an ‘out-of-service’ icescream van.
A strange awakening. A dream body-armour? It is like I have woken too soon before being transformed properly into an appropriate waking state. I should not have consciousness of this. Because I see at the edge of the bed me sitting, ready to go back to sleep and wake up into waking life. And although I know this is “I” my subject position has not yet entered it. Out of body. Right now my body is in the process of some indescribable casting and moulding process. “shhh don’t worry, almost done” say the hags. The body double to be left in bed next to me. After the magic hands have finished making/blessing it. Sculpting this veneer that contains a disappearance of whatever I was in dream. It is like being able to touch the inside and outside of the skin without disrupting the body. Undisrupted gesture of threading between thumb and forefinger. Maybe it is a form of dream transport, for places that require the body to become fluid. At moments I feel I am the body armour fashioned around the sleeping thing…fast disappearing…near the recognizable but not yet returned to ‘me’ at the edge of the bed.
In the Irish countryside I am blown along and up into the vast crisp air, fluctuating winds, dropping and rising, seeing the grass up close and seeing the landscape from far away. Rising I see lines in the fields, dropping I come close to the corner of such a line and there is a severed sheep head. Back up. Then back down. At another corner is another severed sheep head, this time more decomposed.
I turn on the tap in a swanky restroom but cannot turn it off again.
It is night, on a field. I am not me. I may be a man. I go to sleep on the field, it is cold. People wonder what on earth I am doing. This cold outdoor sleep cools the hag hands. Falling asleep in dream to re-enter dream.
Walking from some unremembered dream, through sewers, ankle deep in water. I walk into a version of my childhood bedroom.
A group of us discuss in an email exchange a mysterious photo. We are looking at it. It is black and white, it has us in it. From over my shoulder ‘J’ makes a comment, an observation that is beyond anything I could have imagined. And it takes my breath away and with this the whole dream atmosphere changes. Because ‘j’ is no longer a semi-convincing character, but being now the fleshy embodiment of something beyond my understanding, having approached undetectable to my imagination. I am now a character to him. Eyes that infiltrate the ‘entire’ with something other than ‘I’. I believe in the other more than myself. It is almost unbearable. And now going into the photo, nearer and nearer, inside, the photographed characters begin to move; people disappear and evade resolution. As if returning to the mysteries of their own existence. That people are somehow other worldly ghosts.
The hands are becoming colder and the skin is starting to peel away.
I bring to the watery hags table the pig photos wrapped in skin. And they tell me, “you do realize that not all is recyclable material, and some things will be lost”. Then the photos, placed on the watery table, float, spread and form a turning- translucent membrane on the surface.
Later, I come to a large tombstone engraved with a list of unknown women’s names. I trace my fingers along the indents of the letters and pieces of the stone scratch away, revealing flesh and blood. Curious, I start to pick the inverse of these letters off. Into my pocket with the intention to re-construct them later.
I am shown a documentary about irrational fears of spiders.
Water from mediumistic puddles is ladled into jars that the hags shake near their ears to hear voices. I do not hear voices, only the gushing water in the jar. Then I wake up.
And feed the dogs the water and send them out. Whilst the taste is still on their tongues, “Drinking from the anaemic pools, returning only with sand in their paws. Like infertile cum. Lap up the salty sweat that’s good for nothing but dehydration.” The dogs return with nothing. “Tell Lucien the world is running out of breath and choking and I can feel it.”
Raggedy is a Zombie cat. I fear cats getting lost in transit. And I travel to get away from the zombie cat, Raggedy, who wakes and kills every Wednesday. Always running from but running with the desire to protect her. So in a white, hospital/hotel room, as she sleeps I try to box her up without stirring. Because Zombie cat is at the same time running from her death, and as she runs away from her own death she is running towards me, and so I run. And whilst running there is fear and anticipation that the water is going to come when she wakes. As she sleeps, run!
“confirmed the order of the back and forth of two worlds.”
I am presenting artwork in a convenor. Being watched, I sit, brushing my teeth with a butter knife and a paste of gluey saliva.
I lock myself and my mam in a hotel room so I can interpret this pile of blue horns I have found. Where are they from? A rat-vampire creature. Its teeth?
