Marfa
Poet Mathias Svalina will be in residence in Marfa over the next few weeks and is seeking volunteers in town to record their dreams on the night of Monday, November 24, through the morning of Tuesday, November 25. “The goal of the archive is to keep a record of the dreams dreamt in the city on one night,” he explained in an Instagram post.
Svalina is a prodigious dream archivist, having launched his “Dream Delivery Service” in Denver in 2014. The premise is simple: local subscribers receive a personalized dream-poem delivered by bike every morning, and far-away admirers can receive theirs by mail. Over the past 11 years, he’s taken this project on the road across the country, delivering dreams to poetry lovers in cities as big as Seattle and as small as Fruita, Colorado.
His Marfa project is more community-oriented, inviting the public to take part in plumbing the collective subconscious. Marfans can record and send their dreams via email, text, voice message, voicemail, or more creative means to mathias.svalina@gmail.com or to 718-986-8295––or they can come by Coyote Coffee on the morning of the 25th to dish in person.
Over the next few weeks, Svalina will make a hand-bound book of the dreams to be donated to the Marfa Public Library and will make an online edition of the archive available to folks around the world. If the experiment is successful, he’d like to take the project on the road to other far-flung towns full of dreamers.
