On dreaming in Unfurl by Eli Clare

Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming by Eli Clare. Duke University Press, 2025.

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IV. Dreams and Rebellions

CONTENT NOTES (from book): This section interweaves resistance, dreams of liberation, connection, and belonging with:

• references to death, institutionalization, trauma-induced nightmares, and COVID-19 pandemic conditions;
• brief and single mentions of police violence and houselessness;
• and impacts of child abuse, ableism, racism, and fatphobia.

Learning to Dream

FORMAT NOTE: Clusters of lines anchored to the right margin punctuate and distill the prose.

1.

Floating out of sleep, I reach toward a dream drifting nearby. I sense its color, shape, sound, but the details, though vivid, remain just beyond my fingertips. Bodymind warm, slow, right arm dancing with random tremors, no spasms—by the time I’m actually awake, I barely remember that anything has slipped away. So ordinary, and yet these ephemeral currents still feel unfamiliar.

For my first thirty-five years, I rarely dreamed. In those decades, slumber wrapped me in gummy tendrils. I almost never experienced the quirkiness of ruby-red slippers or the wonder of soaring on an updraft. As a child, I survived endless nights of violence by transforming loops of terror and pain into phantoms, which I then pushed off the edge of my world. I talked gibberish, yelled through walls, walked in my sleep—muscles braced for the next onslaught. But I never swam in the slumber-time currents of image, glimmer, half story.

In other words, I joined a multitude of survivors kidnapped from our dreams. The doors slam hard, locking us away. Deadbolts click into place—keys hidden well with the intent that we will never find them. Flashbacks and nighttime terrors tunnel through our synapses. We lose not just slumber-time currents but also our capacity to imagine, desire, and invent.

In my dreamless twenties, I lived in queer collective households. Mornings at 233 Warwick Avenue just up the hill from Lake Merritt, I often stood in the kitchen, spreading peanut butter on toast, listening to my housemates. They recounted mundane and weird dreams as their first cups of caffeine jolted them into the waking world. I never had anything to add to these conversations.

I couldn’t conceive of sleep populated by the fragmented, fantastical encounters they described. Climbing crisscrossing ladders (orange, red, pink) up and up to Mars, swimming through billowy sunset clouds, walking into crystal tunnels that morph into skyscrapers and lecture halls—these encounters shared nothing in common with the small handful of repeating nightmares that punctured my sleep, whirling around my bedroom. Mostly I didn’t know if I was awake or not, if the knives cascading around me were real or hallucinations. And then I’d fall back into thick, viscous sleep.

I told my friends to rouse me if ever our house caught fire because otherwise I might not escape. Not just ordinarily deep or heavy, my dreamless sleep numbed me like a drug, a fist, dragging me down, muffling all my internal alarm systems. I feared that I simply wouldn’t wake up.

Slowly, slowly I turned to face those violent childhood nights. I started the long-haul bodymind-wrenching process of remembering the unremembered. I slogged through that first decade of work, rattled every day by flashbacks. I learned to recognize and defuse triggers. To release fear. To sit with sorrow. I shook; I cried; I drifted away; I whispered my childhood truths for the first time. Little by little I bound self back to self.

Somewhere amid this process, sleep began to feel less sticky, more like a draught of cool water, a steady stream flowing through me. My reoccurring nightmares diminished. Tendons and ligaments loosened. Dreams arrived without fanfare—mundane, quirky, often dissolving back into the rhythm of my sleep.^[1]

These visitations bewildered me—unfamiliar and sometimes downright bizarre. I didn’t trust them, convinced they were passing fancies, not to be counted on. Gummy sleep devoid of dreams had so marked my survival and shaped the texture of my days. But much to my surprise, these newfound visitations stuck around. Night after night they worked their way through me. Over time, my suspicion morphed into curiosity. Sleep leavened with dreams became a reclamation.

2.

Dreams emerge as invitation. As emotion. As foretelling. They function as reminder. As release. As revelation. They reflect anxiety and chaos. Reveal desire. Unfold as visits from earth and spirit. Slowly over the years all these permutations have introduced themselves to me.

Dreams invite connection across time and space. A friend I haven’t seen in too long, our early pandemic years spent on opposite edges of the continent, appears one night:

A magic visit across thousands of miles

Dreams crack open joy:

This radiant image evaporates into the morning light of my bedroom. I feel bereft, caught off guard not by how fantastical this encounter is but by how real. I find a tattooist, ask her to mark my skin with these tiny amphibians and their ephemeral colors—my first tattoo.

