2 Dreams about cancer

So all tests are fine and of course I’ve had this giddy spot in my mind since. I keep getting these ticklish, happy feelings, like a spinning top whirling randomly around my psyche. My dreams are still haunted though. Haunted not simply by lingering memory, but a kind of self-illustrating process by which the physical threat of rabid corpuscles became incorporeal memory. As the cancer becomes an image, a collection of memory cells, its effect becomes psychological and ephemeral. If this back and forth between presence and absence doesn’t qualifies as haunting, I don’t know what does.

In the first dream a woman has a tumor removed, but it returns, not in her body but as first as an amorphous shadow, becoming an extra shadow perfectly mimicking here shape as she walks through noir like city streets, finally, the ghost tumor take her physical shape becoming a perfect, hungry double…















A medium in a dark, 19th century drawing room, blindfolded, shuddering, throws back her head. The candle lit audience leans forward expectantly –obviously she’s going to manifest ectoplasm. A substance somewhere between smoke and fabric rolls from her parted lips, flowing upward, forming a perfect image of a magnified cancer cell – a hungry blossom, a stinging jellyfish swimming in the body’s blood and water. The slowly image dissipates.






















(The second dream came after searching for images of cancer cells for my story “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” put out in book form by Chelsea Johnson and Iris Porter for their 7-inch Stories series)