Exposing Consciousness ~ Expanding Subconsciousness ~ Entering the Unconscious
Primarily a writing exercise, this dream journal-inspired blog is a quiet introspective sojourn into the process that we traverse in going from private dream to public art. I see our dreaming as an internalized mythmaking. As I philosophize and expressively exhibit dreams, both private and public, I encourage and delight in creative language as a way to practice experiential metaphors through a “public dreaming." Writing Theory: Creative Dream Fiction
Has a instantaneous image from dreaming or creating or imagining ever floated amiably by through your waking lens?
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One afternoon, I woke to find a red balloon floating in my windowless bedroom. The door was shut. As to an atmosphere from the imaginal realm, the scarlet balloon lifted, fading from the perception of my open eyes, slowly flooded with the light of the earthly sun. The light of dream had penetrated my waking consciousness. The red dream balloon had crossed into my waking mind.
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Balloon
"Blighted hopes and adversity come with this dream. Business of every character will sustain an apparent falling off." (iDream)
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“zany paradigms of falsehood croon beaming lost in a dream.”
high, driven alive awry by and by lively inside my mind, finding a screen to need in freed [ ]
wakefulness, asleep calling beyond to meet the naked beauty afraid, open
"Dreams cannot be realized, but everyone has a dream, isn't it? Let's not talk about big dreams, just small ones." - Chinese migrant worker at Foxconn
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The overcast sky is doomful and apocalyptic in its bitter
majesty. The obscurity is cutting and breaks down the soul, memory vanishes at
every instant under its featureless gaze. Intricate sky-trains run through the
horizon and above the city outskirts, buildings are heavy with the shadow of
exceeding industrial progress. Underneath the mastery of technologic ingenuity,
residencies are ramshackle with a past stunted by mysterious misdirection. This
is Xi’an, the ancient capital of China, reduced to a highway market under the
unceasing black smog gathering above. On a dim street, I follow an acquaintance
into his apartment. I reminisce on my time living in the dizzying
neglect-ridden suburbs of Cairo, where once a Southern Sudanese lady told me I was tough for living there! I enter
the swelling door, busted at the edges. The room is drab, yet with hard-won
charm. My friend appears with the build of a martial arts practitioner. He
welcomes me eagerly to enjoy his space as he exits. I am stricken with fear in
this unsure, foreign nightmare. A closet door then opens, revealing a
neighbor’s apartment. A man, half in pajamas, greets me courteously and
comforts my anxiety with friendly exchanges. I am left to a broken television,
indiscernible Chinese books and near-broken furniture.
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Train
"To see a moving train in your dreams means you will soon have reason to make a journey...Freud said that the train is usually a phallic symbol and that a train going through a tunnel represents intercourse...Jung though that the train ride represented the way a person moves and behaves just like everyone else and that you the dreamer may be striving for wholeness."
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spurious blame...the corridor towards bristling american fame. and glum, rock-stopping angelic veins
bellowing green mud into a ghastly, shattered dome factory cone rummaging into the asshole wounded entrances of el-hind museum embellishments veering off the possible pathway sworn to ruining
nursed to zero wanting defiled rambling on the cursed block
nomad goal always westerniz'd to mean not-a-thing!
crazy intellect brine unfeeling as the dreaming vedic horse that destroys
cruel menacing peace in the morbid fashions of contemporary lividity
...
“seeded sickness, martyr'd in the glass caverns of shap'd reckoning calling forward a landless vanishing as the finished evocations of dynastic slavery trains the eyes of a rat-fish bestial love”
“groping for home, just say... what there is to not say... give me a thinn'd breach of time and place, wake me from the driveling selflessly thrash'd disorder or invite emotional nothing, and non-thinking indulgent visitations."
the trunk swirld for a banish'd world created from the nearly unmade
a timeless ocean of intent, bespoken with visceral imagining
the spontaneous friend, as nonhuman entity alleviating the pinkish, boring stress coarse as a matchstick curved with lint from a monotonous parasite of recycled minuteness.
