The narrative follows 4,380 nights spent in a recurring dream that changes in form and slowly becomes clearer. Starting when I was 8 years old I would wake up in a house and journey further into the house before waking up. Eventually, the dream moved beyond the house and into an empty trailer where I would find a dead mouse. As I got older the dream became more and more familiar and seeped into my consciousness. I now walk an empty field with an unknown man who feels like a protector night and night again. The narrative also contemplates the history of bloodshed on the land with the colonization of the Ute people and Uranium mining that killed many husbands creating the Paradox of widows. The video follows the narrative through the symbols found in these three vignettes. The first is an empty door frame as a symbol of the emptiness my mind is attempting to fill or have my unconscious explore. Going through the door there is an oak tree with the mouse head I find in my dream. The oak tree is a symbol of a powerful and nurturing figure in many cultures and therefore breaking it shows the brokenness of a sense of what being nurtured means. In the third panel two hands holding a figure that seems to be falling but also being held. The fragility of her state of being shows the delicate balance I walk between the conscious and unconscious. Visually I wanted to achieve a sense of eeriness as well as warmth. The ink creates a contrast to the warm watercolor hues. The empty black door frame is meant to create a sense of anticipation, whether we will find a nightmare or a comforting room. Upon entering the viewer finds a shadowy oak tree with a mouse head that seems innocent until it is split and the mouse head is left hanging in front of a man's face lightly drawn onto a sheet of tracing paper. His face is crumpled revealing the final scene.
THE COLORADO RANCH OF THE UNCONCIOUS MIND
These three stories are told from the POV of three elements of a recurring dream that occurs in a ranch I visited in the past over 4,380 days. Though the POV alternates between the voices of a house, a trailer, and the land they are all part of the same unconscious state of existence and are therefore in some ways the same voice that has manifested in different forms over time.
THE HOUSE
Her eyes snap open hearing her voice echoing in a whisper. My eggshell walls, white textured ceiling, aged light wood floors, features of a memory she can’t quite place. She wonders why my picture frames do not contain faces as if those who dwell within me are disappearing into the abyss. Where are the voices of family and friends?
“Where are my parents?”, is the question she asks each time we begin.
Her head snaps to the left as her name is whispered again. A man’s silhouette travels in shadow across my walls towards an endless hallway appearing in a mist. She stands up slowly to catch up to him as he fades further away. Her footsteps are too slow as if she is trudging through heavy sand held back by a vacuum of suffocating emptiness that pulls on her limbs.
Her eyes snap open hearing her voice echoing in a murmur. This time only my tan walls and darkwood floors are familiar. The ceiling evaporated into a black mist. An atmosphere of ghostly laughter twinkling in harmony with haunted screams. Endless hallways of doors and wishes but where to begin? Hoping for something, but she cannot name what, she hopes to find in the secrets of my rooms.
Her footsteps deliberate but do not vibrate her bones as she flies over the floor. Like a moth to a flame, her hand connects to the icy nob of the third door. It immediately turns and clicks with its unlock as if her mere touch is the key to a space that is entirely her own.
Her head hits my ceiling as she floats above Earth. The sensation failing to scare her dancing with an act of practiced grace and rehearsed familiarity. She doesn’t question the sisters entwined on the air mattress below. As though it is second nature to view her four-year-old self and two-year-old younger sister with the eyes of a divine observer. She doesn’t wonder why the bigger bed lies vacant, indented by the silhouette of an unknown figure– a human-shaped void without the weight of a parent’s presence.
Her feet hit the ground after her journey across the scene in the bedroom. Wistfully reaching for another door expecting to find another hallway of passages. Surprised when I granted her the wind that rushed through her hair, a blinding flash of light, my existence to her extinguished in a snap that sends her back.
Now ends the 1,460th night, an intermission in our nocturnal dance. Thirty-five thousand and forty hours since she first entered my door and was slammed with a heart-wrenching awareness that echoed through the depths of her soul. Tormented by an absence of something she couldn't name that dug a hole in her heart, sorrow revealed beneath an unmarked grave.
THE TRAILER
Her eyes snap open her voice echoing in a mumble. She awakens a slight smile on her face as she takes in my aged vinyl walls and panes of frosted glass that allow light to filter in. Her smile is frozen in anticipation that remains unchanged on this 1.460th night since she first appeared on my red carpeted floor. Eternally tied to the promise of His return. His presence lingers in the soft echoes of footsteps pacing outside my walls.
