I dreamt of my grandma the other night. We were in a cafeteria and she bought me pasta: meatballs, rigatoni, and cheese. She bought herself a similar dish. She insisted on paying for it: $8.00. I have been thinking about my relatives a lot lately, in the aftermath of recovering from COVID. They say the veil between worlds is thin during Samhain. And I think the same is true for illnesses. On so many nights through the long months of my illness I had trouble discerning between this world and other ones. Time, space, light were bending in ways that defied western logics.

Often, when white people wax on about Indigenous dreams, they evoke tropes of the magical ‘noble savage’. Maybe some folks do dream in wolf calls and hawk cries, and that’s ok. But for me, my dreams about relatives have almost always been rooted in practical environments…