It doesn’t really make sense to put a time and place in the title this time around because the things I’ll be talking about technically never happened – not in the waking world anyway. I’m going to write up a few thematically related dreams. I did this before in a piece called Chicago 2001 : The Dreams in the Red House but that one fit pretty neatly into a time and place based narrative I was already in the process of talking about.
This time around there isn’t any specific “real life” anchor that would be beneficial to tie any of this to.
Dreams aren’t a thing that I’ve studied academically or kept up with the latest research on but my basic understanding is that it’s the brain’s way of practicing the serious work of mapping everything it knows about the world around us to help us survive and succeed. A little bit like how going through a period of “baby talk” is a precursor to acquiring language but instead of having temporally distinct periods of practice and application it’s a constant cycle between the two. The waking mind sits in the navigator chair and reads from the latest maps while the sleeping mind just puts itself through cartography exercises to become a better map maker.
I don’t think all dreams fall under the category of fiction or story telling but those are important methods for sharing and digesting structural data about the actual world. Kind of like how people who have never been to the United States construct a concept for themselves about what living here must be like based on television shows and movies. It isn’t totally accurate information but it also isn’t “no information”. I’ve had access to fiction my entire life so it makes sense my unconscious mind would take inspiration from the rhythms and structures it finds there.
Drugs weren’t a thing I had to think about much as a child. My parents were into alcohol and marijuana but these things didn’t negatively impact my life or challenge my physical security. Most of my dreams at this stage were roughly based on fairy tales: castles, witches, cannibalism and unnatural entities demanding periods of servitude. Technically speaking I didn’t have to worry about these kinds of things either but they were the stories I gave my unconscious mind to play with.
On a side note I just watched what will probably be Hayao Miyazaki’s final film today, The Boy and the Heron, and the structure probably came closer to the format of these dreams than any other fictional work I’ve had access to. I was going to go into specifics but avoiding spoilers feels more valuable than whatever that might accomplish.
As I got a little older the stories I was reading started to include drug stories and I began to realize that was something I’d be dipping more than a toe into. It had nothing to do with pursuit of pleasure or trauma – I just really liked the stories. My unconscious mind started experimenting with stories about drugs too: long before I ever used any and after they became parts of my waking life.
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Yesterday I Cut Off My Left Leg…
I had a dream where I got my hands on a medical scalpel and impulsively decided to sever my left leg from the rest of my body. I was feeling extremely anxious and apprehensive about this decision until the moment the blade first pierced my skin. The moment it broke through a preternatural calm came over me as if my movements were being guided by the invisible hand of instinct.
I realized immediately that I could neatly avoid every nerve and blood vessel in order to sidestep any pain or bleeding. At the same time I realized that through an artful cutting pattern I could cause my remaining leg to become perfectly centered beneath my torso like the mythical creatures thought by the ancients to inhabit the antipodes. I tossed the severed leg into the corner of my room and began to experiment with locomotion.
The moment I began to move I was hit with an unexpected realization. Propelling the body forward was not something that both legs contributed to equally but instead the right leg was responsible for propulsion while the left acted as a counterweight or ballast. Now that my right leg could work unencumbered I was capable of traveling any imaginable distance in the blink of an eye without any sensation of fatigue whatsoever.
After racing back and forth across my neighborhood for a while I hit upon a convoluted plan to entertain myself: I decided to go to the nearest shopping mall and stand next to the escalators pretending to look despondent. Essentially I was reveling in complex feelings of superiority. When strangers looked at me with expressions of pity I’d laugh internally at how foolish they were for regarding me as a cripple when they were the ones restricted from reaching their full potential.
Eventually the afternoon wore on and my confidence sank with the setting sun. I suddenly realized that the paradigm I’d been using to interpret the compassion of outsiders might be overly simple minded. I’d assumed that the emotion invested in these piteous glances was incompatible with detailed knowledge of my present condition but it suddenly occurred to me that it could have just as easily been based on impending consequences I was hitherto unaware of.
Many of the people looking toward me in this fashion were clearly older and more experienced than I. What if they were acutely aware of the thrill of discovery I was currently experiencing but at the same time privy to downsides that would only manifest later? I suddenly thought of my left leg – wasting away in a neglected corner deprived of blood and oxygen. I’d assumed it useless on the evidence of a scant few hours but any hidden function it held was about to me lost to me forever.
In a panic I rushed home and threw the limb over my shoulder then made for the nearest hospital. Rather than waiting around the reception I explained the situation to a passing nurse who agreed to reattach it for me in an unused examination room. She was working fastidiously with a needle and thread when I thought back over the day’s events and mused aloud on the possibility of installing a threaded socket so that I might repeat the adventure whenever I wished.
The nurse paused in her sewing to fix me with a significant stare:
“You should develop a drug addiction. That will take your mind off of things like that!”
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The Era of Brain Pops
Out of every dream I’ve ever had this one was the most specifically curated to a single aesthetic. I was living in an inner city but everybody was dressed like the child actors in a Charm’s Blowpop television commercial that played incessantly in the brief window where the ‘80s became the ‘90s. I threw a screenshot above for reference – lots of baggy sweaters in primary colors and big scrunchies and sideways ponytails.
In this dream I was working as a teacher but when I experienced it I was still a High School student and wouldn’t have necessarily known this would be a future career for me. In the dream there was a huge social craze over a new style of candy called “brain pops” – white chocolate molded into the shape of the human organ, tinted pink and impregnated with pop rocks. As the chocolate dissolved in your mouth the fizzing candy would pop against your tongue.
