Work all morning on my alien world Pegasia: add eight landscape sketches. Expand the tours, and improve the maps for Continent 8, and prepare a couple of pages for intelligent species.

Work on my dream-painting The Berry Dance, and try to illustrate a disturbing dream-poem, Praise The Dancing Goons. Get stuck--I can't draw beefy thugs...

Switch to sculpture. Trim the feet of my centauroid dancer. Hard to hacksaw through her coathanger bones. But she balances better now.

Rest and read Polly Horvath's Corps of the Bared-Boned Plane. Two teens lose their parents in a traincrash; they go live with an uncle on an island off British Columbia--a deeply withdrawn guy. Their family dysfunction is scarily familiar--distract themselves from emotional pain by diving into obsessions. I do it too--mine are artistic and thus more productive than most, but still...

In the evening, watch a video: The #1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Mma Ramotswe faces Note, her ex. A rival detective brought Note in deliberately to rattle her. He demands money or he'll spoil her engagement. She does some research and finds Note already had a wife when he wed her! Even that was a lie... She confronts Note, but rather than tear into him, urges him to get off the drugs. "You're a real musician, don't waste that gift..." Her generosity surprises me--maybe surprises her.

A complex spell in a poorly recalled dream. I wake remembering only a verbal or musical phrase. It was powerful, but limited. For a long time I try to convince myself "that's all there is, I'm just sleepily exaggerating, there was no more; the waking world doesn't permit spells as strong as in dreams." Funny. I don't say "there's no magic at all" because even half asleep I'm not that silly; after a thousand predictive and telepathic dreams I know there is.

After half an hour of lying there groggy, groping around in my own brain, feeling like a fool, suddenly I do recall the other key element. You build a rough dome of maroon leather (vinyl?) triangles with eyelets, lashed together over a light, temporary frame--it can even be mere twigs. Yet this flimsy thing is as powerful as the verbal half of the spell!

As I wake fully, I forget the first half entirely, and what the spell does... but I don't regret it much. That wasn't the dream's main lesson. It's a dream on dreamwork itself, warning I often discount the itch telling me more dream is trying to be remembered. Twice as much magic is going on as I think.

NOTES

• Vverbal/musical half of spell easily recalled: Note's music, in Ladies Detective Agency
• Easy half, hard half: Mma Ramotswe, though scared, asserts herself against her ex's attack; but she could have stuck with the easy half, defiance. Harder to offer him advice and help--and she does.
• I tell myself dream magic has its limits: a parody of Freud's "reality principle"!
• Wicker: Wicca! Modern witchcraft and neopaganism. A familiar pun in my dreams--one used a wicker dome to warn me that my hippie-feminist upbringing had strengths and limits: I'm open to magic, but also to reverse sexism--I discount men's magic, power... and integrity.
• Dome, flimsy frame:
  1. In that old dream, Dome, it meant ESP, magic, the ability to manifest things...
  2. At San Francisco Open Studios, I saw a dream nest by Delfina Piretti--a tent full of pillows and drawing books. I loved it--such a sexy, friendly space! Does it stand here for flirting, for showing my art in public? Not sure.
  3. The covered grave of Mma Ramotswe's dad, in Ladies Detective Agency. Meaning my family heritage?
• Maroon leather/vinyl triangles: the colors and shapes looked like Delve Witherington's art at City Art Gallery here in San Francisco. I used to show my work there; is the dream hinting I should again?
• ACTION: Sketch this. Or build it and sleep in it! Hmm. I'm sensitive to light at night but hate blinders; just buying a maroon pup tent might help me sleep better.
• ACTION: Don't let impatience or skepticism (or silly old Freud) fool you into settling for half-truths. Your dreams have all the magic you dream of. Not just the sensible half. Real magic.

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