https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/2J2l8iucK4GtE6AD9ZIIRm?utm_source=generator
(I forgot for 106 days)
I'm vomiting. More and for longer than I've ever vomited. My mouth is slack, locked, like an unhinged snake’s mouth. The vomiting is so consistent that I have a moment to notice the room. It feels like Southern Florida. It's overcast. The newscaster on the television is reminding us how the natural world is collapsing around us as we continue the death march of modernity slouching towards the cliff of extinction.
And I'm still vomiting. Tears pour from my eyes to merge with the stargate geyser. Mucus in my nostrils threaten suffocation. Both of my hands are wrapped around the porcelain of the sink; planting me complete.
For a moment, the whole scene flickers into the archetypical. Who is the vomiting man? As a tarot, or a deity; who is the god of the purge? The Goddess of Separatio?
As I start to feel liquid washing over my feet, telling me that there is so much vomit in the bathroom that it is beginning to flood, something outside my awareness clicks.
I bring my full attention back to the process of purging; I feel into the place deep inside me that refused to budge during the geysing, the place in me that, in the privacy of my own heart, is the place I pretend isn't there, I allow it to be dislodged. I allow it to be swept in the purgative torrent.
I close my eyes, and bear down, straining like I'm trying to support my own birth contractions, and I behold as a nine inch worm-like creature emerges from my mouth and lands in the sink.
I watch it slowly disintegrate before my eyes, as if its atomic structure is just unstable enough outside my body that the atmosphere slowly dissolves the creature like the mouth dissolves cotton candy.
An absolute sense of completion comes over me. Something is done. Something, released.
I woke up Wednesday morning with that sense of completion.
I've thought about that dream everyday since I've had it.
Dreams are messages from the two million year old intelligence that lives in our unconscious. If I am a King of my interior life, dreams are my prophet. I heed, I listen, I bow and ask.
Jung said that some indigenous tribes believed, in order for the Chief to have 'big dreams' that would help and guide his people, had to follow a few rules to be granted such gifts. He had to tell the truth. He had to behave morally. And lastly, he had to make art whenever his dreams gave him visions.
What follows is my art in response to this dream.