The Dream Cradle

Mitta’s Dream Cradle inspired more engagement and artistic-cultural consequences than expected. After receiving the Sky Heron Grant for Integrative Arts (mostly a package of studio time, craft supplies, and food credit at the neighborhood cupboard), they were planning for a familiar trajectory. Generate a decent enough artist statement about liminality, dream healing and proto-language to entice a few people to risk the trip to the gallery. The installation would be mildly exciting, beautiful even, but also confusing and ultimately forgotten by the time people returned to the regular survival rhythm of their lives.

As Mitta began putting the plans together something started to shift. A soft but urgent pulling coming from somewhere indefinable began guiding their choices. They shaped a dome-like ceiling in the 30’ by 30’ room at the Helio Art Center out of paper maché, and painted it dark blue, speckled with white. They covered the walls in several layers of mottled, waxen paper made out of recycled pulp and melted leftover candles. These formed ridges that were firm and shapely, as well as delicate sections that appeared to hover in the air.

A week before the opening Mitta’s body filled with bright and molten energy, rendering them sleepless. They spent hours in the room that was beginning to feel like a cavern in the clouds, simmering in not-quite-sleep dreams that oozed with color. They formed arrangements of small objects both precious and mundane in crevices and dangled them on webs of eclectic string. Intricate paintings and drawings relegating entire other worlds and patterns appeared on the walls and floor. Mitta experienced a deep pleasure in listening to where each micro ecosystem wanted to be, discovering a quiet communication of balance.

One night Mitta was compelled to wander around the building and discovered a damp earth smell along the west wall. They found a trickling of water, a tiny creek, stifled by the gravel and cement asking to be dug out. Using shovels from the sagging garden shed out back they managed it, digging and re-creating earth until the thin stream was moving and audible. The staff at Helio Art Center didn’t pay much attention to the hole growing under the west wall or their resident artist pawing at the ground. Things had been escalating quickly with the latest ordinances put out by the Evergreen government, something about the local wells requiring a new tribute (usually a conscription based assignment for the populace ranging from holding week long vigils and chanting to blood offerings not unknown to result in death). Those heading the Evergreen government claimed to be mediums for the trees and “Gods of Nature” by extension, sworn to do their bidding. In reality they had a stronghold on the most nutritious food and the latest biotech supplements, simply giving them more stamina for claiming specialness. Everyone else was usually too exhausted to do more than look after their local neighborhood as best they could, generations of ancestral effort no longer buffered by caffeine, alcohol, and modern urban busy-ness so common thirty years ago. Lately though swaths of people had been resisting the finaglings of the Evergreen Government, possessed by a heavy, primal ferociousness. Groaning and scratching and shuddering, tens and even hundreds would surge through the streets and alleyways pushing back the Evergreen soldiers and conscriptors with their raw barks and long, emotional howls.

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The night before the opening, Mitta settles into a wide-body feeling, like a deep lake. The sleeplessness has brought on a silky quality to the world, and Mitta finds themselves feeling kinder and focused. A glimmer of a memory from when they were a child with an ache to stir people, to stir something essential in others, floats up and stays near their chest and throat. All impulses to strain for a feeling of importance are still. Mitta feels content and generous as they paint the following overture in deep green on the wall outside the entrance to The Dream Cradle:

I. Enter with love.

II. Breathe as if all others, all things that you find inside, are a part of you, and you are a part of them. Do this gently, completely, and without much doubt.

III. Say and do what you need to about all the ways you do, or do not find this easy, without hurting yourself or others.

IV. When you feel complete, leave a gift.

V. Carry what you have experienced into the rest of your life.

The opening coincides with a slow summer sunset and relative quiet in the streets. The evening is attended mostly by volunteer staff from the art center, a group of young people who happened by during their nightly supply scavenge, and a few people from the neighborhood. Everyone’s breathing slows and deepens as they read the green words on the wall.

Once inside, there is a blossom of giggling and murmuring as each person is drawn to different formations in the room. A few come out to read the instructions for a second, third, or fourth time. Mitta watches warmly as the attendees settle in, some becoming enchanted by a drawing or a tiny object altar, others circling the space gazing up at the dome ceiling, a few looking unsure and frozen. An hour in and Mitta senses the room, The Dream Cradle, asking them to sing. They never considered themselves a singer, but the suggestion feels completely possible. They glide to the center of the room and without holding back, emit unplanned sound into the atmosphere. The wordless song wobbles in their unpracticed vocal tract and has tones of celebration, regret, longing, and invitation. As each surprising intonation erupts from their body, space and time seem to flutter open. A chorus of unseen beings swell in this open slipstream of Mitta’s voice, filling it with impossible texture and meaning. Mitta’s utter lack of embarrassment and raw joy strengthens something in the rest, and a few begin to add their own voices. Caring not for pleasant sound so much but honest expression, the singers both seen and unseen create a whirling flow of vibration that pulses and reaches and dissolves, and sprouts out again. All who are in the Dream Cradle feel their blood and breath changed by the soundscape, drawing them closer to an oceanic intelligence whirring in the subtle bodies of the songs.

