While you were sleeping, a poet delivered dreams to Tucson doorsteps by bike

For 30 days, Tucson has had its very own dream deliverer.

Yes, that's a thing.

Or a person, to be more accurate.

Meet Mathias Svalina. He's 41. And he has spent the last month bicycling around Tucson before dawn, slipping dreams in doors, just above the knob.

Naturally, we wanted in.

On the last day of his deliveries in Tucson, we asked Svalina to write a dream for Tucson.

It came typed up on white card stock, nestled in a pink envelope, just like each of the dreams Svalina delivers.

His dream for Tucson is full of whimsy, wonder and a dose of weird — like any good dream. Read it here:

Tucson

Day 30: November 30, 2016.

You are walking beside a two-lane road at night. It is winter but clear, & the stars are so bright they illuminate the landscape with a soft cold light. As you walk thousands of shadows encircle you, one cast by each bright star. When you step the thousands of shadows bloom & wilt. When you angle your head this way or that the circle of shadows rise & fall. You are carrying a red metal toolbox. You swing it as you walk. The tools inside clang & clink in rhythm to your steps. You arrive at an intersection. You open the toolbox. Inside sit six metal birds with wind-up knobs & six toy train cars. You pick out one toy train & one metal bird. You place the toy train onto the asphalt. As you crouch down your circle of shadows merge & overlap like a kaleidoscope. You wind up the metal bird until its wings begin to flap. You keep winding until the knob won't turn further. You release the metal bird & it flies in circles. Then the metal bird swoops down to the road & lifts the toy train & flies up into the night. You close the toolbox & continue walking. When you reach another intersection you open the toolbox & put another toy train on the road & wind another metal bird. When you release the bird it flies around in circles & dips down & lands atop the toy train. The toy train comes to life. It makes a high-pitched chugging sound & rolls forward, transporting the bird & leaving toy trains & metal birds at every intersection until dawn creeps over the eastern sky. As the sky grows brighter & the stars fade your shadows do not disappear. They grow darker & more defined. As you step forward & swing your toolbox the shadows bloom & wilt, bloom & wilt, bloom & wilt.

"I kind of feel like I'm a strangeness machine," says Svalina, who considers himself a poet. "I'm not the best writer. I'm not the world's most beautiful writer, but my mind just does the strangest things, so having this form where I can constantly fill it with the surreal, it's something that I can kind of keep on doing."

Svalina, who has written five books, spends about eight hours a day writing unique dreams for each of his subscribers. He tries not to use the same dream for multiple dreamers.

In November, Svalina had about 50 subscribers, mailing dreams to about 20 and delivering the rest by bike, sticking to a four-mile radius around the Museum of Contemporary Art, 265 S. Church Ave.

He also does nightmares for an extra $3.75 per month. In November, he had three nightmare subscribers.

"I think he's just the master dreams craftsman at this point," says Alex Furrier, a University of Arizona senior who subscribed. "It was part of my routine this month. Get up and make coffee and remember there's one waiting for me, and the pink envelope falls down, and then I can't wait to read it. It's a highlight of the day."

This is Mathias Svalina. He just spent the month of November delivering dreams he wrote to people in Tucson.
Johanna Willett

Svalina started the whole thing as a joke after he lost his position as an adjunct creative writing instructor at the University of Colorado.

"I was being self-deprecating and joking about my limited skill set of being able to write weird stuff," he says. "It was an extended joke in which people would subscribe to me writing weird stuff every day, and the next morning I woke up and was like, 'Huh. Maybe that's a thing I could actually do.'"

That was in 2014.

He started in Denver, Colorado and then decided to take this subconscious show on the road. His month in Tucson followed time in Richmond, Virginia. Next up, he'll visit Marfa, Texas and later New Orleans.

His Tucson stay was sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art and the UA Poetry Center.

"We thought it was really cool, and we were hoping to bring more art into people's daily lives," says Sarah Gzemski, the publicity and publications coordinator for the Poetry Center. "It's sort of an amazing thin to wake up each morning and have a dream or a poem there for you."

Tucsonans who still wish to receive daily dreams after Svalina moves on can do so by subscribing to receive the letters by mail.

While in Tucson, Svalina rode about 40 miles a day on his bike, waking up around 2:30 or 3 a.m. to have the dreams delivered before sunrise. He usually bikes three to four hours daily.

"It's designed around the things that I love most in my life, which are writing all day, biking around cities when they're empty and ghostly and mysterious and being weird without consequence."

He takes notes all day, using the thing he sees, the people he talks to and the books he reads to inspire his dreams. Sometimes, he steals dreams and nightmares from people who share them with him.

Gretchyn Kaylor, another UA senior who subscribed, split the cost and the dreams with a friend.

"One that stuck with me most was about me sunbathing by a pool in the hills of L.A. and then there was also me swimming in the pool as a little girl," she says.

At one point in the dream, her parents appear to ask adult Kaylor her name. Instead of giving her real name, Kaylor tells them her name is Sprite and that it's a biblical name.

Nightmares are harder to write than dreams, Svalina says. In dreams, anything can happen and anything is accepted. Nightmares are harder. He tries to avoid cliches — pulled teeth or missing pants, for example.

"The mind makes terror that is hard to reinvent," he says, referencing a nightmare someone once shared with him about watching a golden retriever wag its tail for all eternity. The tail would sweep steadily back and forth, back and forth — and then glitch! —and then back and forth, back and forth.

"The last place I was in, Richmond, Virginia, was swampy and Gothic and hilly with Confederate grave sites on every corner," he says. "And then in Tucson there is so much space and a totally different ecosystem. Coyotes and javelinas and desert paths are coming up (in dreams) whereas swamps and rivers and hills were much more part of it in Richmond."

Dreams are Svalina's life. Financially, he breaks even, he says. He has only a bicycle to get around. After flying back to Denver for a break, he'll return to Tucson and then bike to Marfa. The 500-to-600-mile ride will take him 10 to 11 days. Following his month in Marfa, he'll continue on to New Orleans — a bike ride that will take about a month.

"There was a sense of space and distance coming into Tucson dreams whereas there were more urban dreams in Denver," Svalina says. "Here, it was more of coming upon a strange thing in the middle of nowhere."

But no more.

Tucson will have to go back to dreaming its own dreams.