Her wishes shatter with the drop of her smile and she stands up approaching the weathered teal wooden cabinets above. Peeking inside, looking for nourishment to fulfill an emptiness within. But I know that again and again, she will only discover that decapitated mouse. The only remnant of life I still hold– a head severed from the body. Cradling its broken fragments, her heart aching at the vulnerability of a helpless tiny creature. Wishing for another reality she could rewrite the story and save the delicacy of life. Yearning to spare another being from a life lacking the guardianship of protection.
Her eyes shift and fixate on my open door, a world painted with yellows and oranges stretching to the horizon. Hearing her name whispered in a whistle.
The mouse dropped to my feet, two halves resting in separate graves beneath my frame. Once more sealing the fate of cruelty it experienced in life. Abandoned by its mother, the only solace found in the embrace of its resting place amongst my metal sheets.
The girl inches towards the entrance illuminated by the light. Her hands outstretched struggling through the grip of consciousness that threatens to pull her back into its world called Reality. An unseen ally I try to help her break beyond the confines of my walls. Towards the voice that coos her name. Her cries raw and primal in harmony with the distant wails of a newborn calf, rattling my window panes. Night after night, one agonizing step after another along a tortuous path. My crumbling foundation shakes with the effort straining against the invisible veil that stands in her way. Finally, she stumbles down the stairs to the dust below. Two thousand nine hundred and twenty nights of a tireless pursuit to push her along her unfinished journey. As she disappears into the light I sigh with a creak and smile, believing she’s found her missing piece.
THE LAND
On the 1,460th dawn she stirs in her bed of withered grass I cradle her in. Another inhabitant on my surface is etched with the marks of a past scarred by a history of violence and struggle. Slaughterhouse of the West is my name in the land of Conscious. Footprints that mar my parched skin, are relics of those whose dreams are lost to the winds of time. Remembered in angry winds that rip across a land that was stolen.
Her gaze ascends to the endless blue canopy above. Weariness is evident even in her sleep as her eyes trace a ceaseless path along my horizon. Her name called out, seemingly from a source only a few steps away.
“Father”, she whispers.
A lie and wish that trails a tear down her cheek in a stream of sorrow.
She slowly looks back weighed down by the bittersweet tale that awaits. A solitary figure breaking my endless sea of rusted gold. His form is shadowed by the towering mountains above his distorted features resembling a figure from a reference that is unknown. She understands he is merely a figment woven from the threads of longing. Nights that bleed into years that merge into decades spent seeking solace in the arms of a man she cannot embrace beyond my field of broken dreams an internal experience only found in the void.
Still, she gets up and runs to him seeking comfort that she knows only resides in His embrace. Hand in hand they tread along my trails that have been written by those who walked with joy and sorrow long ago. I have witnessed the innocent children of the past frolicking amongst my tall grass their laughter a melody that echoed off the walls of the mountain, whose blood I cried when the conquest declared claim to my soil. Carving into my flesh discovering a land of desire and death, the tears of widows now dried up by drought. Land and life are entwined in a cycle of theft and power, all yearning for the riches found in the promises of tomorrow.
In the delicate waltz between wakefulness and slumber, they weave tales of missing pieces found and chasms filled. Yet her tears run down knowing this but a temporary reunion with He who she seeks. I can feel the heaviness of her sorrow, a burden too heavy for I alone to bear. She knows despite her fierce efforts to be held by him in the world when she wakes, who she tries to find as a filler for the gap of his existence, or where she wanders in search of a place to rest. She will return night after night to Me, a land of solace and despair.
So we have floated for 4,380 days in this labyrinth, beaten and tired bound together by the tangled threads of desire. A haunting question lingers in the shared corridors that separate our realms of existence: is there an end to this ongoing pilgrimage or will she get lost in the labyrinth her youth created?
RESEARCH
Paradox, Colorado, the internet providing a current calculation of 115 residents, is the location of one of the earliest memories I can conjure. My parents had friends in Colorado after living there in the first years of their relationship and took us to visit their friend's ranch in Paradox. The ranch where we stayed also exists as the place I have spent twelve years visiting in my dreams. Roughly 4,380 nights spent wandering in memory without giving much thought to its significance or meaning. Instead, I have focused my musings on the only resident of the Paradox, Colorado in my mind. A man-shaped companion that started its existence as a whisper in my conscious mind, a shadow in my dreams, something that seemed to be an omen of a thing I needed. His existence escaped my mind and has been beside me in my conscious life as a hallucination for an unknown amount of years. The Devil, demon, possession, Psychosis, Schizophrenia, PTSD, loneliness, coping mechanism, BPD, and dissociation are the names he has been given by Religious teachers and Therapists over the years. I wasn’t given a safe space to ask why he exists until I was 20 and not curious enough about the location where he first appeared in my dreams until now.
