Assignment: Dream a Little Dream
Homework for Kids and Adults Who Need to Feel Like Kids Again
I believe deeply in the power of dreaming. It’s maybe one of my few coping mechanisms that both protects me from a disorienting onslaught of information, and still bears fruit. As a child, I spent countless hours laying on the floor and staring at the cieling wondering what would it be like if up was down and down was up? Considering how empty the house might seem with the furniture now missing from the floor felt rich and purposeful somehow. Where would the windows hit in relation to my body? Where would I sit? See how that overhang becomes a stair? Sometimes the emptiness of the up above felt calming in its minimalism. Sometimes the popcorny texture of the cieling’s limit would generate a wilderness of shadow and shape that my mind could read like star-dotted constellations.
I’m a crab who likes to keep to her shell, a homebody, and introvert. Since becoming chronically ill with lupus and continuing to process Covid and it’s ongoing iterations, I’ve adjusted to pain and limited mobility by returning to my old daydreamy practices. I pay attention to how reflections layer pictures of my reality in the strange mirror of the window. My ears try to discern the stack of sounds that harmonize around and within me. I’ve learned when the white cats that live downstairs like to have their chatty meows, and when the young chicana neighbors get bubbly giggly high with their friends. Each fan in my vicinity has a different voice and tenor. My belly gurgles are similar to and different from those of my dog’s—I know this from careful observation and not so scientific inquiry. There’s something calming about linking the ground of my physical immediacy to my brain’s ability to float off into memories, revery, and what ifs.
This is just a guess, but you and your family may be a little overwhelmed and stressed out by newsfeeds and numbness. Humbly, let me offer you some of my free flights of fancy, meditations in observation, and quiet exercises in being and doing:
Draw the room around you. Perfect is boring and so not the point. Fill in your sketches in unreal shades of neon, or color match the furniture precisely. Just do. Trust your instincts. Let yourself notice what you notice. Leave out whatever you wish. Maybe later examine your picture and wonder about it. Why might I have made the rocking chair so big? What looks most alive? What bothers you in what you made? Where could those judgements come from? What do you love about your rendering? What surprises you? There’s a whole world in there. It’s a cool way to get lost for a few hours and who knows? You might feel or learn something.
Read a poem, essay, or a book. When you’re done with a portion or the whole think about what it felt like reading the piece. How did your body feel? What was the relationship between the world in the pages and the physical environment around you? How does the physical world affect your experience of the imagined world and vice versa? What invited you into the story and what kept you out? What were you fighting or rejecting? What made it easy to float off into the author’s universe? How is the art both yours and the author’s?
Draw a bunch of squiggled up, zig-zag, ball of string chaotic doodle messes on a piece of paper. Color in all the spaces to your liking. Maybe heavily outline or smooth out your squiggles. Maybe press real hard and break crayons with your hand's need for force. Maybe an image emerges from all your nothing, or maybe not. Try to let yourself feel/sense/know what you’d like to do without trying to make a finished product. If it feels good do it. And try to stick with feeling and veer away from judging. If it feels hard and you keep getting upset that you don’t know what you’re doing, or your work is ugly and it’s not coming out right—yikes! this is what we’ve done to ourselves and our creativity. There’s nothing wrong with you! But it could be worth your while to practice doing this often, every day even, to regrow your muscles for play, directionless adventure, and whimsy.
Can you imagine life before the internet?! Having to come up with all this stuff to do? Wild, I know. But it might be soothing and fun to pretend like we’re back in the olden days craving some ways to dream the day away and pass a little time. Abolition is also about freeing our minds from limiting beliefs and cultural expectation. We need to remember how to dream beyond the ceiling and read the colors between the lines. I hope these assignments can help get you started.