Dreams drag me into sorrow:

I wake, throat aching, still seeing that bone-dry channel where currents used to rush. All day, I’m haunted by aquifers collapsing, wells running dry, rivers tapering to a trickle.^[2]

3.

Our sleeping dreams shape muscle memory, carve pathways for the daytime work of conjuring communal thriving. But for many of us—grief piled upon grief, survival upon survival—imagining liberation feels impossible. Capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy benefit tremendously from our diminished and kidnapped dreams.

I know my justice dreaming too often stays reactive, engaged with an end to violence and shame rather than a proactive creation of joy and freedom. Sometimes all I can conjure is no—no to war, no to prisons, no to deportation, no to rape. I sit braced against a wall built from generations of rebellion and noncompliance.

How do we untether from our fear and exhaustion, float toward wild, uncontainable dreaming?

Disabled Puerto Rican Jewish poet and historian Aurora Levins Morales burrows underneath this question. She talks about how our justice dreaming is often dismissed, trivialized as “just utopian.” The intent is to shut down the power of desire. These dismissals only serve to maintain the status quo.^[3] Her words invite us to actively claim utopian dreaming.

We who long for quirky, queer and trans, disabled and chronically ill, BIPOC futures are in the midst of teaching each other to dream. Both playful and serious, we ask: What are our superpowers? This question is intentionally silly, meant to shake loose our imaginations. Sometimes we name skills and knowledges we already have—ones that we need to encourage and value because they will save us. We tell each other:

^[4]

But I, the activist-survivor-poet who didn’t always have capacity to dream, still filled with reluctance and more no than yes—how do I wholeheartedly embrace my own justice dreaming?

I turn to the wisdom of Black lesbian feminist mother warrior poet Audre Lorde. She writes, “I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience.… It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”^[5] I stop; I don’t quite understand. I roll her words revelatory, distillation, predicate around and around. I open my dictionary and thesaurus, dive into definitions and meanings, reaching toward something that feels entirely elusive. What do I need in order to embrace my justice dreams without reluctance? I springboard from Lorde’s ideas and images: The light within which we affirm our dreams, anchor our dreams, distill our dreams down to their most elemental. Dreams cradled inside poetry, gardening, science, stargazing, seed collecting. Dreams affirmed, anchored, distilled. Dreams revealing the very essence of the worlds we need and long for.

I open my hands. Return to Aurora Levins Morales’s invitation.

Black historian Robin D. G. Kelley writes in Freedom Dreams about the exact kind of claiming Morales is urging, “Call me utopian, but I inherited my mother’s belief that a map to a new world is in the imagination, in what we see in our third eyes rather than in the desolation that surrounds us. Now that I look back … the kind of politics to which I’ve been drawn have more to do with imagining a different future than being pissed off about the present.”^[6] Yes, and as a cranky activist, I want to be both a dreamer and righteously angry.

So many emotions accompany my justice dreaming. Sometimes my throat softens, and before joy or curiosity, I feel afraid. I fear the unknown, the immensity of my longing, the tenderness surging through my bodymind.

We gather, encourage each other, knowing that dreaming is often vulnerable work/play. We ask: What would we do with our superpowers? The answers vary widely:

Audre Lorde’s words urge us toward the center, unfolding a progression where dreams weave into language, language bridges into idea, idea expands into action. And from there, Aurora Levins Morales points us to the horizon. She teaches us that utopian dreams—our biggest, boldest, most hopeful and extravagant imaginings—can lead us into futures and shape strategies in the present.

We sit together, unleashing ourselves:

• • • • •

Dreams beckon us. Reach into the past-present-future. Unfurl the flamboyant and improbable. Reveal the essence.

Slowly, slowly I am learning their sheer tensile strength.^[7]

Enough

1.

I sleep easily, slumber steady and unbroken, particularly in the decades since I gained access to a universe of dreams. Sleep loose and gauzy against my skin. But so many of the people I love struggle with slumber. Nightmares jerk them into panic. The latest news of military strikes and hurricanes revs anxiety. Pain knots joints. Children require care at 2 a.m. Trauma burrows deep into cells. Or my beloveds rest, but ever so lightly, attuned to every creak and murmur.