I am afraid of James and I want him out of my house. On the windowsill I am placing a sculpture to dry. It is made from bits of grey parched bone, and stuck together with sticky, syrupy saliva. It is drying, but James is coming in and out of the window to smoke cigarettes. He tells me to move it as it will be knocked over and smash. This seems reasonable so I move it to the side of the windowsill. He sees it and tells me again that it will get smashed if I leave it there. And in this is a threat. That if I do not do as I’m told he will smash it on purpose to punish me. This is simultaneously a fear that he will hurt my cats.
At the table, I actively try to ask the hags a question but when the hags come to be, the questions words are erased from my memory, but I remembered I had brought something to the table. And around the table one of them is holding a limp, unconscious kitten (dead?). This kitten has one human/female breast. The hag is caressing this kitten, which at times is mistaken for sexual harassment but she is in fact bringing it back to life (you do this in waking life to revive kittens, you know that rubbing?) I get the feeling that this poor botched creature is my question and the rubbing is the trying to answer it. And I get the sadness that it is my fault for miscarrying it into this world from the other world. And in the last moments before the encounter ends I feel I am the senseless creature in the hands of this hag.
And the answering continues into a dream/ experience made mostly of feeling, forgetfulness and a lot of sweat
A dream that relies on the simultaneity of other dreams (or dream environments) for its existence to be tangible despite still having the feeling of being very separate from these other dreams, a strange co-dependency. It is like the preceding ‘sensible’ dream (a more linearly ordered dream) was put on pause and attention drawn to the corners. Or not even on pause but certainly turning attention away from it yet maintaining an awareness that it is still there. The lights from this dream (lights from a city at night) seemed to make visible and tangible this ‘kitten’ dream/experience; make possible the very experiencing of it. Nothing ended and one thing did not turn into another. But it is like a head was turned.
…So the feeling resumes the posture of the limp kitten from the previous dream in the hands of the hag… black reflective surface in black night, like black oil sparkling (you know the colours), Or maybe like black marble, treacly in texture. And the colours and movements that are sometimes distinguishable in it are perhaps reflections from the other dream on its surface…this would be a better way to describe as opposed to it producing colour and movement itself, since it doesn’t have that logic. It is like the other dream had to semi-exist, suspended, in order for this otherwise indescribable thing/feeling to take on any tangible form. So the previous dream kept in the corner functioning as a nightlight?
So resuming kitten posture… going up and up, my consciousness a lulled one, caught up in the lungs of this blackness. Inhale/exhale, lacking the rising grace of levitation. With the same rhythm of the hags hands. And this is like resuscitation. It is like gravity still exists but this breathe is defying it and my body is caught between the two, or my body being produced. It is like I am coming in and out of consciousness by way of this breathing. Pulled between the inhale and the exhale, but the exhale must be stronger as I am rising, though not towards sky or anything, there is none. Just what feels like infinite blackness. And the hags are inexplicably present, as if in the corner and they are there in-so-far as they are giving me consciousness/tangible awareness in this black mass of feeling. A coaching from the corners. I am losing breath. This grappling with breath is at the same time a struggle for consciousness which is at the same time a de-fleshing and re-fleshing of my entire body, a sensation which starts from between the lungs, again the same caressing feeling of the hags hands from the previous night but this time I am in the magic of these hands. So the breath that I am caught up in is my breath, given to my lungs, since it is the breath that is engendering them in this struggle. Breathlessness. It is very much the feeling of being sustained. And what a struggle. I wake in sweat and when recalling the dream I can’t help but take on that struggled breathing.
…then stop without memory of it stopping, the dream following has its residues in that I have taken a ‘wound’ from this encounter. So I’m walking through some buzzling city streets at night, on my way somewhere, partying passersby look at me with the wound but it is equivalent to being poorly dressed. I don’t know where/what the wound is, its not visible. Finally I get to where I’m going, for lunch with Patrick, and he gives me a plastic toy pig that has a badly/tacky painted cut/laceration on it and written in marker on its back is “fuck pigs”. This is humorous and so we laugh.
