on dinosaurs, recurring dreams, and generational trauma

a submission for the Soaring Twenties Social Club

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Hi friends,

This newsletter features my contribution to the Soaring Twenties Social Club Symposium, a monthly set-theme collaboration between STSC writers. The topic for this month is “Dinosaurs”.

i.

I’ve always been an intense girl. Even more so when I was younger. The things that I love, I hold so close to me it hurts—or else I want to. My interests, my passions, become obsessions quickly; or else they subside into nothing.

You were intense, too. I stole into your room as a child, whenever my side of the family was visiting yours. It was your books I was interested in, not the teenage boy you were at the time.

Kindness was something that came easily to both you and your sister. With her we watched mermaids, my own sister and I; we loved that old VHS tape she put on, the glitter of that iridescent fishtail beneath the waves. With you, though, it was the monsters.

With you, it was a small, thickly bound paperback, text printed close and important. Written by Michael Crichton: my fingers brushed over his name to reveal a man who’d revivified monsters so terrifying I didn’t even have to see the movie to fear them.

But then I did, and for many nights afterward I was so stricken I lay motionless in the bed nestled up against the window of my attic room. Refusing to move, even as minute after sleepless minute ticked by. If the tyrannosaurus rex happened to pass by my window, hideously empty doghouse dangling from its protuberant jaw, scaly skin housing a wealth of sharp teeth, he wouldn’t see me. Little girl body frozen straight as I could keep it, unyielding as a secret. And if he didn’t see me, he couldn’t hurt me.

The recurring dreams began with another unforgettable scene: two young kids perched on plasticky cafeteria seats, wild-eyed with relief. Ready to scarf down a veritable feast of Jell-O packets, one already peeled halfway open on the table between them. The camera slowly zooms in as its surface jiggles.

Cut to the kids meeting one another’s gazes, panic coloring them once again. The shadow of an ancient predator against the wall. Curved talons revealing its aim, its hunger.

ii.

To this day I have a tendency to freeze in certain situations. Read: when I feel attacked. Force the words down until they create a sticky-hot tangle pressing up from my chest. Make myself smaller, voice bound. To this day, I have difficulty sitting with fear. My heart strikes up a familiar jagged rhythm. My pulse keeps its tempo at my wrist. Hands shake—just so, though not noticeably, I’m told. And of course, blood drubs at the base of my skull.

They say anxiety is the fear of being afraid, and that has always been my experience with it—the displacement of the body at odds with itself. A visceral and physical thing. They never said anything about the self-directed anger that arises from that. The very wrongness of it.

I always knew I wanted to be a writer. For a short time, though, I harbored a fascination with archaeology. Brush the bones loose, braid them together again. Let them tell their stories, pale and bleached, stripped clean by the pickings of history.

I wouldn’t understand until later in my life that writing is another kind of unearthing. Perhaps I still don’t understand it entirely.

That doesn’t stop me from striving to excavate all that I can.

iii.

These are the creatures I dream of: massive beasts rippling scales and claws, teeth and even, as it turns out, plumes of feathers. Velociraptor. Species after species of pterosaur, wings juxtaposed against a perilously deep horizon. So much of the world, too, beneath the sea. Extinct, too, what once loomed beneath. Well, not all—who knows what ravenous breed of behemoth remains there, in the crushing dark.

Always, they lie in wait. Always, they follow in vicious pursuit. I scramble up looming trees, camouflaging myself breathless beneath the verdant-cloaked canopy. Everywhere around me a riot of foliage, prehistoric forest rampant with wet as though expelling its own humid green breath. Vast swaths of jungle terrain unfurl relic flora and fossil foliage. Giant sequoias materialize from the brume, trees as colossal as the leviathans that roamed the earth when they were young.

The oldest of the dawn redwoods remember. These metasequoias carry it in their lifeblood—that neural network of roots that connect their families, creating a system of memories beneath the ground. Forever connected with their parents, siblings. Their cousins.

The human eye can see more shades of green than any other color. A part of us strains to connect with these viridian wildnesses, too—primordial and new. We strain to align with the lifeblood, the genealogy of all that green.

I wonder, do the trees pass on their trauma, too? Fear of fire, or else its threat. Fear of drought. Fear of the vicious two-legged creature that nonetheless does more damage than any other, his yellow-jawed machines come to crunch them down to pulp, feeding their bodies into engine after engine. Do the trees experience, in their own way, the trauma that is passed on from one generation to the next?

I think so. And yet, even if they do: the roots remain. Experience rot. And endure, expand into ever-widening fairy rings, rendered a kind of immortal with their majesty.

iv.

I saw a healer when I was living in the Richmond District, a house near Golden Gate Park that was constantly piled with people. She was a mentor of a friend of mine at the time. I knew she was the real deal because of her immediate prescience: of the time I went to Copenhagen and came back with a spirit entity attached to me; of the army of guides she told me I have standing guard in other realms, all at the ready.

And then she said, I see that there is an older brother looking out for you, too. No, a cousin. He wants you to know he’s here. I knew without question. It was you.

When you died, I was a teenager, clouded by my own fervent, misdirected anger. Only a few years younger than you were when you gave me your copy of Jurassic Park. Too stubborn and devastated to admit just how alike I thought we were. There’s a lot about that age—sixteen, seventeen—that I have blocked from my memory, that I now struggle to recall. I wish I could remember you more clearly. The details. That particular trauma remains my own, though the flash of your smile remains bright in my mind.

I read somewhere that dreaming of dinosaurs is a sign of anxiety, a fear of the past, feelings of being unable to escape it.

Years later, when my family playfully teases me about the childhood nightmares or my antithetical and abiding love of dinosaurs, my mother exclaims that she never even knew I was afraid. Well, yeah, I thought. That was kind of the point.

It’s how I wanted it, too. Enough time spent with trauma, though, and it asserts itself. Rears its ugly head, even. Exposes bloodstained teeth.

We lend grace to the shapes of what we attempt to put behind us—whether by choice or otherwise. Families forget all the time, or at least pretend to, so that we can move on. So that we can forgive. So that we can heal. And yet, we remember so much—memories stored in the blood and bones, down in the root, like fire and famine, war and poetry. Some will always remain jagged.

I wish I could talk to you about it. There’s so much I wish we could talk about.

xx Kimia