Finding a Dream Portal
Photo of the Dream Portal, by Crystal Bi.
My ability to exist in urban space seems predicated on my ability to spend money. And increasingly, that amount of money seems non-insignificant, compulsory, and constantly on the rise. Coffees ($5-6) cost as much as lunch used to cost, lunch ($15-20) costs as much as dinner used to cost, and the price of dinner is… wtf. Not to mention: rent is too damn high. This truth implies another: to afford all of this stuff, we labor. Which means that urban space is frequently organized around endless cycles of labor and consumption.
This cycle has been so completely normalized that it’s easy to forget that it doesn’t have to be this way.
I thought about this a lot after visiting a dream portal a few weeks ago. The dream portal was created by Crystal Bi and curated by Dzidzor Azaglo, two Boston-based artists and cultural workers. The portal, open to anyone and everyone free of charge, was organized around rest. In part, the idea of the dream portal was inspired by Tricia Hersey’s book Rest is Resistance. Rest is Resistance is a manifesto about the radical power of rest, as a way of subverting grind culture, but also, as a tool for imagining possibilities beyond the grind.
The dream portal was a communal nap and dream space, and featured a live soundscape by Dzidzor:
Blankets lined Carson Beach at sunset ready to help tired bodies step into a new kind of urban space. I closed my eyes and listened to spoken word poetry that felt like a Buddhist chant for the contemporary urban soul:
Lay down.
Be free.
You deserve to rest.
Lay down.
We can imagine new worlds when we rest.
Your body can hold new dreams.
Can imagine new worlds.
But it needs to rest.
Rest.
Rest.
Lay down…
Unlike other interactions in the city, this experience wasn’t rushed, transactional, or taxing. It was free—and freeing.