As a fledgling artist whose writing creativity catapulted him into the realm of visual art, I never dreamed to exhibit such art publicly beside truly innovative and dedicated artists of a high order. Such dream creativity sparked when I stumbled upon Asemic Writing. Simply, I am drawn to my writing craft from a visually creative standpoint as a youth whose eyes were pressed to contemplate the magic of the Hebrew alphabet, and its sheer visual wizardry.
I find myself whirling through the lushest forestation, a
gripping riverine jungle, and I float recklessly down the coursing flow of its
river in a dugout canoe. Many times I follow others, as they whip in and out of
half-sunken tree trunks. The mossy greens of all shades mixed with the reds,
blues and yellows inland express a whole range and host of wildlife and
biodiversity. I am immersed in the heart of this living being. Suddenly, as I
begin to think, what if I come across a waterfall, I will surely be flown off
its edge without heed at the velocity with which I row through. So, I slow
down, and lo and behold, I near a waterfall. I see many other canoeists
marooned atop the waterfall, and to my surprise, a few of them are handicapped.
I wonder how they got here! As we all look for a way down, one young man in a
wheelchair dips over the edge of the waterfall embankment to the fright of us
all, and almost lunges headlong over its edge, however he remains on safe
ground. More to the side of us, a tramcar gondola seems to have been installed
for just the reasons we need. I help the handicap travelers to hitch their
things on the gondola line on special hooks meant for collapsed wheelchairs and
walkers of different kinds. We all board the tramcar gondola.
Next, I find myself immersed in the village life of the
jungle. There are dark-skinned women with satchels carrying infants and sacks
of fresh vegetables. We ask about the local origins of their food. They seem to
be living an ideal environmentalist way, with foods only brought from nearby
villages by the same means that we had arrived from the river. This gives them
enough diversity in their food that they could ever wish with such an
unindustrialized forest, thick enough to give privacy at any moment’s notice!
As I begin to spend some days in and around the village, I feast upon the
luscious fruits and raw beauty of their sustenance that they so pleasantly
offer without hesitation. I even come across one Rastafarian man, who slightly
resembles the lead character in the film, “Countryman” but also Bob Marley
himself, who sitting amongst locals as if they were his own, provides me with
some kindly living wisdom.
After I exit from the jungle, I next find myself in a
beautifully set convention room for a new civil society organization. This is
my Cultural Fulfillment Center come to life! There are pictures of immensely
successful inventors, travelers and social justice activists of all types
wandering around the room to view the open house presentation of all the
achievements each of the members has brought to the table and combined for the
efforts of the center. My poetry, in the form of the collection, “Exotic Settlers” lies piecemeal on the wall. I am slightly embarrassed that it is
showing, and even though people are very keen to see it. I stumble on my own
feet in facilitating their knowing about my activities and background.
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Waterfall
"To dream of a waterfall, foretells that you will secure your wildest desire, and fortune will be exceedingly favourable to your progress. Dreaming of a waterfall symbolizes beauty and grace. It may represent your goals and desires."
"They’ve actually brought so much attention to our community that I think right now we really are on the verge of a Latino Renaissance. It’s beautiful, all around art, because only art can save us."
"They’re scared that we will overhaul the government through voting them out of office. And that’s exactly what’s about to happen, because what’s wrong is they’re sabotaging the American Dream for our young, and for everybody." - El Librotraficante(as seen onDemocracyNow!)
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The Banned Book List includes around 90 Books, below are a few that caught my eye!
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paolo Freire - Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, by B. Bigelow and B. Peterson - A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present, by H. Zinn - Occupied America: A History of Chicanos - Puro Teatro: A Latino Anthology, by A. Sandoval-Sanchez and N. Saporta Sternbach - Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems, by J.S. Baca - Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, by J. Kozol - Mexican American Literature, by C.M. Tatum - Civil Disobedience, by H.D. Thoreau
Read these books! Start Banned Book Readings! Honour and Treasure Our Diverse Literature!
