As I begun reading about walking and dreaming about walking, a desire emerged–to complement the practice by documenting the experience.

Documenting. IDOCDE first arose as a platform that was going to create a context for the study of documentation and documenting within the field of dancing, dance making, and dance pedagogy. IDOCDE, as most of you will know, stands for International Documentation of Contemporary Dance Education. Documenting.

In the emergent desire, what I recognised as and decided to call documenting was a sensation that I also knew to be something else, something other than what I know to be documenting. I studied its shape, its tone, its timbre, I observed the way it made me feel. A shape emerged, that of a dream-catcher.

I know very little about dream-catchers. So little, in fact, I would be afraid to speculate about their origin, about their meaning. I acknowledge this feeling, I ask it to accompany me, I ask it to catch my attention later today, tomorrow, to direct me towards information. I offer to the feeling memories of my teenage-hood, dream-catchers galore.

I loved going to, what was in the early 2000s Zagreb called, "indian shops." My favourite was located in a courtyard off one of the main streets in central Zagreb. Just behind the shop was a fountain. The atmosphere the sound of the artificial waterfall created in this enclave was serene. If you were to follow the stairs leading around the fountain and up the hill through a foresty patch–what once was a garden?–you would find yourself in the Old Town from where you could easily step into the forest and begin your hike up the mountain.

This is not the only path that leads from central Zagreb into the forest at the base of the mountain, but it was my favourite because taking it meant passing by the shop. The shop was never not heavy with scent that often made me dizzy. I do not take to scents lightly. But dizzyness afforded dreaminess, and silver shines particularly bright to smoke-hazed eyes. It is in this dreamy state–after I stepped off the main street but before I started my walk–that I would find myself surrounded by dozens of dream-catchers, of all shapes and sizes, made in every colour, some feathery, some not.

On a particularly tender day, I was approached by one of the folk tending to the shop and told that a dream-catcher could create a cocoon around my sleeping body and catch–or filter out–all the bad dreams that wanted to pass through my unconscious-conscious. I imagined then that net, that stellar dream-catcher cacoonanatomy, as I picked one up, purchased it with by allowance, and brought it home, hoping it would help me, protect me. So that my nights, at least, could be relieved of stress and anxiety and fear.

It was this stellar dream-catcher cacoonanatomy that I thought of today, that I felt today, when I felt documenting. I wanted documenting walking to feel like casting a net, a weave, a spell for thought, experience, observation, reflection. As tender and as delicate, as it is strong and reliable.

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