I dreamed of what seemed to be an ink sketch by Dali of a horse--at least its head was Dali-strange, though the rest was more realistic.

But when I looked closer, I realized it was no horse, but a centaur, whose head, arms, and human torso had been bitten off! The guts and scraps spilled over, forming a mangled Dali parody of a horse-head. It was drawn so calmly, so matter-of-factly, I had refused to see it.

It frightened me--for I knew who it was. Me. Mistaking myself for a creature with a somewhat peculiar head... when I was really a mutilated, cut-off version of something quite different and more complex...

And if I want to heal, I need to regrow my non-comforming parts, not trim myself down like Procrustes to mimic normality.

"Procrustes" is a old Greek tale. In short:

A traveler stops at a lonely house as night falls. The host says he has a small guest bed. If the guest is too tall for the bed, the host just chops him down to size! If the guest is too short, he stretches you on a rack till you fit juuuuuust right.

I joke about it, but I took the message seriously. Wrote and drew dreams like these doggedly--and they responded. A flood of intense mythic visions leading me eventually to quit my dayjob, leave suburbia, and try to regrow my murdered half.

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