By Nora Sawyer, Sausalito Historical Society
In October 1979, five-year-old Sausalito houseboat resident Aliss Haas had a bad dream. A monster came and ate her up. Fortunately, “someone cut the monster” and she escaped. A big cat came and ate the monster up. All in all, not a bad night’s work.
Out on the anchorage, fellow boat-dweller Ale Ekstrom dreamed his “ear sucking Siamese kitten” leapt into a bucket of eels. Horrified at the “great clashing of teeth” inside the bucket, Ale had finally nerved up to stick his foot in and attempt a rescue when suddenly the eels came “boiling out in great fear and frustration.” The dream ended with Ale on one foot next to the bucket, his “little kitten licking her lips, not her wounds.”
Aboard the Ursa Major, Doreen Nagle-Thoshinsky dreamed she was “at a place that looked like the Steinhart Aquarium – the part where you go up a railed walkway to look at the porpoises from underneath.” She was in the midst of a wild “reception type party,” including lots of people she knew were from the waterfront, though she couldn’t name any of them. People were drinking champagne and listening to a “sermon-type lecture.” From the tanks, fish, some of them “like snakes, with scary eyes” peered back at the party goers. Though the crowd should have been in “tuxedos and gowns, it was that kind of thing,” everyone was casually dressed, the men in overalls and the women in dirty, torn dresses with bare feet. Nagle-Thoshinsky knew instinctively that she “needed to warn everyone about the people who had invited us to the party.”
These forty-year old dreams are among the hundreds captured in Gates, a “Sausalito Community Waterfront Dream Journal.” First published in 1977, Gates was the brainchild of Waldo Point resident John Van Daam. Arriving at the Waldo Point in the 1970s, Van Daam was struck by the community’s spirit and creativity. At the same time, the waterfront was changing, with some houseboat dwellers in favor of new development while others fought to maintain the community’s bohemian, unregulated vibe. Van Daam came up with the dream journal as a way to add to the creativity and beauty he’d found on the waterfront while trying to bridge the gap between the two factions. Despite differences of opinion, he hoped that dreams would provide a meeting place.
While waterfront unity proved elusive, Van Daam still calls the journal “the most beautiful thing I’ve ever done.” It was made up of dreams submitted by people from all along the waterfront, who would drop written accounts of their dreams -- some of them illustrated -- into a ‘Dream Drop’ at Waldo Works. Van Daam published monthly, with about thirty dreams per issue. The dreams captured in the journal surpassed his expectations. “There was such energy -- I couldn’t be on the docks when a new issue came out,” he recalls. “It was all too much, too fantastic.”
Even today, reading through the dreams of the Gates community is a profound experience. Here are the waterfront’s hopes, worries, and preoccupations, percolated through their dreamer’s subconscious but otherwise unfiltered. We see people -- some still with us, some gone -- encountering the same nonsensical dream logic we experience every night and giving straightforward and unaffected accounts of their experience. The dreams are vivid, relatable. The passage of time doesn’t blunt their immediacy. After a while, themes and connections seem to pop up. Ale’s cat defeats Aliss’ monster.
Dreams, according to Van Daam, are vital, a means for everyone to better understand themselves and their own experience. As a window into the unconscious, they also help us to better understand the world around us and each other. “All of us are contributing to the unconscious every day through our actions,” he explains. These experiences, in turn, fed the dreamscape. When we try to ignore or suppress our dreams, problems can come forward into the waking world.
“We all have craziness in us,” Van Daam explains. Most of us can keep it inside when we’re awake, and at bay even when we’re sleeping. People are sometimes put off by the oddness their dreams, finding them frightening, or too strange or nonsensical. “Those,” says Van Daam, “are the ones I’m interested in.”
Van Daam recently started soliciting dreams for a new collection: Inner Space, a Sausalito community dream journal that will be distributed for free every month via email. Those interested in sharing dreams or receiving the newsletter can find out more by emailing office@innerspace360.org, or by submitting to the Dream Drop at the Sausalito Public Library.