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It’s a windy spring day over the artificial green grasses of
a New England suburban park. Poet Tree is angles into view through my
perspective, as if seen through a filmmaker’s lens. He begins reciting diligent
lines with a fascinating edge. Almost as soon as he begins, the piece is ended,
though now, the cool breaths of night play over the treetop sunset. The night
in this town is a life or death truth. The cut rug of hospitality has its clear
lines of disillusion for everyone with bad luck. In and out of the fire escape
stairways beside brick fortress alleyways, I push on past the escalating
traffic to my space and time. Inside my crooked little haunt, the VCR is
malfunctioning. I play classic exploitation films from the 1970s, boom and bust
raw in the piercing fire of aloneness. Walking outside from my unlocked door,
my surroundings foretell the great epoch of Hong Kong, known in such a film as
“In the Mood for Love”. I’m outside in the Chinatown midnight and it’s as
lively as mid-day. Food is still hot off the oven. One sticky-mouthed Chinaman near
a heated tray of veggie-covered noodles asks about my wife. “She’s not at
home?” His lazy English tongue burns upon my already branded aching, any one
can see it in my eyes. A love as hot as the sun drains my blood in every
instant with a magic touch, changing from burdensome to lightening in every
unpredictable way. “She likes to go out, speak Cantonese with her people, be a
part of her culture,” I said glowingly, appreciating his kind interest. In our
apartment, as I take out the soon-broken VCR tape, my one feels behind my
shoulder. “What grace?” I know. The dim, cornered light is perfect, it is her
night.
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Movie
"If you dream that you are playing a role in the movie, something from your unconscious is about to be revealed. It can also mean you are getting to play a new role in your life and go down a new path." (iDream)
ransomed jungles breed aphrodisiacal wonder in a donkey’s emergent and effulgent touch within the heart of a reading child…hearing the pains of their ancestors in the black print façade of their enduring minds…a helpless urge to forsake the painless tree’s shade and reason with the governmental storage of thought on fire…to bring peace to the unwelcoming hoards armed with scales and the sheer brevity of a reptilian dystopia
I walk into an ecological sanctuary where exotic plants and
fish thrive in a hot greenhouse. The humid air transports one to a
transcendence of spatial dimensions, wherein time breathes with the quickening
pace of an intensified microcosmic environment. Jungle leaves brush against my
face as lotus-bloomed lilies freshly spring from the fish-born soup of
breathable life in the density of my deeply woven surroundings. A plant
scientist and professor live in a nearby hut within the transplanted immersion
of moderate rainforest. Also an active marijuana enthusiast, he keeps to
himself, remote behind a fastened wall of swollen wood. I and a few friends
meander through the delicate passageways, magically mysterious fruits and vines
hang down with a gift of flowering beauty unknown to our Massachusetts scents. Our eyes glisten in
the cool dank inner workings of such magnificent spires as they that mount upon
the blank calm of a recess and serenity in this isolated outgrowth of our
Earth’s most advanced biological developments.
As we glide effortlessly, weaving in and out of the
rejuvenating corridors, a glint of an eye sparks in an unseen corner. The walls
open to encompass the ever-widening viscera of inbound flora. A blue panther
sneaks beyond the encircling brush, masked by the glowing façade of a charged,
fearful night. We are unprepared. Dropping everything, we rush headlong into
the deepest corridor, seeking refuge. This otherworldly animal, prehistoric and
enigmatic, bleeds into the folds of any remaining sensation of physical
security. We manage to find refuge beneath an enclosure of tables. Frightened
beyond the immediacy of thought, we smash the external glass of the sanctuary and
carefully stretch outside into the neighboring cold, modern presence of the
un-bubbled Earthly night.
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Jungle
"The jungle in dreams represents the wild, passionate side of your personality. How you feel about the jungle in your dream indicates how comfortable you are with this side of yourself." (iDream)
“The great events of world history are, at bottom,
profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life
of the individual.