Hag’s hands submerge into a round, black liquid table of infinite darkness. And they are feeling for ripples, or perhaps gauging the temperature. Cold until the hands are dead. Maybe to drop in temperature is to drop in other ways.
and now im Passing through darkness on some train-like transport, through a black city, suspended in space. The trauma elicited by a babies scream…a baby is thrown onto the tracks. Flashes of the desperate, anonymous mother who threw the baby. And in this I feel, completely, postnatal depression, without reference to a direct waking life experience. All the sadness in the world. Because what has happened is a hopeless thing. Brimming with distress I rush to a sink on the train. I am not vomiting but my mouth is producing an excess of saliva. Spitting it out into the sink I notice some blood near the plughole. And this is the baby’s blood. Behind me are paramedics with the baby. But I am pervaded, excessively salivating into the sink and as my mucous mixes with the baby blood, circulating, I can no longer distinguish between our fluids. And at the same time I am petrified to turn around because I KNOW I will recognise the baby. This fear of recognition, not of recognising a person you know, but a recognition of something much more vast and permeating. I cannot look.
And the hag’s hands in the water punctuate night and day.
The hags are very repetitious and frequent. Re-appearing. I know it is them even if they look completely different than before. They are particular because no matter how different in appearance, always female. no matter how different and unrelated the dream context from which they may emerge, I KNOW it is them, this particular type of stranger. What is this KNOWING? Is there something other than but next to prosopagnosia? I can just look at her, without any reciprocity and KNOW she is one of them. Immediacy.
These particular women, these hags, and whatever paranoiac feeling that makes possible the recognition of them, is forever changing in appearance but always full and warm with the same blood.
They sometimes play inoffensive parts in dreams, other times they actively harass me, and other times they are sitting around a table, never directly addressing me but answering my thoughts to one and other.
The table is set as a reoccurrence that seems to be im-between dreams. I cannot look at them in this setting, always an overhearing and corner-of-the-eye visual impression. Sometimes, at the table, they function as an elucidating commentary between more fleshy dreams.
That is, between dreams that maintain the structural integrity of the waking body. Clearly and linearly moving, I encounter a dream creature that, in contrast to me and its context, is fragmented, and not fully given to sight. As if emerging or/and receding into dust, made of feeling with unicorn horns for teeth and white coarse horse fur for tongue and gums; to ritualistically kiss its mouth whilst cutting our hands. And Luca said when kissing the mouth you invent the lips? And the hags around the table are talking about, reminiscing, this creature in taxidermist terms. Very matter-of-factly they are talking about its coming into existence via taxidermy.
And I regularly visit this table. And now it is like a body of water seen at night. And I am stuck on a close-up of a pair of hands in it, feeling. A slow process. Patience.
And now I ask about the pigs.
The different ways me and ‘J’ stroke the pigs. Whilst leaning over the fence. This produces different sounds on the chambers. Knock, knock. Skin.
Interlude, or layer, of the hags hands in water, getting colder and colder. That the water has fallen from…not the sky…we lack that logic. Where could it have fallen from? Forming mediumistic puddles.
And so me and ‘J’ wait for the water to reveal forms in front of us, suspended. To a voice that says: “…Or the threshold elements for keeping people up”-“and down the drown witch cauldron”=”where blood willed fornication”.
Close up of an eye abruptly opening, the pupil dilating. A drop of yellow splashing into the water… to the muffled sound of a ‘knock knock’… heard from underwater.
In a house that is cold and damp, the architecture of childhood memories. Vacant, in the bedroom I notice gnawed holes, ravaged materials and rotting food everywhere. Perspiration in the air. I see that ‘M’ has abandoned her pet rats Xander and Jasper here. The abandoned earth. The rats returning, semi-savage. Xander has attacked Jasper in an act of desperate cannibalism. And so in this derelict house I begin the process of nursing the rats back to health, mending the holes, refreshing the food, closing doors. And I fear infestation. People have left me birthday presents in the muddy garden. The mud that’s texture continues inside, underfoot. They must have passed by when I was not here, although I have always been here. This makes me feel like I inhabit this environment like a ghost. Silky layered worlds. I am pleased to see Raggedy, my cat, sitting, facing a door. She is waiting for it to open. Infinite patience. That doors can open through patience. She is simultaneously a rat. The door opens slightly, and s/he runs into it, slithering through the gap to a voice that narrates, “too much when opening the corporeal door”, and I struggle to grab her, “this is, in the infernal economy of being…the spectrallity of impotence” continues a voice.
Memory tells me that this was perhaps the water-saturated mid-world. Emptying the world of water. Or about to fill it up. Ankle deep, sinks, taps and cold moist air. As a means of locomotive, or of remembering and forgetting? Of the simultaneous of being traversed, submerged, of existing underwater.
