Se Sonhar é Uma Flor (If Dreaming is a Flower)

The Hubble Space telescope turns off passing over my head as I prune cosmos flowers.¹ They are little orange radio telescopes and my body intercepts the signal.² I am feverishly, barely awake, a spinning compass.³ Tonight I will dream another one of those famous radioactive dreams of the sun.⁴ I leave the heads of the flowers on the ground. Eventually I sleep. The particles⁵ that slip through the weakened atmosphere seed the soils of sleep-consciousness, unfold in me a flower…

                . . ˜•. ˜”° •. ˜”°••°”˜. •°”˜˜”°•.˜”° ••° ”˜. • ° * ” ˜• •////

. • *˜

Snip!⁶ Waking like shears. I dress in dawn, quiet as the satellites that drift overhead, and sift through the fallen petal minutia for meaning. I give water to the cosmos flowers, alien bright. And the dreams, pruned by waking, decompose, finally, into something earthy, digestible. I tremble, a little, for experience is illuminated and our star is conscious.⁷

¹ … to avoid strong radiation. I live in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil, the eye of The South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA), which is a region of reduced intensity of the Earth’s electromagnetic field. Here the inner radiation belt is closest to the earth’s surface. The strength of this magnetic field is decreasing ten times faster than the Earth’s average which is about 5% per year (Parks, 2015). The increased particle flux, if it doesn’t prematurely age and kill satellite equipment, at the very least corrupts astronomical data.

² All humans’ circadian rhythms are guided by the earth’s electromagnetic fields; those that live under the SAA have a special, understudied relationship to it. There are increased health risks, too; sunspots and seasonal weakening of the geomagnetic field can induce fatigue, fever and flu-like symptoms (Martel et al., 2023). Chizhevsky (1976) found that high solar activity was tied to social unrest, cardiovascular mortality, and mental illnesses.

³ In the SAA, the magnetic compass is not true to the north and south poles of the planet. When it comes to internal compasses, quantum biologists claim that which grants birds their navigability during migration (the light-depended radical pair formation in retina cryptochromes) is interwoven with the flux of Earth’s magnetic field (Martel et al., 2023, Wiltschko, R., Nießner, C., & Wiltschko, W. 2021).

⁴ A case study showed that dreams from low geomagnetic activity were more bizarre than dreams from high geomagnetic activity (Lipnicki D. M., 2009). Additionally, solar storms reduce melatonin (Martel et al., 2023), which is an inhibitor of vivid dreams. Melatonin levels are naturally lower during Rapid Eye Movement sleep, or the “d-state” as Le Guineans like to say.

⁵ “The inner radiation belt energetic particles come from neutrons produced by cosmic rays that bombard the planet’s atmosphere” (Parks, 2015, p. 2). The only time radiation could cause issues on the ground under the SAA, is if a very strong Coronal Mass Ejection from a very strong solar flare were to hit us head on, which has been proven to happen more than once every 100 years.

⁶ In Ursula Le Guin’s novel, The Lathe of Heaven, the protagonist wakes up from a dream that erased 6 billion people from the planet to find the dream come true. The protagonist, George Orr, says to his psychotherapeutic doctor, stuttering a little: “that there, there might be other people who dream the way I do? That reality’s being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed, all the time…” (Le Guin, 1968, p. 56).

⁷ See quantum physics: the observer effect, entanglement.