A piercing, liquid clarity envelopes Mitta. The fluttering slipstream of open time and space feels fully suspended and supported now, not fleeting or fragile. Something that has always been there is speaking to them, with little obstruction or distortion. Mitta feels a honeyed embrace for all parts of themselves, which expands to include all others, every corner of reality. Relief sweeps through them, and they are not overwhelmed.

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A couple of weeks pass and the city bucks under the events of high summer. The masses of howling rebels become bolder and larger. The staggeringly hot weather results in neighborhood fires that are left to die out on their own, with very little water supply for firefighting. Helio Art Center becomes a hub for resource distribution and shelter for several families fleeing the burning. A 5.7 earthquake rumbles the smoke choked city and splits open the art center right along the creek line running underneath, freeing the water to gurgle across the entire building. Elders staying at the shelter look after the refugee children as they explore this revealed gift, clearing away rubble and replanting shrubs from the tired backyard in the fresh wet banks. Mitta offers their craft supplies and tutorials on the fly to anyone interested in between the domestic chores of the makeshift village. The Dream Cradle spills out beyond the 30’ by 30’ room as people leave gifts and come up with new additions; a reading nook made out of spare plywood and netting, jam sessions with donated musical instruments, myth telling with a local Kashmiri grandmother, a child’s golden heart-shaped locket hung above the original green painted instructions.

The sonic offerings that emerged during the opening have also grown. Mitta was getting requests now to sing for people’s grief, physical pain, and desire. They would guide the asker into the room with the blue domed ceiling and ask for assistance from the six or seven other singers that had been practicing with them. Their voices would coax open the oceanic slipstream of ancient memory and presence, and Mitta and the others would help to melt the feeling of isolation and terror in the asker.

In August a handful of howlers break off from their swarm and stumble into the art center, attracted by the resounding noise coming from The Dream Cradle. They weren't noticed right away because almost everyone in the shelter had joined in the chorus. Children were laughing and shout-mimicking the different song-shapes of the adults, and anyone too tired to sing were resting with eyes closed on the pile of dusty cushions that had been gathered. Mitta felt them before they saw them, like air being sucked out of the room. When Mitta located the howlers visually, they kept singing but held them in their gaze, waiting. Several others also noticed, but followed Mitta’s lead by vigilantly relaxing into non-reaction. Their few months of study in the healing vortex that formed from their sounding had taught them the power of an open pause. The howlers’ jaws quivered and their veins engorged with a strain beyond the movement of blood. But the rest of their bodies were alight with permeable fascination, so much so that they rose on tip-toes, stretching toward the blooming sounds. Mitta was struck by the purity of their feeling, and a clear suggestion from the Dream Cradle sparkled up their spine. A song of welcome cascaded out from deep time and washed through Mitta’s voice, a song for warriors returning home from protecting their people, a song for those who had returned from a psychic fragmentation, a song for those dying or already dead. The most practiced of Mitta’s accomplices pick up the song quickly and effortlessly, the heightened risk of the moment giving them sharpened perception.

Panic rolls through the crowd as more people notice their visitors, and the body of the welcome song falters. “ Do not drop them do not drop them” winds through Mitta’s mind and they add a layer of hot demand to their song, casting the villagers to steady their fear and remember the instructions painted outside. For the most part it works, and once enough of them coordinate their fortitude the song floods the bodies of the howlers. A ripe bursting prances through the room and the howlers moan and crawl. There is no desperation but a delicate shock that they feel at such intimate acknowledgment coming from the song, like the mother of all mothers calling their name. Instinctively volunteers move to be with them, and begin listening to the sighing, fizzling metamorphosis taking place. After a while the howlers start speaking a startlingly sweet political poetry. It’s as though they are the wisest amalgamation of thousands who have tried to bless the human world with innovative compassion and grace. Their unflinching accuracy, humility, and conveyance of profound human warmth cracks any bitterness in the listeners.

The howlers are fed, hugged, and invited back any time. They keep their frightful shapeshifting capacity, but decide to attempt to thaw some of the Evergreen soldiers with their poetry of reckoning.

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By the time the downward pull of autumn arrives, word had traveled that indeed some soldiers had been inspired to drop their vows. There were new ordinances, but the Evergreens seemed less audacious, squiggling in tepid self-consciousness. Talk of what to do about next summer’s fires were starting in earnest. News also spread of The Dream Cradle and its rhythms of life. The creek had gained constant admirers, and new ideas and people willing to shepherd them sprung forth. Mitta tended to the songs like a hearth fire, and looked to the changing season.