While you were sleeping, poet Mathias Svalina was pedaling his bicycle up and down Seattle’s hills, dropping dreams at the doorsteps of subscribers to his Dream Delivery Service.
For 45 bucks, Svalina will write you a
dream (or a nightmare!) every day for a month. Before dawn, he’ll tuck the dream into a pink envelope and stick it between your door and the jamb, or maybe beneath a stone if you live in an apartment. Either way, you’ll find a dream at your feet first thing in the morning.
Svalina has made a name for himself in the world of contemporary poetry, publishing a handful of books in the last few years. His writing delights—not at all academic, but not too light. Browsing a few recent examples, I laughed at one about a bearded dragon really embracing a new skin-care routine, and at another about a person mowing a field of folding chairs as an orchestra plays in the distance. The dreams he writes for animals, which are included with any pet-owning household’s subscription, are hysterical.
Back in 2014, a college in Colorado where he was scheduled to teach canceled the class a few days before the semester started. With no way to pay rent, he came up with the Dream Delivery Service. After a few one-offs in Denver, which made the front page of the newspaper, he hopped on an old 1980s Raleigh he bought on Craigslist and started touring the country in 2016.
He lives a nomadic life, camping most places he goes. In Seattle, he’s staying in the backyard of Shawn Landis and Jodi Rockwell, who run an artist residency in Madrona. Each morning he wakes at 3 a.m., hits the road by 3:30 a.m., and bikes a squiggly route to South Seattle, over to West Seattle, and then up to Shoreline. He covers more than 30 miles and does about 2,000 feet of elevation, he figures. He describes Seattle as the hilliest city he’s ever biked.
“One thing I really like about this is biking around the city when it’s in its ghost form,” Svalina said over coffee at the end of a recent shift. “The dark blue glow of the predawn sky with the water and the downtown lights below, and these very arboreal hills everywhere, and that balance of quiet and big city that I get to spy on at those times.”
Dreamy things happen to him when he’s on the road. In Chicago, he saw two coyotes running through the street. Suddenly an Uber driver pulled up behind him, rolled down his window, and asked if the animals that had just scurried away were horses. “One of my major regrets in life was telling him no,” Svalina said.
Interested parties can sign up at dreamdeliveryservice.com. The money he makes is not a lot to live on, but he’s doing what he loves. “I realized the two things that make me happiest are writing weird shit all day long and being alone while biking long distances,” he said. “Even if things kind of suck, at least I’m doing two things that make me happy.”
And one thing that makes other people happy, too.
