I'm sick. Joints ache, especially my back. I still go to Open Studios out at Hunter's Point Shipyard, talk with a couple dozen artists.

John Ager's simple stylized landscapes focus on texture, design, with sharp outlines of parts. Not much detail. Then huge abstracty landscapes by Linda Fong--again, just simple motifs that read as land, tree, sea, star... but that makes them easy to do and spacious-feeling. Drastic simplicity like this might help me illustrate the landscapes on my worlds (see Planetocopia).

My friend Mark Roller is doing a huge dream-related piece about his wife Colette. "Why so big?" I ask. He snorts "Because her images are life-casts; if I scaled down I'd have to sculpt freehand!" Oh. Duh. Talk about naïve! I assumed he had this incredibly accurate eye and hand. Just a mold...

Evening. My friend Artemisia drops by. She's going to Starhawk's Spiral Dance for All Hallow's Eve. I'm too sick to dance but we talk politics. Our town has a ballot-proposition to ignore (non-nuisance) prostitution. But it also defunds organizations serving prostitutes. Why'd the writers add that? I'm for decriminalization, but why cut services too? Artemisia says "Those charities have atrocious street reputations among the prostitutes I know. Controlling, judgmental, exploitive... defunding them doesn't bother me a bit." OK, she's convinced me.

My friends Mike & Nic call. They're having a Halloween/Samhain party too, but I feel too sick to go. Bed. Sleep ten hours...

I wake. Reach to write the dream, but every move is checked: back-pain. Computer's far across the room. Write in bed? But the pen and pad by my bed are missing. Yet in my left hand's a paint brush! Black acrylic thinned to ink. In my right hand... A girl-doll, two feet tall. It's her, to careful scale! Naked in my fist. I paint black words across her breasts: "Her breasts shrank away." But language bends to meet her curves, by aureoles belied. She has adult proportions, if scaled down to two-fifths...

So I bend her over, paint spine instead. Smoother, but I just can't text: paint's too slow and crude. Hurry! I'll forget dream-facts. Then she stretches arms and shifts one foot to balance better. Alive! But with a scaled-down brain is she adult, child, pet or thing? Did I mistreat her, taking small for mindless, just like them? I quit using her for text; seek paper and pen instead. She arches over still, face hid; sighs, revealing sudden ribs. What do I do next? And then, and then she's gone: I woke again.

IN THE MORNING. NO, REALLY, THIS TIME. I PROMISE.

• Freckled soul-mate dream: Shy No More
• agency that drugs, brainwashes, kidnaps and enslaves clients: local charities "helping" prostitutes. The dream confirms Artemsia's accusations they harass and coerce clients.
• Girl chemically regressed for supposedly killing two johns a few months back: my health's regressed to punish/control my being a whore--for having two girlfriends several months back! I'm keeping myself regressed, desexed.
• Farm work on distant planet: building the World Dream Bank and Planetocopia! Artistically productive, but all work and no play...
• False waking and second dream: common for me. Usually in such afterdreams I write Dream 1 down, realize what it means, then wake again. It's my dreams' way to force me to face messages I might stupidly or willfully misinterpret. But here, the surrealism spills into the afterdream.
• Scale model: at Open Studio, Mark Roller said he has to make his sculptures that big since he uses life-casts. Can't scale down live models! "Oh no?" says my dream, and shapes a living 2/5 scale model. So what do I do? Use her for a dream notepad! Mr. Dream-Obsessed.
• 2/5 scale: unsure, but maybe two senses out of five? Sight and sound, drawing and poetry, but not touch taste smell--no lover for real.
• Struggle to paint words:
  • A: at Open Studio, Younhee Paik painted a sermon on metal--looked compelling, but bad spelling and grammar marred it. But also...
  • B: I'm finding my own dreamwork difficult. Why? The dream hints:
    1. I sabotage myself. Hide basic tools and materials--pen, paper, time to write. So I...
    2. work awkwardly around it, thus...
    3. stressing my body out.
• She shifts uncomfortably: I struggled to find a bearable position in bed with my inflamed back and neck. So she's definitely my sore, neglected body.
• Victorian attitude: saw an online article on Victorian view of prostitution: whores' lives were basically forfeit--no happiness or acceptance possible. Sympathy once they die, but that's all.
• ACTION 1: Vote for the proposition to decriminalize prostitution AND defund charities.
• ACTION 2: To fight moralizing alien drug-pushing kidnappers, enlarge your model of your body and its importance two and a half times! And stretch a lot.
• This is Dreamverse #38. The Dreamverse Project is to write one readable, memorable dream-poem every morning. Insanely ambitious, now that I want to illustrate more of them in watercolor. More like a few a month. Got to leave room for the ones that don't want to be poems...

AFTERWORD

It's a month later now. I still feel regressed, not sexless inside, but latent. In hiding.

I voted as the dream said. The prop lost, but not by much. Progress is slow. We'll try again.

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