This alone makes history, here alone do the great
transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the
world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources.
In our most private and most subjective lives we are not
only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers.
We make our own epoch.
C.G. Jung, 1934"
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We climb the old-fashioned narrow wooden staircase to the humble apartment where my grandfather was born in Lower East Side Manhattan, 1915, into a family of Greek immigrants. The colors of the neglected wood panes and creaking floorboards radiate with a rustic golden aura. The internal structures are mostly charcoal etched, as a black and white drawing, pockmarked with rough patches of oblique pitch darkness. I am accompanied by my Iranian friend who peeks in abandoned night table drawers. Searchingly, he endeavors to reach through a pile of handwritten pages and small books. He begins talking to me about Eduardo Galeano, all the while correcting my Spanish pronunciation in conversing over the dense terminology. At that, he leaves with a few leaves in his coat jacket. I stand amid the bare walls, as the airless womb of my ancestral birth in this country is revealed. I sit at a gothic typewriter. Copious thoughts string in a massive upheaval of soundless striving through the mind of a creational writing that ceases only with pure death, and at once, below me are the distracted lives of my parents. Their televisions blare mindlessly with brainwashed floundering. I empty a nearby drawer, seeking madly for a worthy object, a true talisman, to invigorate my standards of inspiration before this all-consuming pyre of human intentionality, transmogrified by the immense distance of a screen and its subjects never felt by palm or breath. Does their lower meandering mirror my own creative origins on lettered key before the abstract maw of my own typographic lore?
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Typewriter
"To see a typewriter in your dream indicates that you need to open the lines of communication with someone in your life." (iDream)
"Little bird, I dream of you, little bird / Little bird, I dream of you, little bird"
- from "Malaika" favorite song of Miriam Makeba, also known as Mama Africa
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“It all started when we began busking” she eyed me cruelly,
feeling distant as ever while my scanning eyes pierce through the dizzying
array of salacious bodies. The cutting immensity of decadence harbored on this
night pours into our uniquely sized and filled glasses with an escalating
temperament, roiling above our heads as a foreboding torrent.
I call into my childhood school from Alberta. Anxious as ever, I need to cover a
deadline, before the end of spring. “I will not be present! Count me out!” as
my letters turn to poetic dissertations on the finality of my language
experiments, careening over a maelstrom of an ill-conceived message.
Back at the opulent restaurant table in Calgary, different sized glasses and their
respective bottles and pints adorn our dining area. High end whiskeys, beers
and wines flow into the embittered majestic glares at the end of a Canadian
winter, survived now in the meager worries of our sex-pampered minds. My wife
beside, is marked by an intense anxiety.
Exiting the table, I endeavor through night-fallen passes in
these drought-severed western plains. Magically, the air breathes with
otherworldly hosts. A threesome of burka-clad young girls strides deliberately
from an outstretched grove, slowly needing life to burst through its seams of
wintry bark. They disappear at the edge of a mysteriously placed river. The
night is confident upon its paramount hour on which it enshrouds the hidden
world in a veil of the spectacular above. I find a clearing. The new moon tears
into the sky with quiet appeal, yet the starlight and planet’s reflections
intermingle upon the wooly grass. The aura of Venus, Source of Love, kisses Jupiter, God of Power.
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Planets
"Dreaming about planets could represent desire to explore either our internal world or the world of our egos (the external or physical world). Planets could also represent deeper things such as the way that we relate to ourselves. They can say something about the relationship that exists between our soul and ego...if what Carl Jung said is true, all dream images bring us back to issues of self-identity and profound understanding of self." (iDream)
“HAMAD DREAM OF 2030 IS NOT APPEARED YET IN BAHRAIN!...HAMAD YOU ARE A DICTATOR” - from a protest sign at beginning of film
“I feel really alone. Whether it was a democratic country or an authoritarian country. All of them acted the same when it came to us. I discovered that my humanity is a subject of discussion. Should I be killed in the street or not be killed? Based on the interests of the United States or Saudi Arabia or other countries. It’s the killing of a dream.”
