pre-dathun: dream: unstructured alone time

Dream of dathun -- it was held in a wharehouse sort of facility -- all attendees had to find somewhere to sleep in their sleeping bags within the spaces available among the aisles and rows and racks full of things.  It was kind of like a Costco, only more stripped bare, with no indication of what was in packaging. Also, there were hundreds of people, including my parents there. There was some kind of plush but old convention center attached -- rooms with brown couches, fake plants.

I remember stumbling around lost a lot of the time, trying to figure out why people were talking so much on a retreat, why everything seemed like a family dinner party or a convention.  I could never find Reggie, and the only dathun coordinator I found had no information about the retreat, but she could tell me where the self-described queer space was.

I went to the queer space--it was full of older gay men, and there was no room for another person. I thought to myself in the dream, "they probably all snore anyway", and so I kept seeking a place to bunk down. I ended up sleeping underneath something, like a table.

I noticed that the Poet was there at the retreat, and I wanted to sleep near her for familiarity, but she wasn't talking to me nor acknowledging me. She was busy pulling materials out of boxes so she could write literal reams of poetry.

I sat and had white wine with my parents and a bunch of older people.  We sat around a round table that was topped with one of those cloth-backed vinyl table "cloths" common in the 1970s. It was pukey green with a faint yellowish lattice-and-vines design.

At another point later, like a week in, I kept wondering when the retreat would start, and if I could bear another three weeks of this aimless wandering in confusion with no structure save for the towering racks of unlabeled boxes which rather resembled the hoppers at the Celestial Seasonings factory. No place to sleep -- I moved my sleeping bag every night, trying to find a comfortable, warm niche. No practice either. No stability, only the hard concrete floor.

Wherever I found clusters of friends, there was no room for me to join them.

Throughout the time there, I carried a sense of the presence of and connection to another who was there with me, but in her own separate experience. I never saw her, only felt her as if sensing the direction of the faintest breeze by sticking out the tip of my tongue.