My character in this dream had something of a Cassandra Complex – I was campaigning to turn public opinion against this candy for what seemed like an obvious pitfall. I thought that people were losing sight of what it means to think. To simply allow the candy to pop against one’s tongue was, in essence, passively receiving sensation but I was convinced everyone was mistaking it for a mental process due to the shape of the candy and the fact that it was taking place inside their heads.
I was worried that everyone was forgetting how to think for themselves.
Somewhat ironically my dream persona fell heavily into the “white savior” trope. This teacher character didn’t have any concrete evidence that popular enjoyment of this candy was truly indicative of deteriorating mental faculties but viewed it as a conspiracy by the candy makers everyone else was frustratingly blind to. It seems incompatible to both want people to think for themselves and to already have a conclusion in mind as the natural destination for all independent thought.
It wasn’t until I returned to consciousness the following morning that I realized the entire dream could be regarded as a heavy handed metaphor for the crack epidemic.
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Pasta Basuco
Crack wasn’t something I had any first hand experience with until I’d already made the decision to enter hard drug subculture. Actually there was one day when, at fifteen years old, I realized that every person at a specific bus stop except for me was either buying or selling this drug but I henceforth avoided this particular stop and didn’t see it again. It was a strange day – I took the SAT and got bitten by a spider.
Once I’d decided to pursue heroin by experimenting with “gateway drugs” at every opportunity I came across cocaine at the Brooklyn bar Kokie’s Place. Considering how much time I spent downtown in San Diego, San Francisco and Oakland it seems almost unbelievable that I never would have stumbled across anyone using this drug in any form but I don’t think I did. My first night with it was largely underwhelming.
At El Rancho crack was starting to be around but I can’t remember if I tried it before or after getting my hands on heroin. It would be a few months before Nick Feather would come to town and teach me how to dissolve it in acids for injection so I must have smoked it the first few times. Consumed in this way the drug is absolutely overwhelming but feels like nothing much of anything at the exact same time.
It’s a bit like inhaling nitrous oxide or just hyper ventilating until you pass out. Something happening in your brain is obviously the action of the drug on dedicated receptors but it feels something like laying a thick copper wire across the two terminals of a car battery. The energy released in that moment must have been inside you from the start but the sudden release with accompanying heat and sparks couldn’t happen in the drug’s absence.
When I was getting ready to write this piece I thought that crack might have some intense sounding chemical formula name I’d never heard before but it really is just cocaine minus the hydrochloride with a side of baking soda. I used to think that the act of smoking it was sublimation, the process of converting a solid to a gas without passing through a liquid state, but now that I’ve paid a bit more attention I realize it does melt. Sublimation has an almost mystical sound to it – it’s because it comes from the word sublime.
Because the crack does become liquid you are only vaporizing it – far less exciting.
This stuff is whatever you make of it. I know some people have gotten super into it and let it become their entire worlds but I’ve only fiended out in short, punctuated binges. Not the end of the world but nothing to be proud of either. While trying to remain human in the throes of its powerful rush I used to marvel at the caustic nature of the smoke and how it would leave my mouth feeling like the inside edge of a porcelain toilet.
I had a simple dream one night. I was smoking some crack from a pipe and jogging down the street as this was happening. Holding the smoke in for as long as I could I was overcome with destructive manic energy and realized an old woman was blocking my way on the sidewalk. I suddenly leaped into the air over her and released my smoke in a powerful stream that I blew through my legs. When the smoke hit her body all flesh instantly dissolved and she became a skeleton.
I grabbed onto the bony shoulders for a final forward roll that landed me on my feet, running forward and packing the pipe for the next blast to come.
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The Cult of the Forgotten Junkie King
This dream happened after I’d been using, and injecting, heroin for at least a month or two. There was an ancient figure known only to us – the followers of his rites and we had certain methods for embarking on such pursuits in his image. To the nonusers outside our sect many thought of him as little more than a myth but we had both artifacts and practices saying otherwise.
Every initiated user carried a finely made hinged mold that allows the preparation of these drugs in the very form of this shadowed ancestor. Adding just enough moisture to the powders in question creates a kind of clay – then tinted and pushed into every open space within the mold. Once dried a shabti figure of the king himself appears.
This beautiful shabti is unfortunately dry and will not reach full potential until allowed to soak in surrounding water at mild temperatures until the shabti is tumescent. It has come time for the faithful to extract the final form of his majesty’s gift. The shabti is now spongey in texture and gives off small yellowish drops.
With a single syringe the faithful pierces the breast of the shabti and begins to extract. A nice 45 degree angle entry for the needle tip and excess flesh falls away in the form of extracted liquid. The liquid in the barrel is a perfect gold. The shabti returns to the shape it held before becoming impregnated with moisture.
One final move: the celebrant pulls a little farther back on the plunger to reach this perfect end. As every trace of liquid departs the small body what looked like skin is suddenly shrinking against hidden forms within that can only be described as skeletal. Staring into tiny molded eyes the ancient king is ….. emaciated, insane, on the very edge of death. Snakes and spiders now make their forms known beneath this skin.
His regal face stares forward with the sardonic gaze of a death’s head.
A chamber full of beautiful gold and yellow liquid, shimmering in the night. A quick injection and the celebrant relaxes into a state of repose. The unused bits of powder, liquids and partially molded artifacts are put aside until that moment we might crush everything back into the molds and start afresh.
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Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 