OPEN BOOK CASE

I have become subject to a recurring mental image in which my lower abdomen and upper thighs—my general midsection—are replaced with open shelving.

Though the dream from which this image is sourced did not itself mark out a particular color or material of the shelving unit that replaced those organs responsible for reproduction and digestion, and though the change had affected all people who came within the dream’s line of sight (it was not, I mean, something that happened strictly to me), it first settled in my mind as a blue rectangle of painted, solid wood (not a veneer, but perhaps an affordable pine), with a single shelf breaking the unit laterally into two sub-sections. 

The prosthetic was positioned somewhere between my knees and my navel.

This dream was one among a handful that, on waking, I felt would benefit from being painted or drawn somewhat faithfully. This is an ability I unfortunately lack. I don't even know how to manipulate existing images with editing software, beyond rudimentary tools. Others in this category of dream include: the one where I found my gender in a hallucinated painting by Agnes Martin (attempts at reproducing this led to a hideous, warped piece of paper that

seemed to have been filled in by a child who had been afforded no other outlets for her tantrum), and the sex dream where charles and I fooled around on a giant lily pad in the Turtle Pond by Central Park’s Belvedere Castle (I did not need to paint this one, since charles included it in a poem). Buddhists are partially responsible for the population that gives the pond its name, having released many turtles as acts of kindness, but atheists have also found this pond to be a reasonable place to get rid of unwanted pets.

While I believe that an accurate painting of any of these dreams would help me understand something about the dream or about myself, it is only with the person-bookshelf-hybrid dream that I feel it could also help me understand something about “the world.”

I made a first pass at reproducing the dream image, despite my lack of skill, by copying and pasting a subsection of a photo of shelves over a photo of my body, with a bit of effort at generating a transparent space to reveal the background, which I filled in with a photo of the nearby Sunset Park.

There were a few problems with this attempt. Because I cropped the original photograph of the shelving unit to avoid including its white walls, its outline matched the artificial uniformity of the selection tool, such that the shelf looked like a line drawing, rather than actual furniture. This gave the impression of a window—with two panes of glass permitting light, but not physical objects, to pass through—rather than a backless bookshelf. This effect was worsened by my choice of the park as a backdrop, selected because, in the dream, one of the most exciting visual elements was being able to see through each other’s bodies to make out whatever we stood in front of. We don’t often observe the skyline behind our bookcases, though, so this contributed to the sense that the shape was a two-dimensional, geometrical abstraction, rather than a three-dimensional combination of a rustic, heavy material with modern lines.

Worse still, the first full-body photo of myself I could find happened to be one showing me modeling a new t-shirt, which replicates the front cover of the original edition of Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. While it’s a great shirt, it draws too much visual attention, implying that this is somehow a “transcendental style” of being part-bookcase, part-man, as opposed to a commercial or otherwise mundane style.

This first attempt was all wrong.

Despite their spacious openings, the person-furniture in my dream had a quite different balance than the one I found in my collage. When I tried to focus my memory of the dream image on my sense of weight’s distribution, I felt that we were all a lot more like a bottom-heavy étagère I’d recently seen than this person tottering open-shelved in Brooklyn’s best park. The image was more like Louise Bourgeois’s Femme Maison paintings, where the literal house/wife finds her head or torso replaced by a vinyl-sided single family home, or a more stately residence with columns, narrow hips tasked with real architectural purpose.

The unit I had in mind was, according to its listing on Chairish—one of the many sites I’ve spent hundreds (I have to hope it hasn’t yet reached a thousand) of hours scouring as I try to identify the best bookshelves for my living room—from Drexel Heritage, circa 1970.

It was in a style the seller described as “Chinoiserie,” owing, I think, to the gold tassels hanging from the cabinet’s door handles. From the ground up, like my first attempt at representation, it started with a bottom section divided in two, in a dark, unnamed wood, but unlike the shelves of the people in my dream, it was covered by said doors. With this point of reference, in fact, the people in my dream appeared to be immodest. From there, things open up into a silly jigsaw puzzle of 4 or 6-sided segments (many in the shape of a rectangle from which a single slice had been removed), made out of the same wood as the base, but this time cut into implausibly thin panels. The image in the ad was too low quality to ascertain how the top portion was held together, but since a note mentioned a missing “inside barrier railing,” I worry that the attachments must be somewhat weak.

I reached for half-remembered texts to guide interpretation: Henry James, in The American Scene, lamenting “this diffused vagueness of separation between” all manner of rooms, halls, structures, “between place of passage and place of privacy” as “a provocation to despair” proper to the manners “of the American people: “The instinct is throughout, as we catch it at play, that of minimizing, for any ‘interior,’ the guilt or odium or responsibility, whatever these may appear, of its being an interior.” The last century absolved buildings of the sin of having interiors, glass walls now ready to bake the residents of penthouses as hurricanes put the lights out, or revealing the pony hair first floor chaise on which some art gay in Greenwich reclines after instructing Alexa, whose ears have been installed throughout his property, to play Denis Mpunga & Paul K.’s album Criola, hoping the beat will break his depression, visible to a neighbor walking the shiba inu she had flown in from Japan, who is relieved now to watch him rise, remove his shirt, glad at least his misery has taken the form of abs, and prance from the living room, past the glass dining table, through the kitchen, past the study, where we can assume the books occupy shelves as open as their man and his house, bookends floating to give the impression the library had grown self-sufficient and no longer needed wood or steel to shore up its defenses, into the one space hidden from the street, where he collapses on the tile to cry.

Rainer Diana Hamilton is the author of four books of poetry, including Lilacs (Krupskaya Books 2025) and The Awful Truth (Golias Books 2017). This Reasonable Habit, co-written with poet Violet Spurlock, will come out next spring from Spunk Editions. They write, broadly, about the forms that dreams, art, and love have taken.