Reclaiming the dreamscape to share fragments of wonder, beauty and mystery
My life's guiding principle
As a true pisces, I couldn’t have let this dreamy, floaty and enchanting season of the “delulus” drift by without writing about one of my favourite place to exist in: the imaginal dreamscape. It is the only place where we are truly free and mine is a sanctuary for rest, respite, repair, reverie, refusal, ancestral rememory and ceremonies, abundance, manifestation, downloads and shapeshifting. An imagic-nation1 with a luring portal that draws me in slowly or suddenly to experience decolonial time through intentional napping, seizing daydreaming, vision-inducing bodywork, underwater inspiration and then some. I cannot conceive life nor create without these sacred consciousness from which I gather so much wisdom and knowledge. They belong to what Afro-Surrealist writer Suzanne Césaire2 calls the domain of the marvelous, a plane where the dreamworld and the waking world merge. In this realm, she spent time with her wildest desires and dreamt up new worlds devoid of “colonial idiocy” and filled with millions of black people who have awakened to their true selves. It is also in this realm that I travel to, to encounter my wildest dreams and bring forth the worlds I long to inhabit. Worlds of acceptance, ease, playfulness, slowness, deep connections, wonder and life affirming attitudes.
Reclaiming the dreamscape to share fragments of wonder, beauty and mystery keeps me in a perpetual state of awe, gratitude and revelation. In this interspace, I co-create with the divine when I make altars or write prayerful odes. Inside this same non-place where we dwell in eternity, my late grandmother holds me in an eternal embrace as she pours into me the necessary strength to face the world of the Living. Once, a group of marvellous African women from all ages, shapes and sizes welcomed me in their circle in a dense woodland. Wrapped in white cloths and adorned with kaolin powder, they bathed me, smeared my body with a rich oil, plaited my hair in thick cornrows and showed me a secret plant. Recently, I reread “The Mother of the Mother of Tobacco is a Snake”, a chapter from Jeremy Narby’s book The Cosmic Serpent and I remembered that the Asháninka of Peru learned about the origin of life and knowledge by entering in deep communication with their sacred vine.
“And this is the domain of the strange, the Marvelous, and the fantastic, a domain scorned by people of certain inclinations. Here is the freed image, dazzling and beautiful, with a beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming.”
— Suzanne Césaire, Tropiques, 1941
“And I am also thinking of tomorrow. Millions of black hands will hoist their terror across the furious skies of world war. Freed from a long benumbing slumber, the most disinherited of all peoples will rise up from plains of ashes… Colonial idiocy will be purified in the welder’s blue flame.”
— Suzanne Césaire “1943: Surrealism and Us”, Tropiques no. 8-9 (1943)
As much as I love to meander in my own dreamscape and get acquainted with the cracks of my interiority, I feel most excited and expansive when I get to witness the imagination space of others as they melt the soft edges of my mind. Cynthia Colney’s painting “Au Vert” which hangs proudly in my living room brought me tears of joy the first time I came face to face with it. It drew me into a spellbinding imaginal dreamscape whose narrative felt immensely and intensely familiar. It depicts a black woman gracefully walking into the green-scape of the Valle Sagrado in Peru or "the opening between two worlds" as Cynthia likes to say. Our mysterious woman, drapped in a tinted flowy white dress, most likely guided by unseen ancestresses and benevolent spirits not-yet-born, heads towards the unknown confidently and faithfully: a land of voluptuous valley, emerald rivers, infinite possibilities, wise beings and eternal peace.
As I hold on to Suzanne Césaire’s prompt to be in permanent readiness for the marvelous, I turn to my inner child and call upon her to dance the dance that keeps energising the numinous link between my inner and outer worlds. Thus, I say yes to the existence of life before birth, to a great Cat king whose infinite reincarnations endowed him with considerable wisdom, to daisies speaking in tongues the colour of mustard seeds… because why not? These visions are nutrient-rich compost for our wonderful worlds in the making.
“As we walk, we cross the bridge into the realm of desire and imagination. I call this realm the "Imagic-Nation." - Julia Cameron, The Vein of Gold (1996).
Suzanne Roussi Césaire (1915-1966) was a Martinican writer, teacher, scholar, anti-colonial and feminist activist, and pioneer of Afro-Surrealism and a founding member of the Négritude movement.