Birdy

and I’m only hearing my own conversions.
    At the end of the breeding season, Perta and I have eleven wonderful children. There are seven females and four males. The remarkable thing is that the young in Perta’s cage have the same markings as my children in the dream, and as far as I can tell, they are also the same sex. I can understand that I might have structured the birds in my dream to resemble the birds in Perta’s cage, but I knew the sex of Perta’s daytime young before I could know them in reality. Perta in the dream told me. This is something I can’t put together.
    I try talking to Perta, the bird in the cage, in sounds I remember from the dream but she doesn’t respond. However, if I peep or queep in the ways I used to do with Birdie, she’ll peep or queep back enthusiastically. She wants me to stay as a boy. My dream has nothing to do with her reality. Still, her babies are the same as mine in the dream. I’m getting so I can’t tell which reality is making the other. It must be that I’m tailoring the dream in some way to the things that happen, but sometimes it seems the other way around. It’s easy to fool yourself.
    The other flight cage is so full I have to do something. I’ve gotten three nests from almost every breeding couple. I need to separate the young males from the females and take the breeding birds apart. The season is over and the adult birds will be going into the molt soon. I need more space.
    To solve this, I divide off a part of the male cage for my project. I build in a new floor about one third down from the top of the aviary. Above this I put Perta and her young. The bottom part I use for the adult and young males. There are eighty-five young males and eighty-two young females. Now I’ll feed them and give them tonic to get through the molt and ready for the market. I hate to think about selling them, especially the children of Birdie and Alfonso. Still, making money is the excuse I have for keeping my birds. It’s the way I can hold onto the world which makes my dream possible.
    The reason I build off the special cage is so I can live privately with Perta and my children in the dream. The very night the partition is finished, it’s that way in the dream. We don’t have as much space to fly, but this will be all right after I get my plan going.
    My plan is to work out a way for free flying with my family. It is the idea I developed up in the tree.
    In the dream, I’m happy as husband and father. I spend wonderful hours teaching my children to fly, to crack seed, to eat. We bathe together and I teach the young males to sing. We start with simple songs about flying, without any difficult parts, and move on to harder songs. One of the children’s songs is:
    Down is up.
    Up is sky.
    Sing a song
    Don’t ask why.
    Another is:
    Touch the air
    Hold it tight.
    Stroke the wind
    Ride the light.
    When I sell the young birds, I sell off three of my breeding females and one of my breeding males. I replace them with some of the best of the new young birds. I replace the three females because they aren’t good breeders. One only laid two eggs each nest and raised a total of five birds. Another laid eggs but consistently pulled the nest apart scattering the eggs on the floor. The third abandoned each of her nests when the babies were less than a week old. I saved the babies by distributing them to other nests, but she has to go. The male I sell because he’s developed the habit of egg-eating.
    All of these young birds are even better fliers than their parents. It’s a pleasure to watch them. The rustling sound of their wings is musical. Because they fly so much and so well, they are all trimand longer-legged than ordinary canaries. I wish I could have Mr Lincoln come see my aviary and birds. I think about it of ten but I could never explain it to my parents. I wish people could be more like canaries.
    During the day, I spend hours watching the birds fly. The more I watch, the stronger, truer, my dreams are. I’m getting so much inside the bird world, my dream seems completely independent of the day. I don’t even know what I know anymore. I can’t know all the time why things are in the dreams or how they’re going to be. The dreams have gotten so complicated they’re at least as real as the day.
    I don’t do any flying experiments with the birds. I know all of them too well from my dreams. I’m not really that interested in flying anymore; at least not as a boy.