By Irena Barbara Nagler

I’d been given some gourmet coffee for Christmas. It was late at night. I’d have to work in the morning, but, feeling impelled to give it a try, I brewed the rich dark potion.

The next day I remembered a night when I was eight years old. I was living in the tropics with my family, where heat thins boundaries and can induce fertile dreaming. I’d been allowed to drink a caffeinated beverage just before going to bed, a one-time occurrence. As I lay wide awake, the aquarium music from Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals played in my brain. It got louder and louder. My room faded into green mist and shoals of golden fish swam through it from various angles and directions, hovering and then dissolving. Having gone to school opposite one of those old, gothic mental hospitals, I was frightened I might be locked up in it when we returned to the States, and I clutched the sheets until the vision dissipated.

But this December night in my twenties, after a few years of experience of a then-illicit substance, plus one or two others on rare occasions, I was happy to float in a caffeine-induced synesthesia. Sounds in the street turned to color: spills of red and orange light on sidewalks, blue scrape and brush of tire friction on asphalt, green and gold voices.

Then I was in the air, over the rooftop, among a herd of white horses that roam universes. They leaped and soared, their manes and tails brushing my arms, their presence all around. It was a completely unexpected joy.

Horses cast their electricity out broadly. I was invited in 2011 to attend and present a participatory dance at a celebration at Tall Trees Farm in Oakland County: an experiment in permaculture and community farming. My first sight as my friend Matt and I drove up to the parking area was of a white horse standing beneath a tree, painted with Native American symbols, accompanied by two men, (one of them Native, the other not). It turned out the horse, named Magic, was a companion and familiar to Cliff Mortimer.

A little later, when I saw Magic and Cliff walking together in a field, I felt an irresistible urge to meet the horse. Normally I’d have been hesitant, even cowardly, but I walked half the field, swimming through the sense of invitation cast so generously by the horse. Magic pushed his nose into my palm and encouraged affectionate strokes and walked in circles around me painting swirls of elation.

Later, at a pine grove where I was about to facilitate movement meditation, Magic and Cliff arrived. Magic cantered around the outside of the grove again and again, all classic horse with mane and tail flying—then remained guarding the entrance with Cliff and his friend, while participants danced with trees.

A friend once postulated that much human strife was generated or intensified when horses were broken to be used for transportation. The speed of migration and invasion made for superficial connection, projection, and objectification, which intensified tendencies to exert dominance.

I’m weaving into a longer novel a story told by a ten-year-old girl of a people who have an intimacy with wild horses. They ask for permission to ride them. The horses offer transportation aid when there is need. The cultural cohesion is disrupted by the arrival of invaders from a cold land, hungry and desperate, a group that corrals the horses and keeps most of the people, who know how to connect to the horses, as servants. These now-subdued people with their secret ability for genuine intimacy are holding the world together for the conquerors. With various threats held over their heads, they believe themselves unable to break out of the servitude that reduces their lives and those of the horses to a mechanical aid for control and conquest.

One day, in my late teens or early twenties, during a week or two in Northern Michigan, I wandered on my own, exploring little roads. At the edge of a field of some golden crop, I stopped, chilled. A prehistoric horse was peering out of the fronds, its eye on the road. Eohippus, the dawn horse, estimated age 45 to 55 million years, resembling a strange little dog- tunneling its way into twentieth-century Michigan and peering out through long, pale-gold fronds.

I stood, riveted.

Suddenly, it emerged with a flamboyant gold-red tail floating behind it. A fox, the first I had ever seen. Fox, the shapeshifter, a flame.

In night-maps from space that show urban lights bleeding onto land and into sky, much of Michigan’s reaching hand is brightly lit. But just above it is an area wondrously dark and vast. The hand meets a place where dreaming appears to meld with the physical more purely and there is room to explore the blending of the two.

A dream, 1994. I am in a forest pierced by a lamp-lit road. Two women walk down it and disappear to the left where the road enters an area of dense trees. One of the women seems to be myself, wearing a dress I had worn to a recent memorial gathering.

Then, from that direction, moving to the right, a golden horse ambles through the scene, drawing a cart, looking burdened and sad.

A moment of silence.

Then five horses appear from the right, running. The one in the middle is the golden horse, now freed of its cart.

Another dream of five horses presented a film set during World War II. A young woman named Anna and her father are rescuing war-orphaned children who are being mistreated on farms where they are held as refugees. They rescue five boys and take them to live at their farm where they have five horses. Anna is devoted to the work, which leaves her little time to live a “normal” young life. But she has a luminous dark beauty.

One day, the family at the house sets the five horses free. They bound away into a field steeped in sunlight. They will come back and visit, but will no longer be fenced in.

Five horses, one more than the apocalyptic four. Pandora’s Hope, and more. The horse-dream companion: the ability to fly while standing or walking or lying on earth and paying attention to what is near and find portals to journeying from wherever we are.

After millennia of migrating on foot: the horse and the wheel. Then the horse-power measure for distance covered in clock-time in automotive vehicles. Greater distances, but in some ways smaller fields.

Then smaller and smaller devices, vast quantitative mental spaces, galloping electrons. There can be a sensation of cramping and compression despite the opening of global connections: we are designed to use more of our senses than sight and hearing, some of which give access to deeper, wider fields to perception and experience than eyes and ears are able to.

Are our fields contracted when we focus on small screens? An opposite effect from William Blake’s world in a grain of sand despite promises to fit the cosmos into a handheld device or a minuscule chip? Carrying them about alters the visual field for those around us, and the sense of presence of those we might otherwise meet. For the shy and overwhelmed, nervously whipping out a phone replaces averting eyes in order to avoid direct contact. But something in us remains fully aware of the other, more so when attention isn’t diverted. Something in us may be aware of the people and places bound in servitude to the making of the machines, and the vast amounts of energy consumed to create the physical components of Cloud-infrastructure.