“When I’m sleeping, a lot of times I dream we are returning to the roundabout. To this day I dream it is there. I don’t feel it is broken.”
"This [facebook] page was a virtual lynch mob, focused on a 20 year old girl, named Ayat al Qurmezi. She had read a poem criticizing Khalifa and the King at Pearl Roundabout. The page asked thousands to participate in defaming her honor, and demanded her arrest and torture in prison. It wasn't long before they got their wish. Masked commandos broke down the door of her family home and took her to prison...After three months in prison, Ayat surfaced for this apology on state TV, which the family says was obtained by electric shock torture and forcing her to open her mouth while army and police officers spat in it."
- from "Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark" by May Ying Welsh of Al-Jazeera, the only journalists who stayed
"I have not yet finished forcing every candle of dreams (youth) on this motherland..."
- line from the poem by Ayat al Qurmezi which led to her imprisonment, translated by Mohamed Al-mahroos
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I had come out of a bedroom, pajamas and all, to greet a few friends. Sitting patiently and in reserved calm is my wife and a local actor in town, sitting outside in the main room of my abode. I begin talking about recent books I’ve read. I start talking about a book on the subject of black history in the American South pointed at the presence of the actor, who I only recently became acquainted with. I continue to divulge in The Inconvenient History of Brazil, which I learned received the greatest influx of African slaves than anywhere else. She is sweet and doesn’t mind me carrying on. In another room, my brother and a friend are worriedly arguing about how to get to Los Angeles, specifically to have more drinks. Ignoring them, I saunter out of the house and find my way to a nearby bus stop.
Small trickles of rain bear down on the fogged windows of the bus as we cross through a muddy swamp area. The bus driver is exceptionally personable and a great comfort, in total control. In mid-conversation, I ask to be dropped off at a local convenience store. The cold, wet ground feels like a vent of sticky moisture from the saturated soil. Immediately outside the door, three homeless Aboriginal people kneel prostrating outside the store entrance, while one of them, a middle aged lady takes to a free gift of exceedingly processed fast food. I enter, greeting the store owners. As I look out the window, I see a group of girls in beachwear catapulting themselves off a nearby roof for the humorous purposes of landing on a trampoline. I walk out to get a closer look. The first lands extremely short, the second a bit further and right on her spine. She gets up aching, only to watch a third catapult far beyond the trampoline’s distance. Her impact is felt with crushing intensity as she writhes in a split-second. Witnessing, one can immediately tell her thigh must be broken. I then enter the store again, and with uncontrollable laughter, we are outraged by the stark contrast between the different kinds of help needed around the store.
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History
"To dream that you are reading history, indicates a long and pleasant recreation."
Rain
"A powerful symbol of renewal and spiritual cleansing...Interpretation is contingent on your current circumstances as well as the kind of rain that is falling...Depending on the dreamer it could suggest a period of renewal and fertility (reproduction or creativity)."
Help
"If you dream that you help someone, or someone asked you for help, it means that you will succeed without needing help from anyone."
(iDream)
_________
can you tell me why you want to lose your minds?
“is the mind not a functional device?
a stronghold of impurity, though weak as a right?
a vile desire entrenched in the quickening of race and drabness?
or old as a tire-stretched din?"
shrieking at dawn with favored kids,
roped to the sound in time
only for a moment
“to flesh out the wicked rot
a spawn of loss and un-coped wires
fuming ghastly as the corpse
that smoked wild smoke
and leapt to a magic unseen and disbelieved
except by the weeded out freak-smiling lawmakers at dawn”
the hopeless mold sweetens through an unearthly jail
round toxic commotion encircles in ash and loneliness
wakefulness opens to the sole breath of god
and waiting awhile for the noose tightened,
alas around the saviors brightened tooth shown under a restful laugh...
