Birdy

must’ve had them buried. Maybe she had them buried down where we hunted for the treasure. Maybe she ran down just before us and dug them up. It’d explain the depression in the ground.’
    Birdy’s watching me. He’s giving me his ‘you must be crazy’ look. I’m beginning to believe he’s been right about that all the time. I can see them sending Birdy up to Dix in about two weeks. There I am hunkering around in the ‘altogether’, throwing shit at anybody who comes near me. He’s sitting with a garbage lid for a shield talking to me about raising pigeons and running away to Wildwood, and ice skating, all that crap.
    God, it’d be great; just to let go and stop pretending; to let it all out; holler, scream, give Tarzan yells, run up walls or punch them; to spit or piss or shit at anybody who comes near! God, that’d be good! What keeps me from doing it? I’ve been hurt enough; I could do it if I really wanted to. Nobody could blame me.

I don’t know how long I was dreaming the dream before I began to know. It’s hard to know you’re dreaming unless you catch yourself doing it.
    I was working in one of the flight cages when it first came to me. I’d put all the birds into the breeding cages and there were already eleven nests built and over thirty eggs had been laid. There were eggs being brooded under four of the females. Everything was going beautifully.
    I’d decided that sand in the bottom of the flight cages wasn’t such a good idea. The bird shit sank into it and got smelly. Also, the seeds and shells of seeds fell into the sand and rotted. I was designing a slanted concrete floor I could hose out easily through the wire.
    So, there I was, sitting in the bottom of the cage, smoothing cement, when it came to me. I realized I’d been in this cage. Now, this shouldn’t have surprised me, except my feeling was that the cage had seemed larger, much larger. My view of the inside of the cage was different; it was the view of a bird.
    I searched my mind. The only thing I could think of was that I’d dreamed about being inside this cage and was remembering the dream. The next two days I concentrated, trying to remember the dream. I was getting more and more sure I’d dreamed it and was somehow being stopped from remembering. It’s hard to catch a dream.
    First, I set an alarm clock under my pillow so I’d wake updreaming. I did this three nights in a row with the alarm set for different times. Each time I woke up, but by the time I shut off the alarm, the dream was gone. I’d lie there in the dark trying to make my mind go back. I’d almost make it sometimes, but then it’d slip away. I began to wonder if I wasn’t going to start making up a dream that didn’t happen.
    Then, one afternoon, I was painting the new cement floor of the flight cage with waterproof green paint, when it came back all of a sudden. I remembered being in the cage as a bird. I had to have been dreaming it. The dream came to me while I was in that open-minded non-thinking state you get into sometimes when you’re doing something easy and concentrated, like painting. At first, it was as if I were thinking it, daydreaming, then I knew I was remembering the dream. I kept painting, trying to keep it happening. I felt that if I turned my mind on to the dream too much, it’d go away.
    I could remember many nights of dreaming; it seemed to go back a long time. This could be because it was a dream. Dream time is different. In my dream, I’d been living in this flight cage with the other males. Alfonso, the bird, was here, and all his male children, along with the cinnamon, the topknot, and the crazy who kept flying into the sides of the cage. I could talk to them. I heard them speak in my mind in human language, in English, but they sounded like birds. I was a bird myself; I made sounds like a bird. I couldn’t remember in the dream how I looked. I didn’t look down at myself, but the other birds treated me as a bird, or almost like a bird.
    I ate seed, watching them eat and imitating. I was like a baby bird learning, and they all helped me. I could feel myself standing on a perch with my feet. I didn’t look down at my feet but they were bird feet, not human feet, and were wrapped around the perch.
    I flew with the other birds! The flying was wonderful. I’d flap my wings and soar from perch to perch. It wasn’t so easy. The other birds flew beside me and taught me what to do. I was learning about flying. Alfonso