The hags are overheard. The way they communicate is something akin to dropping, and stirring, and dissolving. I cannot read their dialogue. But it does not have the intangibility of a foreign language. There are no translations. It is a sensuous sound.
Far, far underground transport system. I am late for the trains. Travelling with a friend and many cats in carriers. I am panicking. The tracks have water on them.
In a sparkly purple dress and heels I am given a story from a series of horror-fantasy and it is a mystery to solve.
A caged chickens head is deceptively a hunt saboteur’s hand in puppet wear. A hand puppet. Where are the real chickens!? I am impatient. We are running out of time!
A City. With ‘J’ and his wife ‘R’. And they are discussing political strategies. I listen. It seems to make good sense. But I fill with an impossibility to communicate, to respond, and I feel like I am starting to understand the coming-into muteness. And it is hopeless. It is like asphyxiation. That there are right things to say…I feel juvenile and violent. And mourn something.
The discussion continues, the walk has lead to the edge of a body of still water, at sunset. But the previous impossibility and frustration is somehow resolved via this water. Through a succession of symbolic gestures, that I cannot recall, I try to communicate something that isn’t even tangible to myself. And whatever the movements they are exhausting and rigorous. Maybe hysterical. They require intervention. I am partially restrained by ‘J’ in what is some sort of gestural exchange that involves a baptism into the water. But not too much. A splash. I almost fall in. I am calmed and soothed by an “ahh, I understand what you mean”. And I feel in this a generosity, for a moment.
I cross this same water, but now it is moving, turbulent and ominous, over a frail bridge.
In a haunted-house nightmare I am the mother of a generic American family. Night falls and we anticipate something is coming for us. Though we regularly forget what this something is. A car pulls up in the drive outside. As the car stops the driver jolts forward and a kitten regurgitates out of his mouth with the violence of an alien tongue. His body a host.
The hag hands persist, getting colder and colder. I think they are memory.
I lock myself in a restroom, lean over the sink, I am exhausted and do not want to participate in whatever is going on out there!
A man is talking. More and more convincing. I run to him, clasping my hand over his mouth, with such force we fall. But my grip does not slacken. Eyes wide open in panic. Sssshhhh SShhhhh! The hand over the mouth produces honey. Sticky and bubbling from his faint breath. We are both almost not breathing for sake of keeping as quiet as possible. Looking in the same direction, we do not want to be sent away. What is this production of honey?
I invoke, I try to envision the hags hands in water whilst I am going into sleep but I feel my eyes try and spin to the back of my head to avoid them.
As a question I drop the pig photos into the watery hag table.
Searching for the response in an eerie city hotel at night. Quiet. I walk down to the basement pool. The room full of steam. There are caution signs and areas cordoned off as there seems to be construction work going on. But vision is somewhat impaired by the warm steam. I make out amidst this fog a lifeguard towering above the pool, he stares at me blankly. I see that two older men are silently doing lengths in this pool. These characters are cold and apathetic. Sinister; like this entire scene is an unconvincing characterchore disguising something much more unimaginable. I am afraid. I hesitate to go into the pool, but I go in. I almost forget how to swim but get to the centre and just float there on my back. To the movements of the warm water. Staring at the ceiling a revelation comes to me: “I am at the centre of the myosis path.” (Greek: to close the eyes)
Outside, night, under the stars, sparse bits of remaining architecture. A place that has been desolate for some time, but its abandonment was abrupt. It feels like an evacuated party and me and a stranger whom are left throw our drinks at each other, laughing, and take this opportunity to ask all the questions we didn’t get to ask in waking life. We come to the conclusion that there is no resolution and we laugh more and more. Then our laughter is interrupted by what sounds like a bellowing in the night sky. We look up and see swarms of dancing blackbirds outlined in phosphorescence. We are overwhelmed by the beauty of it. Colours flashing we stare, transfixed; the birds are lowering in their circling dance, coming closer and closer to the earth. Closer they take on the appearance of landing penguins. That is their bodies transform from grace to something fleshier and upstanding. They are not threatening at all. Though we worry the odd one may land on us. They appear not to see us, completely disinterested, completely enchanted by their adventure as a harmonic whole. They are equivalent to warming sunlight on the face. They feel like kindness. Outside here in this field of crumbling architecture the landing birds knock over a few stone animals. Life-size stone mammals, a lion I remember. I lift the fallen back up. These stone animals are earthly creatures, mortal animals. It is only that here they exist at what feels like a different pace.
