The Cake Dream

 1.

In the dream this time, I made you a cake; so, in this dream, I was the kind of man who fluently makes cake for someone he loves, and you were the kind of man who wants some cake, which you really are. One side of our little kitchen fell open—we lived on the side of a mountain. This delighted us every time. In the dream, I get on my knees while you eat. You put two fingers on my cheek, so I look up. “Baby,” you say, “You know that if you’re in control of it, it’s not a dream, right? That’s desire, or a fantasy.” You are right. But it makes me mad. Still, other versions of the dream feature houses deep in the woods, and a child, and of these, which I sleep through, I am not in control.

2.

I lied again. The dream about our son—I made it up to tell you how I felt. Since then, I lost authorship of my lie, and I dream of our son like he’s “just a hidden reality,” an uncontrollable fact. Can’t make anyone know it but me. That’s why I beg to get bred. Sometimes, I wonder whether I can have children, but it’s never a matter of “still.” Besides, those are questions, not dreams.

3.

Once, in the dream, it was you, but with reversed tattoos. The address of your old house on the right hand instead of the left. The broken clock fucked up by the scar on your left arm instead of the right. The rest of them. I knew either this wasn’t you, or was some ancient, somehow truer, deeply evil part of you–something that, I realized with dread, might live inside all people, but that I had somehow summoned. If it wasn’t you, it was a thing. It would mewl when I had to kill it. What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Neither is this a real sleep dream I had, but an unused idea for a story.

4.

I dreamed someone finally noticed that I kept my middle name. I got to tell about my book and Elizabeth Bishop. Mike says, “Everyone you meet in a dream, you’ve met”–exactly the pseudo-fact a poet loves. How do you check on that? Canvass your dreams for strangers? This person was strange to me, or I would have remembered them. When I explained that Elizabeth was the only part of my given name unfreighted with familial significance, they really got it, and they got how that related to the arbitrariness of selfhood Bishop panics over “In the Waiting Room.” They asked how my manuscript handled that poem’s racism, because, they said, it sounded like too good of an idea to risk going badly, and that led me to talk about how I could, and had to, tell the truth. If no one in dreams is a stranger, why couldn’t that person be you?

5.

But the dream about you is different. It extends out into sleep, but is not limited to it. The dream about you has to do with politics, but not the way we feel them here and now. Your campaign does not, say, in the dream, reach viability in most of Iowa, so that I know I’ll have a job until New Hampshire, in the dream. In other words, in these dreams about you, I know the difference between wanting to do good and doing it; if I don’t, I can adjust the fantasy. Often, when I sleep through dreams, I know everything, say, about my manuscript, but of course, I can’t carry it. Genet asked a young man if he were gay. The young man confessed, for the first time, to any living soul, that he had had homosexual experiences. “Experiences?!” cried Genet. “Oh, no! I mean dreams, desires, fantasies!” In a way, the temporary knowledge is my favorite part of dreams.

6.

I dreamed I could fly. I fought my ex-girlfriend, mischievously. You asked, “Did you get angry at anyone today?” You were so mild. When I said no, I figured you would know it was a lie, because the cops were listening. A hump on his back with three sticks coming out, but then, the camera moved, and the pronoun changed from him to you. This is always happening once I nod off. The hunch began to fall; I saw it was a sweet potato, which accounted for the curve. He was worried about it at airport security.

7.

I always tell people this one. I’ve told you. During dinner, I had something in my bag that I wanted to show Alfred Hitchcock. But beneath all the copies of The Normal Heart, I couldn’t find it. I just kept pulling copies out, and some playbills for it. Like, fifteen copies of The Normal Heart, which I did not expect to be there. I certainly didn’t put them in my bag.

8.

In the dream, your gold skin feels gold. So does mine. In the dream, the horizon is frank, and at last it arrives with the deeds. These deeds are to enough houses to hold all the boys in our lives but still let us get married! Then, once we think twice, they’re to everyone’s houses, and we rip them up. They’re a big neon sign reading: EVERYONE EATS. The first time I saw you as a figure in my fantasy, you were up in the barn, just swinging your legs like Huck Finn. I was ten feet below you in the parking lot. You were tinkering with the neon sign you’d made from scraps, and it said the name of that place.

9.

Bronco says that fantasies are more abstract than desires, and knowing this changed his whole life. Freud says that in a fantasy the “I” is mobile and can see itself. Howard Stern says, everyone should do psychotherapy. And I say, in the dream I can’t tell the difference between you, me, and our son, who could be anyone.

10.

I remember now, as if I really dreamed it, the house in the woods, and the boy with his long blond hair, like crepe paper. You would have a workshop. It wouldn’t have the name, “studio.” I guess I’d have the name “Stephen.” I don’t know what it will be like, so how should I know how to make it? How can I learn to see it, then persist in the pleasure of gazing? I do not sleep well, and it’s rarely I remember what has happened there; the dream of the normal heart, for example, was long before we met, when I would write dreams down. I can’t remember what we do in my mind without our consent. I wonder how different it is, in the dream.

ξ

Stephen Ira is a writer, filmmaker, and performer. His poetry has appeared, or shortly will, in venues like DIAGRAM, Poetry, Fence, the American Poetry Review, and tagvverk. As an actor, he has appeared at venues like La Mama Etc, Dixon Place, and The Stud, creating roles in new plays by poets like Maxe Crandall and Bernadette Mayer. As a filmmaker, his work has appeared at OutFest, New Fest, and the Philly Trans Wellness Conference. In 2013, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow. In 2019, he completed an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.