ENCOUNTER WITH EARTH
If the surrealist realm is beyond reality, this was before reality. The confusion of reality in the mind of a child comes from having no preconceptions, no idea of the reliability of space. Here is a curiosity, an openness. The urges that children have to touch stoves, candles, fans, wheel spokes. Or put everything in their mouths. The dream world precedes the real world as the misunderstanding of matter. Experimentation.
The heat was always there. Not oppressive but exhausting. My most dreamlike childhood memory was warm and bright like every other day. The kind of hot where the black asphalt sparkled. I had on these black gloves, not sure where I got them. They also sparkled. They were winter gloves, gloves for snow. They were so thin. The snow would have melted, soaked through the gloves and refrozen on the outside, probably. Purposeless. But I had them. I was wearing them because I had a plan. It was probably ninety degrees outside. It could have been summer. I was there and my little brother was there, along with a babysitter. Or my father. I can’t remember.
The bees were playing bumper cars over the lavender bushes. Still air. A dog barked. A response arose. Christmas Tree Lane watched silently and grew. As we wandered over to the next street and my home disappeared behind others, unfamiliarity and a sense of placelessness took over.
Often, children perceive their thoughts to be more hidden than they really are, and it is actually obvious to everyone around them what they are planning. I acted absentminded until we reached this spot so as not to be noticed. I don’t think anyone knew my thoughts this time, otherwise what happened next would not have happened. I had gotten my mind stuck on a cactus a street over, which we passed on a loop we often made around the neighborhood. I could imagine nothing around it, not the yard it was in or its approximate location, so I was watching all of the surroundings with care. Whoever it was was much more focused on my brother, who was still round and clumsy.
First I had only one glove on, then I put on the other because symmetry was important even at this age. We stopped in a pocket of shade near the cactus. The gloves had begun to heat up from the sun. My brother was up and babbling. The back of the adult was turned. I approached the cactus. I had chosen this one because it seemed closest to the platonic ideal of the cactus, not that I knew this at the time. A healthy green with beautiful long spines that came to a clear point and were darkened at the tips. Importantly, its pads were easily accessible at my height. I wanted to merge briefly with this cactus. To understand its feeling, its being. The gloves were supposed to protect me, so I could experience the essence of the plant without being harmed. Of course, the spines went straight through the gloves, and the gloves caught on them going the other direction.
Yet, the spines were thin, and drew no blood. Or maybe it had soaked into the glove? I became confused about the relationship between matter and itself, if it could pass through itself, the origin of pain.
Having to grapple with causation that as yet cannot be explained.
Dreams are internal inventions, yet dream analysis depends on the idea that they can connect back to the real world. Meaning that the dream self is an expression of the real self. Actual reality is imposed, but you have more free will than in dreams, where every action is seemingly automatic, seemingly accidental. The art is a combination of the two, gasping for maximalism and total freedom.
Dreams are devoid, deprived of most senses. It’s not common for a person to be able to hear music or sounds in a dream, nor have I heard of someone being able to smell or taste. You’re left with sight and feel. The content is reality stripped back to its basic elements, their feeling components. Simplified. Is it imagination? No. The visions require imagination to become realized, however.
Related, there are few people, usually, in dreams. Not many distinguishable characters, rarely more than a dialogue between two, though the other might undergo random transformation into auxiliary configurations appropriate to the subject matter. Much like a summer’s day or a weekday in the suburbs where all doors and windows are shut, and there is no one to be seen. When either speaks, words are exchanged without sound. Instead, we communicate nonverbally, telepathically. I am simply aware of what they are saying and vice versa.
The city where I grew up is named meaning the valley above. A tranquil unincorporated town beyond the county proper. It had a big road down its center that was called Christmas Tree Lane. Maybe a Christmas tree was as tall as your father, if you had both. But these were taller than mansions, and that’s not an exaggeration. Cedrus deodara can grow up to 60 meters tall. The story, history, was that this road, lined with the biggest evergreens you had ever seen, had been the driveway of a general, the first man to live there. This is where I got the idea that people grow smaller with time. We were just ants crawling across an Earth deserted by gods and giants, staying close to the soil.
I would mostly speak to others in the shame dreams. The type where you’re naked somewhere and being looked at publicly. It’s much like real-life shame, which is also transmitted nonverbally. These haunting representations.
Reality is like a memory. Each time it is revisited, it is changed and scarred by the meanings assigned to it.
The prefixes super- and hyper-, Latin and Greek in origin, respectively, share a Proto-Indo European root which means above, over, or beyond.
Surreality is a super-reality, beyond reality, a resolution of dream and reality, the internal human experience. Baudrillard’s hyperreality is the reality created by application of signs relative to images which are actually irrelevant to one another. A meaningless one. Is it a type of juxtaposition? The point is, how can we prove what any of it means?
I’ve had friends talk about the age where they “gained consciousness,” an experience that is difficult to either quantify or qualify, but it’s probably about the age you stop burning yourself by touching things you shouldn’t.
Fling off convention. Rationality. Get rid of utilitarian politics and economics that have no regard for the individual, happiness, art?
Operating as if in a dream, a form of performance art when applied to writing, the process, the legend of the performance. A dreamlike state. A trance. Having no conscious control, no awareness of the witness. The shame.
Not truly automatic but you are trying to make it feel essential.
Once on a family vacation, during which my parents would fight the entire way through, someone broke a glass and I stepped into the mess. I need you to understand that the trees were smaller there. They were tiny slivers—it was thin, delicate glass, not ceramic. Again, I couldn’t see the injury. Again, it was hot. My foot was slick with sweat so that the entire surface refracted enough to disguise the shards, which took a while to pull out.
Always dependent. Always being led somewhere.
Hannah Hernandez, 18, USA ✯