Dreams…

Sometimes dreams move with such vivid symbolic intensity, with such glorious surprise and symmetry, they read like poems.

Dana Levin – Some Notes on Poetry: Divination, reverie, dream; The American Poetry Review (vol. 52 no. 2  March/April 2023)

being captured by the incredible

Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream — making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams […] No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence — that which makes its truth, its meaning — its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream — alone…

Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness

Dreams

You are the evening cloud floating in the sky of my dreams.

Rabindranath Tagore – The Gardener

Dreams are not a product of the logical mind

To explain away an image is to lose contact with an important visitor. Most folks who listen to a dream try to figure it out mentally. They look for what it “means.” This is a trap. Dreams are not a product of the logical mind, and when a dream is met in the way of rational thought, images get folded, spindled, and mutilated to suit the rational mind. When we approach dreams with an agenda to interpret or judge, the living image becomes stagnant, fixed, and eventually dies.

Stephen Aizenstat – Dream Tending

Dreams…

She exists as in dreams. She has no sense of reality. She gets nervous because people are always interrupting her daydreams.

Clarice Lispector – The Egg and the Chicken

Wake from a dream

Sometimes you wake up from a dream. Sometimes you wake up in a dream. And sometimes, every once in a while, you wake up in someone else’s dream.

Richelle Mead – Succubus Blues

all is not lost…

In death – no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed.

Edgar Allan Poe – The Pit and the Pendulum

Wish for all in 2024….

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

Neil Gaiman, Journal

forest in the sea

I awoke again this morning from the dream of the forest in the sea: a dream without people or events in it, or anything whatever except the gigantic dendrites, vast masses of pale leaves, and the tideless waters, light and sunshot toward the surface, darkening to impenetrability down below. It seemed there were schools of fish, or flocks of birds, in the leaves, something that faintly disturbed them, now and then; otherwise, stillness. 

John Crowley – Great Work of Time 

Dream