“There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable—a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown…” —Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900:111, n. 1)

In October 1909, Miles Furlong attempted the deepest unassisted solo dive ever: a descent to the bottom of the Sea of Dreams. There he hoped to find “the navel of the dream”—the very spot from which dreams are borne, where chaos is turned to order, and wish becomes reality.

Tragically, Miles never returned from this daring voyage. In 1956, the remains of his ship—the Manifest Destiny—were discovered by a small band of Yaghan Indians gathering penguin eggs on a beach near the remote Patagonian town of Ushuaia. No evidence of Miles was ever found. After 45 years of patient waiting, his wife Ophelia requested that the Corps classify him “Lost in the Sea of Dreams, missing and presumed dead.”

Despite this, the Corps of Pheneomenal Explorers continues to hold out hope that Miles succeeded in locating the oneiric umbilicus. And perhaps he even passed through it, into the place beneath it—into that foreign land in which familiar landmarks of meaning and reference fade, in which lies the unknown…

[CPE Archivist KPG]