Are we conscious of how we are slicing into smaller pieces even the experience of those around us when filtering it through handheld phones, collecting secondary images to send to friends, instead of fully experiencing the moment we’re in? It ought not to matter, perhaps, but sometimes it does. Those of us who want to be “all there” can feel the snapped threads of consciousness that would otherwise be woven into a scene of ineffable richness and dimension. I remember standing around a fire brazier with strangers and wishing I were not the only one really being with the fire—everyone else continually held out little rectangles to photograph it. We were not in the same space despite standing measurably near each other.

The metallic horses, too, with their need for parking areas, have shaped our perceived space, almost irrevocably, though eventually all will be swallowed again in eruptions of green, of root and stem and branch, elbowing out concrete.

Electronic/LED colored lights, almost addictively vivid, are sometimes like bleed-through from another world. Liquid crystal touch-screens read our skin as we read them, bubbles seeming to rise up and shape themselves to electromagnetic finger-gloves until the suction is broken, a touch at a time.

A darker dream that I recently recalled after not thinking about it for years:

Two friends and I are on a hike. We arrive at the edge of a ravine. The slope is dry, eroded, with outcroppings of rock or firmer ground. One of the three of us, Mandy, takes a look at the plunging slant and gets on a sled, lying on her back with her head pointing down. She goes bumping and sliding down the slope, yelling, “This is fun!” I’m feeling annoyed because she’s doing something dangerous, and I believe I have to work to keep her safe with my attention.

The other friend, Arlo, gets on a bike and goes tearing down the slope. I’m not as worried about him, but still would not choose that route on this terrain.

I follow, leaping down from rock to rock and feeling grounded and agile. I prefer to be touching the earth.

At the bottom, I find the other two crouched by a little pool. It’s apparently quite a deep one. Arlo sinks an arm into it. As he pulls his arm out, a horse rises from the water. A ghostly one, though it seems physical enough. It’s ancient, all bones clothed in yellow-white parchment skin. It is loosed into the world, and makes its way somewhere unknown to us, in the direction of the slope we just descended that seems to have disappeared.

Does that ancient horse, still roam the earth, live within the bones of modern ones, or in our own? Was there a time when horses took us, dreaming, into the marrow of present space, before humans broke them, skipping vital steps to intimacy and connection, to know less of essence in the guise of knowing more in quantity?

In vernal ponds and tidal pools of dream are realms to explore, moments that expand into journeys. All is available through a simple gesture of turning in, or sharing a dream in community, reaching for one or more dreams that feel currently relevant. The grace of flying manes, running on tundra and grass, or picking a way more slowly on mountain ridges, or swimming among the white manes of blue-black waves. The infinite/eternal space cannot be bound in artificial grids.

Walking through a living forest, relaxing our focus, our attention diffused, we become aware of life-fields around us. It’s a speaking world. It can seem as though a frozen film begins to play again, as we reenter consciously the field of the living system.

Through a recent connection with the Residential College Writers at the University of Michigan, I’ve been reminded of my times in East Quad: the RC before renovation. The one with the Halfway Inn, aka Halfass: a performance space, café, restaurant, and general hangout, open to the outer world for events.

I haven’t visited the building since 2010. My life is centered elsewhere. I may prefer memories of extended evenings there that overflowed with vitality and strangeness, during which it was impossible to sleep until four in the morning.

The doors were open all night. On my first evening after moving in, I heard exquisite, birdlike tones from a dark stairway. I followed them and saw a blond man, older than we students were, playing his flute on a ledge. I knew I was in for an adventure.

In the dorm room of a friend, Nisi Shawl, now an acclaimed author of science fiction, three companions lounged around philosophizing and listening to music. The Incredible String Band somersaulted through universes, like my herd of horses. Elf-sparks flashed and flared. In its last line, The Juggler’s Song intones, “The next little ball is orange and blue/I can’t juggle four so I’ll toss it to you/And I call it TIME.”

A potential future steeped in electronics existed already in the music and vision. Actors and jugglers waited behind a night-velvet curtain.

Maybe we could have—and in some universes actually do—followed along different threads, the way into worlds of burning colors, some beyond the visible spectrum, not bleached in blue-white light, nor polluted by ever-increasing clouds of illumination thrown skyward. The fifth horse of my dream cannot be bound in squares. It travels through waves of ocean and blood. It’s not “orderly” though there’s order arising from it, translated through pulses and waves. Nor does it label people as disordered. It exults in adhering to essence and celebrates differences that arise in creative exuberance from underlying oneness. It celebrates both connection and core.

In the vast picture everyone is everyone and everything is everything, having a grand creative adventure with all possibilities, and generating new ones. Stars beckon into dream journeys on wandering horses with manes and tails of light. They glow within us too.

A little white horse with sapphire eyes leaps into sunlight from under the sea. It’s exquisite, starry. I don’t know what it’s about, maybe just a glimpse of elusive beauty. A hint that a pelagic herd of horses may be wandering just beneath the ocean’s ever-moving skin. Or a benthic herd, grazing on the sea floor, unhurried, shining like a galaxy, generating waves.

Irena Nagler writes fiction, essay, and poetry, teaches environmental movement meditation, and is a visual and performing artist. She has been researching the environmental, social, and industrial underpinnings of current technology for eleven years. Contact her by email at: birena@umich.edu.