On leaving I pass my cousin ‘E’ on a path. She is drunk, depressed and dressed as though returning from a violent night out. At first she looks at me in a way that invites a fight, but then her eyes change when she recognises me through her drunken haze and we walk together. She stumbles, I walk slow chewing blackberries. We pass an ‘out-of-service’ icescream van.
A strange awakening. A dream body-armour? It is like I have woken too soon before being transformed properly into an appropriate waking state. I should not have consciousness of this. Because I see at the edge of the bed me sitting, ready to go back to sleep and wake up into waking life. And although I know this is “I” my subject position has not yet entered it. Out of body. Right now my body is in the process of some indescribable casting and moulding process. “shhh don’t worry, almost done” say the hags. The body double to be left in bed next to me. After the magic hands have finished making/blessing it. Sculpting this veneer that contains a disappearance of whatever I was in dream. It is like being able to touch the inside and outside of the skin without disrupting the body. Undisrupted gesture of threading between thumb and forefinger. Maybe it is a form of dream transport, for places that require the body to become fluid. At moments I feel I am the body armour fashioned around the sleeping thing…fast disappearing…near the recognizable but not yet returned to ‘me’ at the edge of the bed.
In the Irish countryside I am blown along and up into the vast crisp air, fluctuating winds, dropping and rising, seeing the grass up close and seeing the landscape from far away. Rising I see lines in the fields, dropping I come close to the corner of such a line and there is a severed sheep head. Back up. Then back down. At another corner is another severed sheep head, this time more decomposed.
I turn on the tap in a swanky restroom but cannot turn it off again.
It is night, on a field. I am not me. I may be a man. I go to sleep on the field, it is cold. People wonder what on earth I am doing. This cold outdoor sleep cools the hag hands. Falling asleep in dream to re-enter dream.
Walking from some unremembered dream, through sewers, ankle deep in water. I walk into a version of my childhood bedroom.
A group of us discuss in an email exchange a mysterious photo. We are looking at it. It is black and white, it has us in it. From over my shoulder ‘J’ makes a comment, an observation that is beyond anything I could have imagined. And it takes my breath away and with this the whole dream atmosphere changes. Because ‘j’ is no longer a semi-convincing character, but being now the fleshy embodiment of something beyond my understanding, having approached undetectable to my imagination. I am now a character to him. Eyes that infiltrate the ‘entire’ with something other than ‘I’. I believe in the other more than myself. It is almost unbearable. And now going into the photo, nearer and nearer, inside, the photographed characters begin to move; people disappear and evade resolution. As if returning to the mysteries of their own existence. That people are somehow other worldly ghosts.
The hands are becoming colder and the skin is starting to peel away.
I bring to the watery hags table the pig photos wrapped in skin. And they tell me, “you do realize that not all is recyclable material, and some things will be lost”. Then the photos, placed on the watery table, float, spread and form a turning- translucent membrane on the surface.
Later, I come to a large tombstone engraved with a list of unknown women’s names. I trace my fingers along the indents of the letters and pieces of the stone scratch away, revealing flesh and blood. Curious, I start to pick the inverse of these letters off. Into my pocket with the intention to re-construct them later.
I am shown a documentary about irrational fears of spiders.
Water from mediumistic puddles is ladled into jars that the hags shake near their ears to hear voices. I do not hear voices, only the gushing water in the jar. Then I wake up.
And feed the dogs the water and send them out. Whilst the taste is still on their tongues, “Drinking from the anaemic pools, returning only with sand in their paws. Like infertile cum. Lap up the salty sweat that’s good for nothing but dehydration.” The dogs return with nothing. “Tell Lucien the world is running out of breath and choking and I can feel it.”
Raggedy is a Zombie cat. I fear cats getting lost in transit. And I travel to get away from the zombie cat, Raggedy, who wakes and kills every Wednesday. Always running from but running with the desire to protect her. So in a white, hospital/hotel room, as she sleeps I try to box her up without stirring. Because Zombie cat is at the same time running from her death, and as she runs away from her own death she is running towards me, and so I run. And whilst running there is fear and anticipation that the water is going to come when she wakes. As she sleeps, run!
“confirmed the order of the back and forth of two worlds.”
