Hand-delivered by bike, Mathias Svalina is writing and sending dreams to the people of Tucson for the next few weeks. 

Mathias Svalina is a poet and has been running his dream delivery service since 2014. Originally starting in Denver, Colorado, he has been nomadic since 2016. Traveling to different cities, focusing mainly on the west, Svalina is staying in Tucson for the month of October. 

When in Tucson, Svalina, every day for the next few weeks, writes dreams to the subscribers of his service. In the morning, he will bike within a four-mile radius of where he is staying and deliver the dreams to people’s doors. 

Gathering inspiration from biking through the city, books and observing things that might go unnoticed to most people, Svalina stated that these are the things he writes about: these surrealist narratives built from the things our subconscious unburies while we are asleep. 

“And they’re written with a general kind of form of how we tell each other our dreams. So we can have this kind of crazy chaos that’s happening in a dream, but typically when we start to tell it to each other, we tell it very simply,” Svalina explained. “In a way that is sort of in contrast to how immersive and complex an actual dream may be.”

Svalina has been continuing this project for 11 years, yet he cannot imagine himself in a different situation. It started as a way to get by and has evolved into so much more. 

“I was broke. I was teaching at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and due to a clerical error, the classes that I was supposed to teach for the summer disappeared,” Svalina said. “And that was how I was going to pay my rent for the summer. And being a poet, I don’t really have […] other skills that people want.”

He turned to the thing he loved, and over time, his dream delivery service gained more attention, eventually allowing him to bring it to other cities. 

“It sort of started as a joke, and on the other hand, I was writing these books of poetry that kind of worked in a similar mode with repetitive surrealist modes,” Svalina said. “So, in one sense, it was just a joke, in another sense, it is sort of an extension of what I was doing as a poet. And then instead of having an 80 or 100 page book, what would happen if I wrote, you know, 40,000 of them?”  

According to Svalina, even after so long of writing in this way, he doesn’t lose interest in it, “it fits my inclination to write all day, which is what makes me happy,” Svalina said. This passion for writing and poetry has led him to publish eight books, with the most recent one being “Thank You Terror,” published by Big Lucks Books. 

Along with his dream delivery service, Svalina does guided tours of the cities he is in, covering real history and his own surrealist interpretations and ideas of each place. Asking the question, “What happens if we apply the laws of dreams to thinking about history?” 

Similarly to how he collects inspiration for his dreams, he will learn about the history of the city. 

“I was going through the newspaper archives of old Tucson newspapers and sort of reading stuff that’s outside the headlines,” Svalina said. “I’m trying to find little stories of Tucson and people and then sort of trying to translate it into thinking about history, the way poetry works, so the way dreams work, rather than the way the history is told to us.” 

These anecdotes and creative interpretations allow Svalina to get people to think about the place they experience every day a little differently. Stories that people aren’t around to tell anymore or get excluded from major history retellings.  

“And it’s an excuse to just walk around with the bullhorn, which is surprisingly fun, as somebody who’s not very theatrical, typically,” Svalina joked.

His first dream history tour in Tucson will be Saturday, Oct. 25, starting at the Poetry Center at 11 a.m. and is free to attend, with about two miles of walking. The second one will be Saturday, Nov. 1, starting at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson at 11 a.m., also free to attend. 

Svalina stated that he is excited to be staying at the Poetry Center, sharing surrealist dreams with the people of Tucson. Having been into poetry and writing his whole life, turning to it as a way to get by, he shared, “I literally have no other way of envisioning my life. It’s sort of my core identity, pretty much.” Svalina said.

For more information on Mathias Svalina’s dream delivery service, visit his website, and for the dream history tours, visit the Poetry Center’s calendar.