I am on several SSRIs and medications that are supposed to aid sleep by taking away distressing dreams. SSRIs are reported to decrease the amount of REM sleep users experience. However, I spend what seems like hours in my dreams and can remember them vividly the next morning and can often conjure them in explicit detail years later. Undefeated by my medicinal attempts to control the mind, the recurring dream of the fields in Colorado continues. I started my research by looking into the psychoanalytical theories of dreaming in works such as that of Freud. Though elements of my dream have slipped beyond unconsciousness and into the lucid and even conscious realm, I wanted to focus specifically on the state of the unconscious. Across most theories, there is a shared idea that dreams are both a way to temporarily relieve the conscious state of unsolved thoughts as well as allowing us to explore wishes that remain unfulfilled. Freud explains his perceived importance of dreams stating:
“A man deprived of the capacity for dreaming would in time become mentally unbalanced, because an immense number of unfinished and unsolved thoughts and superficial impressions would accumulate in his brain, under the pressure of which all that should be incorporated in the memory as a completed whole would be stifled”(1)
He theorizes that if we were left unable to dream our brain would become so overwhelmed by our unfulfilled desires and unfinished business that we would not be able to function. Perhaps if I were unable to constantly revisit the comforting figure in my mind I would be left in a constant state of searching that would make everyday concentration a difficult task. I am therefore given an unconscious space to explore the emotional absence I carry in my conscious life. A labyrinth expanding as I have more and more unanswered questions and needs. However, that doesn’t answer the question of how the space was born in the first place or how the Man who lives there came to be.
*SECTION TAKEN OUT FOR PRIVACY REASONS*
After I identified why my young unconscious mind formed this space in my mind, the symbols behind the recurring dream I was having made sense. Empty houses mean a lack of sustenance in Islamic interpretation and in Christian traditions that, “A lack of unity in the family has opened up a vacuum”2. Dead baby mice in dreams represent a small delicate life that needs nurturing or a vulnerability in need of protecting. Empty dead fields are a sign of ominous futures. All interpretations merge into a reflection of my childhood. *CENSORED*
Stolen from the Ute people in the 1870s; Paradox, Colorado is known as the “slaughterhouse of the West”3. Though it is remote and lacks water, the land was rich in Uranium and therefore became a mining boom town. Land was fought over leading to legends such as that of Slim Hecox who was killed at the mine and beheaded. His head was found separate from his body and was therefore buried in a separate spot in an eerie reflection of the state of the mouse I encounter in dreams. Hecox was not the only victim of the mines as many Paradox mine workers would die from exposure to radium leaving behind a town of widows. This violent history inspired me to explore the point of view of the land as a source for narration as it witnessed the injustices of colonization and greed leading to death. I believe that land can hold the energy and emotions of the history that occurs upon it and therefore its history drives the language and emotions in the third vignette. *CENSORED SECTION* The ghost town of Paradox, Colorado, is an unconscious refuge that holds my unfulfilled wishes.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A.A. Brill (New York: the MacMillan Company, 1913), 32.
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“Biblical Meaning of Empty House in Dreams”, SCity, org, Accessed March 21, 2024. https://scity.org/biblical-meaning-of-empty-house-in-dreams/
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“Paradox Colorado Townsite”, Colorado Ghost Towns, Accessed March 21, 2024. https://coloradosghosttowns.com/Paradox%20Colorado.html#:~:text=This%20area%20was%20first%20settled,find%20reasons%20to%20fight%20over
Herring_THE-COLORADO-RANCH-OF-THE-UNCONCIOUS-MIND-5431e439b8e3a16eDownload
Sources
“Biblical Meaning of Empty House in Dreams”. SCity,org. Accessed March 21, 2024. https://scity.org/biblical-meaning-of-empty-house-in-dreams/.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by A.A. Brill. New York: the MacMillan Company, 1913.
Layland, W. Ralph. “In Search of a Loving Father.” In The Father- Contemporary Jungian Perspectives, edited by Andrew Samuels, 153-169. New York: New York Univeristy Press, 1985.
“Paradox Colorado Townsite”. Colorado Ghost Towns. Accessed March 21, 2024. https://coloradosghosttowns.com/Paradox%20Colorado.html#:~:text=This%20area%20was%20first%20settled,find%20reasons%20to%20fight%20over
Schwartz, Sunsan E. The Absent Father Effect on Daughters: Father Desire, Father Wounds. New York: Routledge, 2021.
