The image was hung on the wall in an otherwise clean and well- managed business hotel.
I can't really say that I'd ever had that particular nightmare before I checked into the room, But I know I've had it many times since.
Set atop a post on a brutal white sand beach in a stifling burlap onesie -- a onesie that one would have to have been sewn into, for it had no zippers, buckles, buttons, or Velcro.
What was the nightmare? To be seen, while not seeing? Suffocating slowly -- held under the high tide with waterlogged cloth clinging to my face? Arms pinioned as the seabirds went to work on tearing through cloth and skin in as few vicious pecks as possible -- pristine white growing blood crimson stains, running down the pole, dripping onto the sand. All of the above?
I never have a good memory of it. That's why I'm not sure that I didn't have the nightmare even before I ever saw that poster on the wall of an ordinary hotel -- far, far from home.
I’m afraid I’d be damn near unemployable in the world of dreams. If I’m not running from something or falling down, my teeth are falling out. (I certainly couldn’t get anyone to provide decent dental coverage in dream world, and I’d be suspected of Meth addiction.) Unlike the real world, in which I’m hyper-punctual, in dreams I’m always late and I often go out of doors to find myself on the other side of the world. Besides, in dreams I’m usually not lucid more than once a month, at best.
The houses are haunted By white night-gowns. None are green, Or purple with green rings, Or green with yellow rings, Or yellow with blue rings. None of them are strange, With socks of lace And beaded ceintures. People are not going To dream of baboons and periwinkles. Only, here and there, an old sailor, Drunk and asleep in his boots, Catches tigers In red weather.
Asleep on a leaf beneath lotus blooms, Their fragrance floats across the misty lake. Sudden rain - taps upon the canopy; Its sound snaps me from sleep to wide awake!
The lotus is beaded with rain droplets -- Like pearls, drops roll together and apart; The clear blobs coalesce like mercury, Dripping to the river... back to their start.
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with the golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
NOTE: This poem is also sometimes entitled, “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.”
Why fades a dream? An iridescent ray Flecked in between the tryst Of night and day. Why fades a dream? -- Of consciousness the shade Wrought out by lack of light and made Upon life's stream. Why fades a dream? That thought may thrive, So fades the fleshless dream; Lest men should learn to trust The things that seem. So fades a dream, That living thought may grow And like a waxing star-beam glow Upon life's stream -- So fades a dream.
I don't remember my dreams -- not in the middle of the night and not in the morning.
But, sometimes, I catch a glimpse at a random instant: composing a poem, reflecting on a passage from a book, eating a cracker...
But my dreams are like frightened animals, turning my attention directly upon them, makes them skitter off...,
vanishing into the thicket.
My dreams vanish like they were never really there, and I am left wondering just what I saw.
The harder I try to remember, the more severely I scrub my mental hard drive, purging all shapes and motions, until my recollection is nothing but a vague residue of feeling.
I don't KNOW that it was a dream.
I couldn't swear to it.
All I know is that it's an image that I can't tie to my waking life, can't tie to any person, place, or thing I know to be real.
(And, often enough, it's an image that couldn't exist in the real world.)
I couldn't remember it as a dream, but - somehow - I intensely FEEL that it was a dream,
but the Dream is deep down in its hole, shaking like a critter that was almost snatched up by a monster too awful to contemplate....
When I was a child,
for a time,
the bridge was out.
They were replacing the rusty
iron trestle bridge
with a thick-slab concrete
monstrosity.
I could go down to the river,
and I could see the
scarred and marred
construction site,
& the big yellow machines
that sat dormant on the weekends.
But one couldn't cross the river --
not unless one was willing to get wet,
and was a better swimmer than I
(and it was autumn & the water cold.)
It was a strong current that swept
along between two steep banks.
It was not a great distance,
nor were they violent waters.
But that brown water moved with
such smooth swiftness.
I dream about the time the bridge was out,
now & again,
and wonder what it was
about those weeks
that still has meaning to my mind.
There was a retiree named Graham
who dreamt he was unprepared for an exam.
"What a dream, you fool!
You're sixty years out of school,
and still have an impulse to cram!"
Tiger Riding for Beginners 