Dream Delivery Service Comes to Philadelphia

You have a big bunch of grapes. You sit in the light of the moon, rocking back & forth on a wooden porch-swing, eating the delicious grapes. You look up at the Moon. The Moon looks hungrily down at you …

Imagine: a pink envelope wedged in your doorframe or slipped through your mail slot while you dreamed overnight. When you wake, it is there to recount a dream for you. Enter the Dream Delivery Service, in Philadelphia through April 14.

For over 10 years, poet Mathias Svalina has traveled the country, popping up in different cities. He spends his days writing “dreams” for his subscribers — which “consist of brief surreal prose-poems or flash-fiction” — then wakes to deliver them before dawn.

Svalina delivers dreams by bike to local subscribers, and mails dreams to anyone outside of his delivery zone, which is based on wherever he is staying. “I’m currently delivering to 162 people, pets and ghosts in this iteration at 58 addresses, 16 of which are by mail, two international,” he shares.

“There is a tendency by some artists to think that in times of turmoil and crisis everything must be reiterating and focused on the crisis. There also has to be a space carved out for daydreaming and play.” — Mathias Svalina

Svalina started the Dream Delivery Service in 2014 while living in Denver. “I started it as a joke,” he says. “The director of the Museum of Contemporary Art was a subscriber, and they brought me in to do a project; other people started inquiring. Suddenly I had the choice between being a broke adjunct professor of poetry in a rapidly more unaffordable city or a broke person who bikes around and delivers dreams. I chose the latter.”

The Dream Delivery Service hit the road, with residencies in cities like Austin, Tucson, Marfa and Richmond. Until a year and half ago, Svalina was entirely nomadic. He would travel (primarily by bike; he recently biked up along the coast from Richmond to Philadelphia) to different cities, based on where he was able to establish partnerships and find a free place to sleep – sometimes with friends, other times with a local bookstore, gallery, museum’s artist residency, or hostel. Once there, he would stay for a month, writing and delivering dreams,

Subscriptions are available for each discrete residency period; Philadelphia’s subscription is two weeks long and costs $30 for Philadelphia subscribers and $50 for dreams to be mailed anywhere in the world. At two weeks, his Philadelphia residency is shorter than past editions of the Dream Delivery Service, helping him test how shorter residencies might fit into his life today. As he has grown and evolved over the years, so has the project. “I was much more purist about it [back then]. I didn’t want to do any press, and I didn’t want to have any record of it online. I was really into the ephemerality of it,” Svalina shares. He even looked into whether he could retrofit a printer to print the dreams in disappearing ink (that didn’t ultimately work out).

Svalina is contemplative and lightly self-deprecating during our interview; he occasionally breaks off to comment on his environment (he took the call in an alley with “a curb made out of shale — it’s really lovely”). “I still am into the ephemerality but less martyred about it, less self-flagellating … well, slightly less,” he corrects. “I thought maybe I would last a year doing it and people would call bullshit.”

Over the years Svalina has written and delivered around 40,000 dreams in around 40 to 45 cities. A project that he anticipated would be brief became a significant chunk of his life. “At first I was convinced I could write like a superhero,” he says. Because, “If you’re not demanding impossible dreams of yourself, what’s the fucking point?”

Compared to his poetry, dreams offer Svalina the opportunity to work quickly and be less edited. While he might rework a poem over the course of a decade, dreams are often written in minutes — and then he forgets all about them. A dream might be a couple of sentences or a few short paragraphs, depending on the day. “It’s a different craft process,” he says. Dreams also offer a “more intimate and permeable” way to connect with readers. Ultimately when it comes to the dreams, “I’m just trying to make light entertainment.”

Escaping into dreams

And isn’t that something we all need, now more than ever? “Sometimes in high literary worlds the idea of entertainment is sneered at,” he comments. “Lord knows I love to pander, but name a time when nobody needed escapism, when nobody needed to imagine a world that was more amenable to the spirit than the unrest and suffering of reality. You know that quote by Bertolt Brecht? ‘Will there be singing in the dark times? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.’ There is a tendency by some artists to think that in times of turmoil and crisis everything must be reiterating and focused on the crisis. There also has to be a space carved out for daydreaming and play.”

Subscriber Eric Walter, who lives in South Philly, says Svalina’s dreams are better than his own. “I’ve had mainly anxiety dreams,” he says. “But these dreams involve me feeding grapes to the moon, or wearing an inscrutable Halloween costume and making something up whenever someone asks what I’m dressed up as, or turning into other people while looking in the mirror.” Best of all, though, says Walter, are the dreams his cat, Puck, has received. “My favorite is the one where he learned how to drive a go-kart and he would drive past the park to catch everyone’s attention.”

A dream from the Dream Delivery Service.

Receiving a dream is an opportunity to escape, even if only for a moment. “I’m holding out space for what is playfully possible for the self, in addition to having to struggle against the forces that want to de-self everybody,” says Svalina.

While delivering dreams, Svalina taps into his own sense of play. On his bike, he witnesses the city slowly awaken. He enjoys the murals around town, like the insects on the exterminator building in Spring Garden, which he sends me a picture of when we hang up. “Getting to wander around in the dark and see the murals and the intimate making of the city has been really wonderful so far,” he muses. He hopes to encounter coyotes during his route and is excited to continue exploring for the next week. “People should send me their favorite weird shit to add to my route!” he enthuses.

“If I wanted to be really financially successful I wouldn’t be a poet or have started the service,” Svalina reflects. “But I don’t want to be successful or big. I want to be cryptic and weird and small.”

Ellen Miller is a multi-disciplinary performing and visual artist, dancer, and poet currently creating somewhere in between Traverse City and Philadelphia. When she’s not at her day job, collaging, or at rehearsal, you can often find her volunteering at Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens.