Last night I dreamt that I was this guy called Randolph Peter Marshall, who was born in the early 1900s and did all this dumb shit. As the dream went on, it became evident that I wasn't RPM himself, but an artist who was recreating his life through pictures and words. I made this huge, involved presentation on his life that took place across the entire Scottish countryside and involved numerous trippy re-enactments. It was fucking weird. My dreams often involve concepts that don't really make sense once I wake up, despite seeming perfectly natural in the dream.
Another part of the dream took part after the presentation. I was so tired that I couldn't even move; I just laid on the ground while my friend Katie S. sat next to me and looked at all of the pieces of the presentation that I had collected in a folder. There were a lot of paintings and drawings and stuff, and they were really awesome. After a while it became evident that we were at camp and were both twelve years old again.
Which is interesting, because that makes last night's dream the most recent of at least half a dozen dreams I've had since getting into Oxford* in which I am twelve or thirteen years old. The frack? I only have half of an idea as to why that's going on. First of all, my twelve-year-old self was into Paganism. It all began with an interest with the Salem witch trials in fifth grade, then an interest in actual witches and magic in sixth grade. Over seventh and eighth grade, I immersed myself in Paganism. My friends, specifically Cedilla and Katie S., and I celebrated all of the most prominent Pagan (Celtic) holidays: Yule (the Winter Solstice), Imbolc, Ostara (the Spring Equinox), Beltane (May Day), Litha (the Summer Solstice), Lammas, Mabon (the Autumn Equinox), and Samhain (Halloween). I can't tell you how disappointed my twelve-year-old self would be to know that her nineteen-year-old self just had to look that up.
We also did spells, and had a New Age store in my basement. I read a hundred books on everything Pagan and dreamed of going to Stonehenge - literally. Now that I'm actually going to England, I'm having dreams of being that person who would have loved to be there
so much. Of course, I'm expecting to love it, too, but in a different way than my twelve-year-old self would.
Another thing, which is maybe important. Just before I woke up this morning, I was narrating my dream. That's not uncommon; I think it's a writer thing. In any case, I said/wrote something like, "I'm twelve years old again, at least for now. At any moment I might be something else. I might be Randolph Peter Marshall, who will exist because I make him be." After I woke up, this was normal dream-nonsense, but now I'm thinking about it, and how I made RPM exist through pictures and words in the dream. I thought about what I was doing before I went to sleep, which was searching for old writing on my computer. It turns out that I don't have any of my old (pre-high school) writing on my laptop, which disappointed me. Add that to the fact that there are very few pictures of me in middle school (I wasn't fond of being photographed), and I start to wonder if the ghost of my twelve-year-old self, or my twelve-year-old doppelganger, or whatever, is struggling to exist without any words or pictures to make her be in the way that RPM can exist (despite the fact that he is not an actual person). She too is not an actual person anymore, but maybe she could be again, in some small way. I haven't thought of her much in the past six years, so maybe the reason why she's suddenly on my radar now is that she wants to go to England.
Of course, this is all weird shit that only makes any sort of sense in the dream world, but that's where I live, one third of the time, anyway. And it interests me because there are a lot of features of my younger self that I would like to rediscover. I'm at the point where reading what I wrote at that age is almost like reading another person's work, albeit another person who thinks uncannily like me. Maybe I'll share some of it with you, if you want. Seriously, it's not as lame as most middle school writing, I think. Okay, some of it is, but I did have a weird mind and some of it is funny and interesting. Some of you may have read it before.
But to start ... here are the only pictures of my eleven-through-fourteen-year-old self I was able to find on my computer (above, and below).
And here's the only old writing I could find, which is only a bit. I was twelve or thirteen when I wrote it. The other stuff I wrote does exist, but it's just not on my computer. Here you go:
She felt her grandmother’s chalcedony, warm and living, in her pocket, as she slid waist deep into the sludge. Keep to the hills.
But there weren’t any hills. Only mud – as far as her squinting, bloodshot eyes could see. Only mud and rain and trees – lolling on forever … with not a single knoll interrupting the shivering black tides. Had she passed the hills that would lead her over the waters to the highlands? How had she passed them, overlooked them, ignored them, even through the driving rain and ice pecking at her back?
Then, a quiver. A tree’s branches trembled. Something broke the surface of the water far off, and sent a cascade of tiny tremors through the tides. Juno felt the waters stir all about her – felt the pulse of the waves as another severed the grimy surface, and another, and another. She spun, and her fingers tightened on the baby. A dark silhouette, hunched over before the tan blotch of a far-off tree, hooked an arrow into the string of an elegantly arched bow, and slunk closer. Its movements were echoed by each of the spectral ring that had strung itself so quietly about the girl and the baby motionless in the circle’s utmost core.
“Tenyas,” Juno breathed into the baby’s hair.
The tallest advanced, the nose of its golden arrow catching a slice of moonlight as its master veered it nimbly in the direction of the girl’s face. Another of the pack slung a gritty arm about Juno’s shoulder and swung her, as she writhed and slashed blindly at its fingers, onto its shoulder. It shook from her the muddy bundle, and taking up the baby in one clawlike hand, deposited it into the thrashing waters.
*Did I tell you that I'm going to Oxford next year? Because I am.
Chevalier mittens by Mari Muinonen.
