We are a dream. A machine for falling asleep, forgetting, and unlearning. We close our eyes to let the predatory world around us spill out, like boiling milk. Heavy heads slowly forget grammatical structures, rules of savoir-vivre, traffic regulations, and decency. We are tired of rationality, journalistic narratives, and decoding meanings. We slowly stop remembering our names and personal stories. Their complexities are unable to squeeze through the gates of sleep. We flatten them and stuff them into pockets until they lose their form completely. They spill out, leaving wet puddles behind. Once through this gate, we no longer recognise faces. We juggle the images of our friends and loved ones. They cease to have any meaning. They become blurred figures from the past, like worn business cards or cards from a packet of crisps.

Upon entering the dream space, we see the world for the first time, without filters or words that enclose reality in drawers of meaning. We have limited articulation, like newborn babies. As we pass through the portal of sleep, we repress what daily life means in terms of pain and fear. Sweet displacement brings relief to shattered nerves. We return to the womb of the inhuman mother. We lie down on the soft underbelly of the kitten. We knead. Our bodies begin to grow fur, and we can see the seeds of sharp claws on the tips of our fingers. These protect us from the afterimages of reality. We want to bask and stretch in the sun. We no longer have body and soul, body and mind. We are a dream or a vibrating feeling, impression, and intuition.

We enter the darkness. We touch the unconscious, which thickens, line by line, like a soft pencil drawing on paper. We are constantly surrounded by vistas of the real and the unreal. Forms softly flow into each other. Pleasant visions are punctuated by shrieks and thunderclaps from an unsettling, beyond-dream reality. We have no control over this, like so many other phenomena we thought we had mastered. Only the primal and archetypal remain within. We can start learning again, but only in the school of dark pedagogy—of forgetting and letting go, as a counter to the logic of capitalism, self-improvement, and growth.

— Michalina Sablik