I am in a small village by a marsh. It's colonial looking, an old fort where one might go to see historical reenactments, but it's sitting empty and used at the moment as a large space for a few artists to live temporarily and explore. It's a bright summer day. Two beautiful women are about to begin my lesson, in what they describe as a very old and important tradition. They are both people I know from real life, one in her fifties who reminds me a lot of an art history professor I had, who would cry sometimes because she was so passionate about her lectures (we'll call her D) and one in her late 20s who we'll call E. They speak in hushed, intense voices. We all wear white linen dresses, something between communion and pilgrim.

I was taking a sunny afternoon walk as a break from my residency work, on what seemed to have become a habitual route there, taking me by a glistening pond encircled by reeds.

I noticed that on this day, E and D were bustling and murmuring by the water. I walked up behind them, trying to see what the activity was. They hushed me and bade me closer to watch.

They were watching buzzing black bugs go inside a flower, and then shutting the flower tight around them with their fingers. The blooms were trumpet shaped, and the hot orange color of marigolds. Their vines tangled just at the water's edge and the trumpets, squash flower size, poked straight up out of the shallows. They explained to me that you held the flower closed until the fly died inside, and then you got two wishes.

It was a very old tradition, dating back to the days the historical village had been built to reenact. I loved this, but was worried that the creature was rare, which they then googled and confirmed. They felt bad, and I felt bad for spoiling the fun. But it was still neat, and apparently they’d gotten their wishes, which was exhilarating. In the dream I thought about how the fly was a perfect little sacrifice. Vulnerable and rare. So, perhaps a little sadly, I did not get my wish.

Later though, we were bored and digging around in the attic of an old lodge-like building. In a chest we found several old dolls--they were very cute and strange. Made of worn linen, very old looking, all yellowed white, much like the stuffed rabbits my mamaw used to make. But taller, stretched out, with a face like a tapir. (They have charming downturned snouts)

The one I held had a mopey but sweet face and a frilly bonnet tied on its head with a bow. It had glass eyes, which gave it a surprising liveliness. Its body was sort of curved, hunched forward in a way that made it very easy and comfortable to hold against my chest. It was about a foot tall, maybe a little more.

E, D and I each took one. D explained that these dolls were made by the villagers long ago, who filled them with straw and fibers that the black flies from earlier liked, so that they could grow wishes. The flies would lay eggs inside them and the whole doll would be sacrificed when they hatched--they referred to the whole doll as if it was the fly/sacrificial animal. I think maybe they called them gilly flies or gilly dolls.

The other ladies found dolls with old inert eggs in them, but mine had one that was hatching into a fly. I could see it moving through the threadbare fabric on the bottom of the doll, which was so worn it had become gauze like. The eggs were tiny fuzzy little round ovals that the fly wriggled out of like a silkworm pod. They were easy to see against the light brown straw. Mine had just one, left of center.

I asked "Do I get to keep the doll?" and D said "Yes." I giddily held it to my chest and felt an extreme love for it. Like it was a valuable, and my baby, and a favorite stuffed animal. I knew within myself, as certainly as if I had been there hundreds of years before, that freeing this freshly born gilly fly would not only right an old wrong but get me 2 extra strong wishes.

On E's recommendation, I proclaimed “by this time next year, I wish to have 3 more powerful connections than I do now," (I meant emotional connections) and “By this time next year, I want to make 3 TIMES as much art as I do now.” This was always the format of the wish: “By this time next year…” That was the tradition.

I took a sewing needle from E and used it to make a little tear in the fabric on the doll's bottom. They helped me hold the doll. We were excited.The fly spiraled happily away into the air (we were outside in the sun now) and I felt an extreme assurance that these things would come true.

I woke up feeling that the wishes were real in my waking life. And that in some other place, the doll and all was real too.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Residencies: at this time I had recently finished a couple of art residencies, where I stayed in strange places and made art with new people. It all felt so surreal that I was having a lot of dreams that weren't too unlike my waking life.
• Dolls and toys: recur in my dreams as goals, or things to covet, or as rewards.
• Magic in old dolls: back in college, I found a strange homemade doll made of plain white fabric. It was very very heavy, so much so that I eventually opened up a seam on the back to see what was in it. There were a few strands of human hair. My friends and I agreed it must be haunted. Eventually I think I got rid of the doll--I feel guilty about that. I hope it forgives me!
• Animals dying: I often dream of this. It's one of the primary ways guilt and anxiety manifests in my dreams. Maybe the flies were little symbols of the guilt I felt about how lucky I was to be doing those art residencies. Or just guilt in general. Bugs occur a lot in my dreams as a point of sick fascination--I love them and am disturbed by them at the same time.
• Interpretation: My dreams are grappling with an uncommon degree of optimism in my life, and trying to give it a narrative. That's the kind of thing I do when I'm awake. Also, the freeing, rather than killing, of the sacrificial fly suggests that this transitional period in my life is healing a deep hurt in me.

--Sam H.

EDITOR'S NOTES

THE ETHICS OF WISHING. I've found that my wishes often materialize in the waking world, but are even more effective in dreams. Yet I rarely wish, and keep them small. Do I have the right to disrupt others' lives, or even have good sense about my own? "Mind what you wish for!" After all, most of our wishes are conflicted, self-sabotaging, or clashing with others' wishes (folks who whine that their prayers go unanswered tend to ignore that little problem of others' prayers).

Sam's dream explores the ethics of wishing. She can't stomach either blood sacrifice (even of a fly) or harming an endangered species. So she finds a way to wish that harms no one. Being guilt-free and unconflicted, her wishes are far more likely to manifest.

I don't read that as symbolic. I read it as real.

GILLY FLIES and GILLY DOLLS. As a kid I read Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees (1926). It's set in a land remarkably like the Shire (but not inspired by The Hobbit, which came out over a decade later. The influence could run the other way; did Tolkien read Lud?) The town of Lud borders on Faerie, but is aggressively mundane, in denial about magic--the Luddites (ha!) literally won't speak of it. Inevitably, magic invades. Mirrlees (a formidable folklorist) associates 'gilly flowers' with pagan magic and the other world. Indeed, when Luddites die, they go to reap gilly flowers in Faerie--why, we never learn. I don't know if Sam H. consciously recalls reading of gillyflowers in Lud or elsewhere in British-based folklore, but I'm not surprised to see the word in a magical rite involving flowers. Her dream did not make it up; it's centuries old.

--Chris Wayan

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