"I've been sitting behind the loom since I was a kid. My mom is a good weave. She weaves rugs, you see in a dream."
Belghies
"I don't dream of rugs. I had a dream about you a few nights ago. You were flying with a lot of birds. I shouted, "come down." But you didn't pay attention. Suddenly, I was as on top of a hill. There was a wedding down there. It was a beautiful wedding. I ran towards the bride and groom. Then I saw you. You were sitting under a tree. There were birds all around you. I ran towards you. Then I just woke up."
- from "Daughters of the Sun" an Iranian film by Maryam Shahriar
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A few friends and I cut through the wild coastal thicket. We are scrappy ruffians and troublemakers, lifting the unmarked passageway with careless abandon through brier patch and horizontal woodland vines. A walk through the forest such as this spells mischief. We come to a house and trespass eagerly. After entering the house and snooping about, the residents return home. It is a Chinese family, home from a dinner in well-dressed attire. We scram and they barely notice without taking much heed to our presence. My friends turn back afraid of any more close calls. I wander off, aimless into the unending chaotic web of brush.
Years later, I exit a farmer’s market with a girlfriend. Our friend, an East Indian man picks us up in an SUV. As we drive along, he manages to pick up another friend, East Indian as well. Getting seated in the car, he passes snacks through the car and then makes an incredibly demeaning, however unintentional comment towards the girl in the car. We are all stricken with disappointment, as he quickly corrects himself. After an uncomfortable silence, he is let off out from the car earlier than expected. On the side of the highway, he stares at me bitterly and says, “When you look in its eye, ask yourself, do you see a snake?”
The last image of the dream, in a split second, a painting appears, gold painted with foam matting, a white stripe cuts vertically and pushes across horizontally at about the middle of the painting, on the other side of the stripe is a deep, patchy red, each with a bright yellow capsule shape embedded into the color plates.
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Forest
"Dreaming of a forest signifies a feeling of being lost or confused. You are having difficulty finding a solution for a situation or problem and do not know how to conquer it."
Serpent
"A powerful dream symbol associated with feminine energy, healing and spirituality...In the long run the snake may be a positive symbol, it may represent difficulties that lead us to the center of personality and result in feelings of completeness."
(iDream)
________
gasp.
and no more
in the walk
to ultimate freedom
awaiting
pleasant as her dream
beckoning
the wall
to no more,
no more
destind failure or washd up foolish hunger
“and where was our lost flesh sent to?
to what mind do we owe the greatest thanks and hate”
"...in graduate school one of my advisers, I spoke to him one morning, he was doing research on star clusters that have these huge orbits around the center of the galaxy, he said he had a dream the night before where he was one of these galaxies and he was orbiting the center of the galaxy...if you start becoming in your cosmic dream, I want to have those dreams because then you think creatively about what remains to be discovered."
- Neil deGrasse Tyson in "The Poetry of Science" presented by The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science on September 28, 2010
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I’m climbing the stairs in a long, thin rectangular
building. I’ve been trying to follow a friend of mine who is taking a course
with a professor of geography. In the college campus, I seek this professor.
When I arrive to the group of students situated outside of a classroom at the
very top floor of the building, the professor had already left them to an
assistant. Curiously, we move out through a glass door and onto the roof.
Interestingly enough, we are at a ledge overlooking the plains of Southern Alberta at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. As we
look out towards the horizon, strange mountains have formed, quite unusual to
the local terrain. The professor’s voice rings as from above, sounding like a
loudspeaker overhead. He tells us about the mountains ahead. They are sparsely
topped with fluorescent greens and ruddy earth reds and light browns, forming a
seemingly endless carpet of medium-tall peaks at about uniform height draped
over with the shadows of roaming clouds. “I have known the endurance in
traversing beyond the range.” He speaks to us coldly with matured foresight as
to the near impossible natural impasse. As the students begin to clear, my
searching eyes see traces of industry. Train tracks appear, passing directly
into the heart of the range.
