It was another warm day and I had the windows open.
I spent most of the day finishing my second reading of Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves. Maybe it was because I was reading out loud that it made me cry even more the second time around. I was bawling my head off at fifty points as I read along. The book seems to be designed that way. When I think of all of my favourite novels, none of them made me cry. The great ones like Beautiful Losers or Tropic of Cancer because they are artfully written rather than written to be emotionally manipulative.
I started typing up my handwritten notes on the book and doing research in order to formulate questions for the author. Here are a few things I wrote down:
Oneirology is the study of dreams.
“Raccoons the size of huskies." For raccoons to become on the average that big would take a very long time. It takes less time for animals to evolve smaller. If raccoons were to go through evolutionary changes in generations that we could observe they would probably be subtle changes of colouration and resistance to poison. There's some evidence for instance that humans are becoming less prone to alcohol poisoning.
“Flying cockroaches.” This could happen in Canada with global warming as there have been flying cockroaches seen in New York. Some of them can glide.
How much research did you apply to some of your evolutionary claims in the novel?
“Feeling sorry for the dreamless.”
Research shows that everyone dreams, including the few people that do not think they ever dream. The more accurate word for a non-dreamer is a non recaller. All people can be observed to dream even if they don’t know it.
When you talk about the dreamless do you mean that these people really don’t dream or that they don't remember their dreams?
“Dreams get caught in the webs woven in your bones.” One study shows that Mexican Americans showed longer durations of REM activity than African Americans, Asian Americans or Non-Hispanic White Americans. There was no study of Indigenous Americans but Mexican Americans do tend to have more Indigenous DNA than the other groups.
Do you really think that Indigenous people are genetically more inclined towards dreaming?
“They live in the marrow.” The only differences in bones among ethnic groups is density and people of African descent tend to have denser and heavier bones with less risk of fracture.
If dreams were in the Indigenous marrow why couldn’t the non dreamers grow it from stem cells? All they would need would be one person and a harmless extraction.
What practices to you engage in to help you dream?
A Chippewa elder says dreams are not in the body but the soul. The Chippewa are same people as the Ojibwa with just a different spelling and pronunciation probably caused more by the border than anything else.
Where did you get the idea that dreams are in the bones?
For dinner I had a potato and two chicken drumsticks with gravy. The potato was undercooked and the chicken overcooked. I think this bag of potatoes that I bought are harder than usual potatoes and might require longer cooking time. I had dinner while watching Interpol Calling.
In this story a man named Gill and a woman called Lena in hats and sunglasses rob a jewellery store in Paris. Gill ends up shooting the owner when he tries to sound the alarm. He survives long enough to tell the police the robbers are British. It turns out that they run a bus tour of Europe with Gill the driver and Lena the guide. They rob stores during brief rest stops for their passengers and then drive away in the perfect alibi. In Geneva they rob another store but this time the store clerk shoots Gill’s hand before they escape. The police know this because he has left his glove behind. Gill’s wound turns septic and so in Locano they have to break into a doctor’s office to get penicillin, a syringe and phenol barbital. Interpol learns that the glove was sold in Liverpool. They check the hotels for guests from Liverpool and find a whole busload. Gill’s wound is getting so bad that it's making it painful to drive but they have to get off the continent as soon as they can and so they leave the hotel early. Gill is driving very fast to make it as quickly as he can before his wound gets unmanageable. Duval goes after the bus knowing two people on board are the crooks but not that they are the people in charge. He heads the bus off and boards it. While checking passports he sees Gill’s wound. Lena pulls a gun and makes Duval sit while Gill drives. But just as pain causes Gill to almost lose control Duval manages to cut off the lights and take Lena’s gun. They are arrested.
Lena was played by Rona Anderson, who co-starred in “Floodtide” and “Little Red Monkey”. She was in the cast of the first season of the sitcom “Bachelor Father.”
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