Category: Dreams (that come in the night)

Saudade

Katharine Asals5 Comments

There is a strange cat in the basement, like a cat that has been painted a dark burgundy.

I am nudging the cat up the stairs towards the back door, and as we pass through the kitchen, Dad is there, hunched and skeletal, getting himself a snack. He makes noises of annoyance at the cat, at the audiobook I am listening to… I promise everything is being taken care of, everything will be alright in just a minute.

***

When I awake I remember of course Dad left us on Wednesday.

He was 90 – a life very well lived.

His departure had been coming for a while, coming for a year and a half and then coming on all at once, coming so clearly and pointedly in the last week that we contacted palliative care and they came and laid out what they could offer – the painkillers, the sedatives.

During the summer I was out in BC for a couple of months, and often feared we might lose him while I was away and it would be something I’d have to live with.

There was an evening where I’d come back from dinner with some new friends and was on the couch in the house where I was staying, messing around with my phone, and I looked up and saw an owl, just there on the balcony, staring at me.

The next day I thought for sure I would get the call that Dad had gone. The owl was so spooky, his sunken black eyes glaring at me I was convinced he was a messenger of death.

For days I drew him over and over, in pencil, in watercolour, on the iPad…

But no, the summer carried on without incident after the owl’s visit, and many evenings were spent in various local bays enjoying the sunsets and watching the seals come out, their little round heads bobbing in the water looking for evening snacks.

Word of the summer : crepuscular.

1 : of, relating to, or resembling twilight

2 : occurring or active during twilight

Back home and into the final weeks of care, soon enough it was clear where things were going, and the spirit of loss and melancholy began to haunt all events.

A friend had a film premiering at TIFF, so I went and tried to be distracted by the bustle, the crowds… but alas, Dad was such a huge aficionado, a devotee of the festival every year until these last few, so my thoughts were with him at every turn.

In recent nights another critter made it’s way into my world – I’d been leaving the balcony door open at night to get some fresh air in as the apartment was full of strange smells.

A moth got trapped inside and would get fluttery in the evenings, knocking against windows and ceilings, clumsy futile movements, harassed, looking for a way out.

Wednesday morning I found the moth dead in the kitchen. And I wondered…

Indeed, it was the final day.

Lens Artists Challenge – Longing

Letting go of patterns

Katharine Asals8 Comments

I find myself on a boat, quite a large boat.

But it seems I have a corpse that has come with me, or is somehow part of what I am carrying.

I’m figuring there must be some paperwork that needs taking care of, some bureaucratic machinations must surely be done for the corpse, so when a few crew members pass by, I ask them : What needs doing?

“Oh, you can just let that go”, they tell me, “just let it go into the sea”.

It’s about a week after the dream that I find myself in waking life on a ferry, and it takes me maybe half an hour to realize I am in fact on a rather large boat and that it might be a really good time to let some shit go.

Dead shit.

I’m not sure I could define or articulate exactly what the dead element consisted of, but I did have a sense of patterns of behaviour, repetitive stories, relationships that aren’t necessarily working out.

So I opened my arms to the wind there on the upper deck of the ferry and tried to let it all go.

The next day we stood on a mountaintop and looked out.

High enough that the birds floated up to us on the currents of wind.

Mostly we just looked in awe, took in the expanse, the huge sense of space, but once in a while we pulled out the binoculars and tried to identify the flash of movement in the water.

Aside from the tankers passing, all remained elusive and mysterious.

It was the following day at the eastern point of the island that we saw the fins of what we guessed must be porpoises, small and agile, making their way across the strait.

Nope, sorry, I didn’t take a photo of them.

Right now I’m carrying only my phone, no big camera, and besides, those moments seem so precious it feels more important to breathe them in than take a fuzzy terrible picture.

Breathe in the moment, the sea, the wind, and let all the dead shit go…

Lens Artists Challenge

Cinematic dreams

Katharine Asals13 Comments

The taxi driver refused to go any further.
I was staying at a hotel near Spadina and College – El Mocambo territory – and wanted to get further down towards Dundas, into the deep and winding medieval streets, but the driver turned the car around and let me out, saying “most people don’t want to go down there – it’s too dangerous”.

In the dream, downtown T.O. was like one of those neighbourhoods in Mexico City – Colonia Doctores or Ciudad Neza  – where all taxi drivers refuse to enter cause anything could happen.
So I got out and walked.
The streets were deserted and dark, and I walked and walked, way south, walking all night until I got down near the very bottom of the city, almost to the waterfront, where the sky was wide and the road opened up into a kind of rock quarry or a crumbling Colosseum, a part of the city that had long been abandoned and was just big open empty raw spaces  –

I ventured up onto the first layers of the rocks, rambling happily until I sensed movement in the shadows of the quarry. And as I looked, creatures took shape.
They were lions – stone lions.
They were living animals – their large bodies moving and rummaging about – but they were made of stone, the same stone of the the quarry.

At just the moment that it registered in my mind what I was seeing and the danger I was in, a large lion sensed me too, the hint of movement in his peripheral vision, and his head snapped up in a snarl.
Then there was a pounce, the running jump of the massive creature coming after me.

big biting lion

Suddenly I had a large plywood board in my hands which I lay underneath in a crevice in the rocks, pulling the board flat on top of me, effectively disappearing into the ground.

The lion lumbered heavily over me, not finding me, scrambling over and away, somewhere beyond where I lay hidden.
The fear was so huge – one of those nightmares that wakes you up in a sweat, blinking in the dark of the bedroom.

* * *

Today I had one of those days, out and about in the ‘hood and, while taking photos of the various construction and rehabilitation projects happening all around us here, here down at the bottom of the city, in an area that had been abandoned for decades, I remembered this dream again.

A dream from more than 10 years ago.

What I still don’t quite understand is where does this dream exist in time?

Because it’s as if some part of the dream knew where I was going more than 5 years before I moved here, before our building was built, before this abandoned part of the city was on its way to being brought back to life.

But now, having remembered the dream, and feeling as if I am somehow somewhere inside of it, I remember also some of the wise words of Robert Moss regarding the animals we meet in dreams :

Our animal guardians are hunting us in our dreams. If we will only stop running away, brave up, and remember, we can claim their power …

Lens Artists Challenge – Cinematic