{"id":5904,"date":"2023-11-28T13:09:16","date_gmt":"2023-11-28T02:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/?p=5904"},"modified":"2023-11-28T13:09:19","modified_gmt":"2023-11-28T02:39:19","slug":"behind-books-missing-dream-tetra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/2023\/11\/behind-books-missing-dream-tetra\/","title":{"rendered":"BEHIND THE BOOKS: The Missing Dream Tetra"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

‘I was spellbound by this hallucinatory excursion through the uncharted, elusive terrain between unconscious states and wide-awake reality.’ \u2013 Robyn Ravlich<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Dream Tetras<\/a><\/em>, a collaboration between writer Mike Ladd and artist Cathy Brooks, combines experimental essays by Mike with extraordinary images by Cathy. The essays, which are inspired by snippets of dreams Mike has remembered, embrace randomness and coincidences with waking life. Cathy’s artwork responses are extrapolations of the essays, drawing on her extensive photographic archives and combining drawing, collage, painting and photoshop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are pleased now to be sharing a bonus dream tetra, written after the book was published.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read this bonus content below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u2018don\u2019t drink the wine \u2013 it\u2019s made from chicken feathers\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m dreaming that I\u2019m working for a research company which has been contracted by a large corporation. The bland, triangular logo of the corporation disguises the fact that their main business is killing millions of animals and turning them into a glossily packaged mush fed to other, more favoured animals. They want to know how they can improve their profit ratio by processing one of the by-products: chicken feathers. I\u2019m in a stark, clinical room with white cupboards and benches, and the man who warns me against drinking the wine is holding up a measuring jar with a Riesling-coloured liquid in it. Suddenly, he vomits. He blocks his mouth, but some comes out of his nose. He hands me the jar before sprinting out of the room. I sniff it \u2013 smells like wine. I taste it \u2013 perhaps a little oily, but very wine-like. I spit it out. The other men in the room \u2013 they are all young men \u2013 some wearing suits, some dressed in white lab coats, are in a whirl of urgent discussion. The product is too-obviously toxic. There will have to be a rejig. The pale, green-tinged liquid in the jar is the last thing I remember from the dream as I wake up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Dream<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Dream Tetra 25: don’t drink the wine, it’s made from chicken feathers<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The next day I visit my son. We have coffee and sandwiches in the backyard while the magpies sing and the planes slide in low to land at the end of his suburb. His garden of cacti and succulents is thriving. The prickly pear has deep magenta fruits ripening all over it. After lunch I say, \u2018I want to look at your chickens\u2019 and we make our way to their pen. They all come to the wire gate to greet us: a Cornish white, a Barnevelder whose bronze feathers are trimmed with blue-black and shine like exquisite chainmail, a crazy Frizzle, an elegant Plymouth Rock, a glossy black Australorp named \u2018Cluckubus\u2019 and a Silkie called \u2018Hairdo\u2019 because of her wild mop-top of white feathers like a little punk rocker. They watch us with their smart, anxious eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A chicken feather is a very light thing \u2013 just a snowflake in the air. Yet this world consumes so many chickens in a year (some sources estimate up to fifty billion) it results in millions of tons of their feathers being sent to landfill, a crushing collective weight. Corporations who consider chickens not as living individuals but simply as x<\/em> amount of protein, y<\/em> amount of fat, z <\/em>amount of keratin, are experimenting with ways to increase their profit by processing the waste feathers. Each of the ten thousand feathers on a chicken is, like a snowflake, unique. They are plucked from uniform corpses on conveyor belts by jets of scalding water and whirring rubber-fingered machines, then roar out of factories by the truckload. A typical industrial chicken plant creates 450 kilograms per hour of wet, bloody feathers, a slurry of ruined uniqueness. They have been chemically and heat-processed into nappy linings, cosmetics, animal feed and shoe soles, but not, so far, into wine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About the authors<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Mike Ladd<\/strong>\u00a0is a writer and broadcaster and\u00a0Cathy Brooks<\/strong>\u00a0is a multimedia visual artist. Mike and Cath are partners in life and art and have been working together for over forty years on books, films, installations and live performance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘I was spellbound by this hallucinatory excursion through the uncharted, elusive terrain between unconscious states and wide-awake reality.’ \u2013 Robyn Ravlich Dream Tetras, a collaboration between writer Mike Ladd and artist Cathy Brooks, combines experimental essays by Mike with extraordinary … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[773,907,80,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-books","category-behind-the-books","category-for-fun","category-we-love-books"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4v1Of-1xe","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5904"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5907,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5904\/revisions\/5907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}