Personal and daily, but also systemic and global, the social and material conditions of sleeplessness gnaw at our hearts, nerves, adrenal glands. Sleep squeezed around second shifts, split shifts, or the three minimum-wage jobs needed to pay the rent. Sleep sheltered by cardboard in city parks and alleyways.^[8] Sleep shaped by prisons, psych wards, and tent encampments. Sleep disrupted by police barging in at midnight, guns drawn. In her manifesto Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey declares, “Sleep deprivation is a public health issue.”^[9]

We need to reshape slumber into release and refuge, a drifting down to stillness.

2.

I watch you slog through sleeplessness. Nights stretch out. Anxiety and pain thicken. Sometimes you tumble into sleep just before dawn but not for long. You wake unrested, unmoored, occasionally desperate—nothing unusual, no crisis, just this ordinary grind. Some days you turn brittle, a drought-worn blade of grass. I fear that you might break and blow away. I, the solid sleeper, yearn to share my slumber with you.

If everyone floated inside plentiful rest—experienced sleep as resistance and possibility, dream dust and love note, medicine and map, common as dirt—who might we become?

3.

I conjure a past-present-future: You and I wade in a gentle high tide, the surf a bed of stars. My chest rumbles. I scoop up a handful of foam—part salt, part sweet—basil, lemon, and cardamom all at once. My great-great-grandmothers walk toward us. They say, “Pay attention. At high tide there is always enough sleep, just share it.”^[10]

I don’t mean these words as a metaphor, nor foam as an abstraction. Certainly I’m spinning a fanciful story. But for a moment, allow the substance cupped in my hands—salty sweet bubbles—to be the material manifestation of my solid and reliable slumber. A substance we can transport from sleeping to waking and circulate among ourselves. I dream of sleep collectives; sleep co-ops; informal sleep networks of neighbors, friends, extended chosen family.

4.

Resting inside the rhythm of moon and ocean, you and I pause, hold still until my slumber surges—deep inside ephemeral currents, highest of tides. We arrive on its crest. Your sleep wanes, bodymind restless. We scoop up handfuls of foam. Pass them back and forth. Wash each other’s faces with the bubbles. I trail more through your hair. It drifts over your collarbone, sternum, wrists. And then we’re floating together, skin touching skin, in long slumber; neither time, space, nor history intrudes.

• • • • •

Let me pause to ask: How do we build a past-present-future where sleep is communal, akin to library books, public transportation, community meals? I conjure sleep libraries, sleep buses, sleep potlucks—slumber transformed into a collective resource. In this past-present-future, rest is the province of the moon and tides, the realm of earthworms, a gift as essential as air and water.

• • • • •

We wade repeatedly in the foam, roll onto our bellies, morph into sea mammals. You grow less exhausted by the night. I scoop sleep by the handful into a bucket. “Careful, careful,” my great-great-grandmothers call. “Ask for consent and never take the last little bit of foam. Leave just enough to nourish an ocean of slumber.”^[11]

5.

You and I whisper to each other late at night, “Enough warm, dry, safe beds. Enough homes. Enough food. Enough clean air and water. Enough respectful, affirming health care. Enough sleep. Enough love. May there be enough.”

Sustenance washes through us.

6.

We build vats from old cisterns no longer used to collect rainwater, reshaping the red cedar planks and rusty steel bands. Those of us who are solid sleepers carry our sleep foam into the waking world, filling the vats until they overflow. In this past-present-future, we’re still imagining our way out of capitalism, establishing practices that don’t mirror the not-so-distant past of selling and buying. Our success is uneven.

I love accompanying my not-well-rested friends to the barns, warehouses, and kitchens where these repurposed cisterns live. Together we arrive with mason jars and coffee mugs to scoop up handfuls of slumber.

We construct community sleep bins, akin to compost piles, in front yards, alleyways, and city parks. Foam collected and turned, decomposed to its essence, salty-sweet crystals. Rest instigates rest. We shut our eyes, nestle into blankets.

We invite each other to wade, roll, scoot, crawl in the surf, giddy and laughing ourselves to sleep. We lie loose-limbed, near but not touching, our breath slowing together, foam bubbling across skin.

The vats, compost piles, crystals, frothy surf all communal resources: enough smells part salt, part sweet—basil, lemon, and cardamom all at once.

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