Ink Manifest
On “Therianthropic Dreams” by NightEyes DaySpring
“We only dream of images we already have inside of us.” – David Lynch
I’ve been wrestling with a few questions lately.
A little over a year ago I finally defined myself as a furry after nearly a decade of inner conflict. As of this year, I finally shared my identity with my loved ones. In this present moment I’ve been looking back through my past to understand how I got here. This has led to a lot of internal investigation.
Why is being a furry so integral to my identity? What unknown part of my soul connected to this fandom since the moment I found it? Why, after years of turmoil over being this way, did it finally feel so liberating to accept it?
Even before I learned about furries, I was a kid with a deep fascination for animalistic transformation. The one who pretended to be a werewolf stalking the McDonald’s playground on all fours. I can string memories like these together into some line towards the coyote I am today. There are moments of clarity, but it all still feels abstract.
So, in this retrospective longing, I found a book called “Therianthropic Dreams” by author NightEyes DaySpring. I read it wanting to know what poetry from a furry author would look like. How the physical manifestations of the body are depicted in this sincere, lyrical medium. I wanted to learn more about the therian community. And of course, the title hooked me as a feeling I’ve known myself.
The collection is a brief 32 pages, and yet I’ve been retracing through it again and again, dissecting its thematic density. DaySpring’s work is evocative and emotionally resonant. It is vulnerable in a way that many writers struggle to achieve. And even through its truly singular perspective, I find a deep similarity in the feelings it pulls out of me as a reader.
The opening poem, “The Dream-Self Never Vanishes,” is one that captures the inner conflict of discovering your own subconscious revealing itself to you. In a collection that dives deep into the dream world, we open with the reality that it can manifest.
“It’s a phase, it’s not real,
but sometimes, it is.
Sometimes I feel my ears flick,
sometimes I feel my tail wag,
and I wonder, is it a phase?”
It’s cyclical, the beginning of a journey into selfhood captured in the five-line movement from “It is” to “Is it?”
DaySpring takes us further into dreams through the imagery of moonlit forests and the patter of wolf paws in the dirt. It’s a new body that can exist in this psychological space. Fur becomes sensation, paws guide the action, and howling becomes a guttural release of emotion.
This same dream body can manifest itself through the similar power of writing. Specifically characterized by “Ink,” this imagery creates a sense of overwhelming black, but also of harnessed technology. Ink is the ability to take the dark in life and wield it as one’s own, creating a new reality for oneself. A space the author builds and the reader can inhabit.
“In the dark, I write because I must,
Digital black ink for the future.
Words to shape, words to revise,
stories to tell.”
– “Ink on Paws”
There is a grief to this collection in the verbiage of dark nights, loved ones lost, and the struggle of survival. The staggering, “Fangs & Dirt,” moves between brutal lows and powerful returns, never giving in to the weight of the world. Imagery earlier invoked by the poem, “Prayer to the Phoenix.” The cycles continue on, but DaySprings poetry is never defeatist, as so often people write. Instead, his work is one of resilience.
The collection is dedicated to two figures who have passed, both with poems about them included. I’ve been thinking lately about the way death is commemorated in the furry fandom. It is so real, and grieved so profoundly. These two memorials exist in a tactile description of furry community. They are striking in the way DaySpring captures digital distance between our avatars, and the brief moments we are made tangible in conventions. However distant we feel, we are connected together as a fandom, and we carry each other forward through communal memory.
Another pair of poems that struck me were, “The Goodbye Parties,” and “Lost at Home.” The former is a vulnerable telling of the steady loss of friends over time and the struggle of living in a place where the realities of violence against your identity weigh heavy. As someone who lives in a red state, the queer honesty of this poem is a genuine conflict I know. Do you survive in the state you love that may not love you back, even when others leave? (queer identity is another crucial theme in this book exploring identity made manifest, most notably in the poem, “Urges.”)
But the earlier poem, “Lost at Home,” circles back to this question. It reckons with the changes that time makes of the places you grow up in. But nonetheless it’s still home for you again.
“I will stay,
and with what little time is left me,
I will spend it here.
I have come home at last.”
I feel this poem in two ways. One, the assertive power in building a home for yourself, insisting on living on. The other is how it reflects the journey in finding one’s own identity. You’ve changed too. Things are different from how they used to be. Yet you’ve come back to yourself, ready to make a home in your body again.
The final poem in this collection is titled “Eulogy,” and yet it may be the most assertive of life itself.
“From an uncertain world, I go to an uncertain future,
but I follow in the path of those before me,
and in their braving of this journey,
so shall I.”
This is poetry reshaping the oppressive black of grief into the ink to write a new future. In moments of struggle, we come back resilient to fight for a better tomorrow. One we can dream for ourselves as possible and manifest into reality. We achieve this together as a community in this beautiful and weird furry fandom. And for the moment we will continue the good work until we too pass.
It’s strange what dreams reveal about the self. Much of what I write comes from the imagery that stuck with me longer than most memories. The dreams that wake me in the dawn light, where I’ll spend hours in bed dissatisfied by the lack of an ending and have to come up with one. I don’t understand the subconscious, or the dreamland, but the images we find in it may be the ones we need to pursue. They are evocative of something inside us, and we will forever question why, that is the journey.
There are so many other incredible quotes I would love to include, but my fair use is bordering on piracy at this point. So instead, I’d like to end with two quotes from books I’m currently reading that struck me in the way that moments in your life syncopate:
“Coyote power: surviving by one’s intelligence and wits when others cannot; embracing existence in a mad, dancing, laughing, sympathetic expression of pure joy at evading the grimmest of fates; exulting in sheer aliveness; recognizing our shortcomings with rueful chagrin.”
– “Coyote America” by Dan Flores
“The dance I came here to perform will be over,
and as the curtain comes down,
I shall rest in the silence, where everyone goes.
But I’m not ready to go, not ready to pass on.
I refuse to stop dancing, stop fighting –
I plan to keep living till they yank me off the stage.
I refuse to simply wait for the end,
not when there is so much to do.”
– “Chasing my Tail” by NightEyes DaySpring
You can find “Therianthropic Dreams” through DaySpring’s store link – Therianthropic Dreams | Dancing Jackal Books
And their socials at – https://bsky.app/profile/nighteyes.bsky.social
Yote In Print
by Ash Lestes