I am presenting artwork in a convenor. Being watched, I sit, brushing my teeth with a butter knife and a paste of gluey saliva.
I lock myself and my mam in a hotel room so I can interpret this pile of blue horns I have found. Where are they from? A rat-vampire creature. Its teeth?
I am afraid of James and I want him out of my house. On the windowsill I am placing a sculpture to dry. It is made from bits of grey parched bone, and stuck together with sticky, syrupy saliva. It is drying, but James is coming in and out of the window to smoke cigarettes. He tells me to move it as it will be knocked over and smash. This seems reasonable so I move it to the side of the windowsill. He sees it and tells me again that it will get smashed if I leave it there. And in this is a threat. That if I do not do as I’m told he will smash it on purpose to punish me. This is simultaneously a fear that he will hurt my cats.
At the table, I actively try to ask the hags a question but when the hags come to be, the questions words are erased from my memory, but I remembered I had brought something to the table. And around the table one of them is holding a limp, unconscious kitten (dead?). This kitten has one human/female breast. The hag is caressing this kitten, which at times is mistaken for sexual harassment but she is in fact bringing it back to life (you do this in waking life to revive kittens, you know that rubbing?) I get the feeling that this poor botched creature is my question and the rubbing is the trying to answer it. And I get the sadness that it is my fault for miscarrying it into this world from the other world. And in the last moments before the encounter ends I feel I am the senseless creature in the hands of this hag.
And the answering continues into a dream/ experience made mostly of feeling, forgetfulness and a lot of sweat
A dream that relies on the simultaneity of other dreams (or dream environments) for its existence to be tangible despite still having the feeling of being very separate from these other dreams, a strange co-dependency. It is like the preceding ‘sensible’ dream (a more linearly ordered dream) was put on pause and attention drawn to the corners. Or not even on pause but certainly turning attention away from it yet maintaining an awareness that it is still there. The lights from this dream (lights from a city at night) seemed to make visible and tangible this ‘kitten’ dream/experience; make possible the very experiencing of it. Nothing ended and one thing did not turn into another. But it is like a head was turned.
…So the feeling resumes the posture of the limp kitten from the previous dream in the hands of the hag… black reflective surface in black night, like black oil sparkling (you know the colours), Or maybe like black marble, treacly in texture. And the colours and movements that are sometimes distinguishable in it are perhaps reflections from the other dream on its surface…this would be a better way to describe as opposed to it producing colour and movement itself, since it doesn’t have that logic. It is like the other dream had to semi-exist, suspended, in order for this otherwise indescribable thing/feeling to take on any tangible form. So the previous dream kept in the corner functioning as a nightlight?
So resuming kitten posture… going up and up, my consciousness a lulled one, caught up in the lungs of this blackness. Inhale/exhale, lacking the rising grace of levitation. With the same rhythm of the hags hands. And this is like resuscitation. It is like gravity still exists but this breathe is defying it and my body is caught between the two, or my body being produced. It is like I am coming in and out of consciousness by way of this breathing. Pulled between the inhale and the exhale, but the exhale must be stronger as I am rising, though not towards sky or anything, there is none. Just what feels like infinite blackness. And the hags are inexplicably present, as if in the corner and they are there in-so-far as they are giving me consciousness/tangible awareness in this black mass of feeling. A coaching from the corners. I am losing breath. This grappling with breath is at the same time a struggle for consciousness which is at the same time a de-fleshing and re-fleshing of my entire body, a sensation which starts from between the lungs, again the same caressing feeling of the hags hands from the previous night but this time I am in the magic of these hands. So the breath that I am caught up in is my breath, given to my lungs, since it is the breath that is engendering them in this struggle. Breathlessness. It is very much the feeling of being sustained. And what a struggle. I wake in sweat and when recalling the dream I can’t help but take on that struggled breathing.
…then stop without memory of it stopping, the dream following has its residues in that I have taken a ‘wound’ from this encounter. So I’m walking through some buzzling city streets at night, on my way somewhere, partying passersby look at me with the wound but it is equivalent to being poorly dressed. I don’t know where/what the wound is, its not visible. Finally I get to where I’m going, for lunch with Patrick, and he gives me a plastic toy pig that has a badly/tacky painted cut/laceration on it and written in marker on its back is “fuck pigs”. This is humorous and so we laugh.
