PIPE DREAMS

This book is a strange one indeed. It’s a nonfiction work about an imaginary network of pipes and tubes that carry dreams around the world, so that people separated from each other in time and space can meet once again in sleep. The pipes, of course, are not real, so how can the book be nonfiction? The text was created from quotations found in the transcripts of online conversations with a friend of mine in Spain over the course of a year. We had first discussed the dream pipes more than 20 years ago, only to find them re-entering our conversations and our dreams today, across a gulf of time and distance and deep changes in our lives. There is magic in the world sometimes, even for those of us who don’t believe in magic.

Archival inkjet prints, original watercolor illustrations, case binding, 5 x 5 x 0.5”
40 pages
Available with brown cover (pictured below) or gray

The complete text of the book is underneath the image gallery, below.

PIPE DREAMS

I.

Once, many long years ago and across a vast ocean of time and sleep, I was thinking about dreams. And so I told a friend what I had been thinking. I told him that there should be a great network of pipes and tubes that carry dreams around the world, so that people separated from each other by time and space can meet once again in dreams. The pipes would run under the oceans, connecting in great hubs from which they would fan out across continents and arrive at individual sleepers’ pillows. 

This was eighteen years ago. I have not seen my friend since. 

At the time, we both lived in Ireland, though neither or us belonged there. Later, we traveled together to Istanbul, where we parted ways, both in our dreams and our personal geographies. He returned home to Spain, where he has remained. I have lived in several countries since, moving around the world, carrying my dreams with me, along with all of my other more solid possessions.

II.

One day this friend writes to me in Canada, where I live now. He says I appear in his dreams sometimes. He reminds me of the network of pipes I dreamed up long ago. I had forgotten all about it, this imaginary network of nocturnal pipes and tubes. It got lost among the other changes in my life. 

He says: I had a dream the other night. It is the first time we have been face to face since I last saw you in Istanbul.

He says: The thing you need to know about the dream is the light in your eyes which is the light inside you. It is your task to go and find it in yourself. 

He says: I thought I wouldn’t dream of you, but it was meant to be this way. In the dream, it was as if a part of me was back again. I’ve recovered something I am not sure how to name.

And I think once again of the dream pipes, and wonder why I cannot see them. They must have been here all along. 

III.

I experience frequent insomnia now.  

He continues to dream of me. I can’t sleep, yet I somehow still appear in someone else’s dreams, even while dreams elude me.

He says: I go to bed not knowing whether I will dream of you tonight, because it is not up to me whether you show up in my dreams or not. It is up to you. Since the last dream I have known this somehow.

And then he says: You won’t be in my dreams for a while. It is you who decides to travel or not. But I know and that knowing is like crossing a galaxy.

I like the idea that I am doing, being, knowing in ways beyond understanding, beyond my own consciousness, within someone else’s consciousness. I wonder if this is true, wonder how. I wish I could will myself to sleep, to appear in dreams, my own and others. But it is not up to me, either, unfortunately. 

I feel an aching absence. Like I’ve been neglecting my friend without knowing it because I haven’t been appearing in his dreams. I feel I owe him something, owe him some rest at the end of the day.  If only I had the power to provide it. 

IV. 

And life becomes more difficult, and I can neither sleep nor dream, can neither work nor create. I feel like there’s no me left in me. Like I look the same on the outside, but have been hollowed out of all that made me who I used to be.

Then I see his message, sent from the other side of the world, seemingly from out of the blue: I am so aware of your pain that it has nearly crushed me for a long time. 

And he says: Forget who you are. Forget the past. Forget whatever you thought life would be. Pain will wane, but slowly. If you want to heal, look for your own space, time, and silence, and you will sleep. And I’ll see you in the dreams that sleep will bring.

And I hope he will, hope I will, after all these years. I hope the pipes I once imagined can again connect us across oceans of sleep. 

V.

He says: This is quite mysterious indeed, but in Istanbul, I heard from an imam in Eyüp mosque that dervishes can communicate with other dervishes hundreds of kilometers away while whirling, because in that state dream and reality are the same.

He says: Before we left Turkey, we should have gone to Konya to see the dervishes.

We should have. We should have gone to see them whirl, to be in the presence of something that transcends ordinary notions of time and space, of knowing and being, of dreaming and dancing, even if we could not partake. Just to know it’s possible. Like being able to see the opposite bank of a river you cannot cross, getting a glimpse of the other side, just to know with certainty that it’s there.  

VI.

Waking reality is hard. We struggle to make sense of it, of what our lives have lost and have become in recent years. 

And there are times when I can’t write to him, and when he can’t write to me. When things are too difficult, I fall silent. But I always return eventually. 

And I say: Thank you for waiting for me through the silence. I hope I was able to keep you company in your dreams while I was away. I miss you. I always do. I will build the dream pipes as soon as I am able… but perhaps you don’t need them. Perhaps they already existed, at least between us. And perhaps that is enough. Knowing that, maybe tonight, I will sleep at long last.