The Witch Who Cured My Nightmares

or: on dreams and magic and puppies

I have a new zine out as of today, a fancy double-sided, double-zine that collects my essays “Hurrah for Anarchy: A History of May Day, Haymarket, and the Chicago Anarchists” and “Anarchism & Its Misunderstanders: On Supply Chains & Buried History.” It’s one zine on one side, another one when you turn it over. And it’s gorgeous, with an offset printed cover done by Eberhardt Press. This photo doesn’t do the metallic ink justice.

I’ll be at the Black Cat Book Fair in Belfast, Maine on August 23rd, tabling for Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness and giving some sort of talk.

This week’s Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff episode is about Indymedia, the volunteer media collective who changed the way the internet worked (for better and worse) while developing methods by which to cover protests.

I’ve been working on recording audiobooks for the Danielle Cain series, and I’m hoping to have more updates about that for you soon.

The Witch Who Cured My Nightmares

Last night, in the middle of some other, much nicer dreams, I dreamt of being herded into a building by riot police, who then tried to break in, armed and screaming.

I used to have nightmares about police chasing me, every night, decades ago. It went on for months, and every night I woke up panting with fear or exhaustion, because I’d just been running, and the cops had just caught me.

I was twenty years old at the time, and I spent most of my days organizing anti-war protests in Portland and most of my nights riding a bike around from dumpster to dumpster looking for food. In my dreams, maybe I was shoplifting, or maybe I was dumpster diving, or maybe I was at a protest, or maybe I was just walking down the street, and a cop or cops would come for me. I would run, or I would bike, and they would run after me, or they would drive after me, and I could never get away.

I figured, when I was twenty, that I’d be dead or in prison by the time I was thirty. I know how dramatic that sounds, but I was a very dramatic young adult. Police in Portland were working hard to put fear into us, and I’m sorry to say they were fairly effective at it, at least for a while. I knew one anti-war organizer, the cops broke into his house and beat him bloody at his own desk. Another got recognized by cops while he was waiting for a bus and the cops beat the shit out of him. Another time, a punk wearing all black was jumped by cops on the street in the middle of the night, with the cops yelling shit like “are you an anarchist?” while they beat him bloody.

A few of the Portland cops, whom I knew by name—who might have known me by name—had been successfully sued for torturing people with pepperspray but were still on the streets. One of those cops, Captain Mark Kruger, was suspended briefly for nailing up memorial plaques to dead WWII Nazi soldiers in a Portland park.

Kruger looms large in my memory, because he was a fairly literal Nazi and because he was always out on the streets commanding the riot police, and because there was video of him laughing and laughing while pepperspraying a woman who clung to a parking meter, unable to see, unable to escape.

Another time, he pointed a munitions launcher (a grenade launcher, essentially) directly at my face from about five feet away. And for years, I thought I must have run after he did that, but a friend who was with me told me that me staying strong through that was what gave him the courage to hold his ground as well.

So in part because of a man named Kruger, I had nightmares every night. I wouldn’t write that into fiction, it would be hackneyed, even without giving him knife gloves or a striped sweater.

I had nightmares every night until a witch cured me, and I’ve never had that sort of nightmare again.