A Cairn of Cries Upon You

While dreams are seen as deeply internal, they have also served as powerful inspiration as forces of change in the waking world. Dreams provide one of the most important sites for people to imagine new, inhabitable futures and to work out otherwise insoluble conflicts, even on a national or global scale.

According to the Neoplatonist Synesius, one of the chief benefits of oneiromancy over other forms of magic is that it is free from oppression, in the sense that no tyrant can control a people’s dreams. But tyrants must dream too, and when shared a peoples’ dreams serve as a powerful force of energy that can haunt those who attempt to control them.

The following poem is an oneiromantic attempt to respond to current events.

One of the earliest dream rituals from ancient Mesopotamia was to whisper your nightmares to a handful of stones thrown at the crossroads, where the cairn god Anzagar would carry them back to the gods. Likewise, many ancient oneiromantic spells, found from the Rigveda to the Papyri Graecae Magicae are attempts to send bad dreams to others, in many cases to send the horrors back to the evil wizards who caused them.

This poem collects lines from dreams posted by anonymous users in online forums over the last few years, in which people have expressed their nightmarish experience of sociopolitical issues in the waking world, and attempts to forward them to those who are the source of this suffering, in the hopes that they will dream of and come to understand the impact of their actions.



A Cairn of Cries Upon You

O you men of terror
The day belongs to your brutal smiles,
Knifing lies into the souls
Of those who follow or who despise
Your will to violence amplified
By lightning blind to care or cries.

O men in your high towers
The cities shiver at your rise,
Marching ice into the homes
Of those your hate has vilified,
A kingdom come of might makes right,
White sun grown blind to human kind.

O you men at power
You rule the day—

                    But the night will not be kind.
Not crystal-knived nor draped in gold,
Ballrooms for slumlords deified.
For tonight behind closed eyes
Our pain you’ve thrown aside will rise.

O you men in error,
Where dream on dream our fears and cries
Pile high, a cairn of nightmares,
Each stone a wound enshrined,
Each a whisper of futures bright
Burned on the pyre of your pride.

O you men shall cower
For tonight our ghosts will rise
A phantom god named ANZAGAR
Who bellows bad dreams down your spine
And you shall watch each, paralyzed
And you shall know our cries:

We’re crushed under the globe,
States disordered, no reason why.
Mourners chant Nazi slogans
For the Lincoln Memorial in shoddy 2-ply.
A bald eagle on the asphalt dying
While business continues at an all-time high.

Old man, this country’s not for your crimes,
Your evil gaze between our legs lies,
Rape and bankrupt us with mayo and cactuses
Dick too tiny, too real while we writhe
Begging journalists to throw us a line
While families only avert their eyes.

We were the first to be kidnapped,
Panicking, our children trying to hide
Confused because we’re citizens also
Crawling between the walls and wires
Phone at one percent, 911 on dial,
But no one’s there to answer our cries.

Masked men unidentified
Flashing badges made of ice
Drag us into murderous black vans,
Where flopping like fish to a fry
Frozen in horror, completely violated
We’re shipped off and never seen alive.

Enact your enforcement fantasies,
Neurodivergents locked in asylums
Processed like a concentration camp,
Stretching for miles in chaotic anxiety
People huddled, coughing, crying,
Annihilated if you step out of line.

O give me your undesirables
Tattooed with our political alliances,
Mostly corpses who complied
Forced to shovel the dead into pyres.
Complicit in our own genocide,
The chamber narrows into the pipe.

Hitler’s having tea at Disney World. 
As the dark magician’s apprentice, you decry
War on the world to prove your worth
But don’t know how to handle the fire
Your followers waging war on our minds
Soldiers shooting everyone in sight.

People fleeing, stuck in traffic,
A resistance movement to protect our lives
Rounded up for food and riots,
In barns, basements, and churches hiding
No room, the children must fend for their lives
The universal instinct to arm for a fight.

Grown men scream as gunshots ring out
Unjustly persecuted and on the frontline,
Evacuating war zones, sheltered with strangers
Unable to tell our parents we’re alive
Running across mountains on fire,
On a ship to Greenland claustrophobically tight.

Someone has to kill the president
But your skin splits to reveal a robot eye
Entombed in your tower seven year ago.
The White House lifts into the air like a giant
Mecha bombing black holes in the sky
Enough bombs for the world entire.

Are those fireworks across the night,
Or missiles battling in bursts of fire?
Oh, my God, it’s finally happening
We look at each other as skyscrapers die.
In tears we hold a moment of silence
For a world irrevocably spiraling.

O you men who see these visions,
Bear tonight our cairn of cries:
I’m so heartbroken, so heartbroken.
I don’t want everyone I love to die.
What’s the point if we’re going to die?
May the people dream your empathy to light.