_________
"A mountain dream is used by the subconscious mind to tell us that we have many obstacles to overcome and they will be large ones and almost insurmountable." (iDream)
_________
spiraled dawn fractured by a scintillation
inspiring madness divine on the cemetery backwall laugh
uprisen as a hand, freakish to the crack of lying dreams
prepared, as spilled ash freezes in a line trembling freer than a rocked flash
“oh god entice this sickness to crash on the empires doorstep
last before the carnage to fall quakes in the morning
with a demonesque call to become the jeering weasel
creaking easily as high distance in fright, and lost”
“…Zulus called M-kulu-kulu, the first spirit. When first spirit had passed over some of his power and some of his responsibilities to the human being, and the human being had a god-like task to perform in creation, and the extent to which he performed it, he derived his meaning, that’s a very important part of Jung’s thinking.”
“…it sometimes takes half a lifetime to get somewhere in one’s psychological development…psychology has also the aspect of pedagogical methods in the widest sense of the word…it is an education, it something like antique philosophy and not what we understand by a technique, it is something that touches upon the whole of man, and which challenges the whole of man…”
“…my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life…All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams…
C.G. Jung, 1961”
The Natural Laws of Analytical Psychology
“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.
That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.
C.G. Jung, 1959”
“To me the unconscious was then, was a matrix, a sort of basis of consciousness of a creative nature, namely capable of autonomous acts, autonomous intrusions into consciousness.”
“Consciousness is one factor, and there is another factor equally important that is the unconscious that can interfere with consciousness any time it pleases…I think I am the only monster in my house, but I must admit that there is another, somebody in that house that can play tricks…”
Founding New Community Dreamwork
“We [Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud] were together every day, and analyzed each other’s dreams.
C.G. Jung, 1961”
“You have to think at the beginning of psychoanalysis it took an enormous amount of moral courage to face these facts which so far had not been considered, or repressed.”
“…our totality is not complete unless we take our human failings into it…they are not only part of me but they are part of every human being, that is to say, it is part of man.”
- from PART 2 of "Matter of Heart" documentary
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Narrow corridors in a slim, tall building echo in a top floor with the click of doors shutting and opening in unison. A hand calmly waves me in through the corner of an opening. I glide into a classroom setting and sit down simultaneously watching myself begin to read a poem to an otherwise detached oblong room of students. I am nervous for myself, watching my anxious face peer down onto a sheet of paper. Have I done this before? I smirk as I begin. Images lurch forward into my mind with an effortless cinematic sweep, at once interrogative and charming. The reading ends with confident resolve. I am relieved, with a new sensation of unassuming pride.
_______________
"To give a reading, or discuss reading, you will cultivate your literary ability." (iDream)
_______________
The wine mildew sunk and spilld caressing the unearthd wizardry of yearnin for the lanky blessd panegyric gong that hung to mine; the meccan youth judged to the spike of a bestial frame, calld to throatsing the burnt fungi of a stinking dungeon, smouldering, and challenge the furtive upbringing of a snaky eyed Jew, bloody as the few ethnic spines that learnd of another god, now say slowly:
“The joke,
of a ghoul
bursting at the weasel
- astringent chimes -
wedgd into a prairie
fanned to the thickbodied beggar
playin a screw for a watch
“‘Swamped by the knowledge of external objects, the subject
of all knowledge has been temporarily eclipsed to the point of seeming
nonexistence.’
C.G. Jung 1946”
“He means that what happens psychically is the real reality
and this other moon, this stony desert, that’s illusion, that’s only
pseudo-reality.”
“He said, ‘You know, I’m only an old African who finds he’s
God in his dreams.’”
- from PART 1 of "Matter of Heart" documentary about C.G. Jung
__________
In a huge reception hall, with round tables, I sit at a table with my wife at a family reunion for my Dad and his side of the family. My dad quickly rushes over to us, simply to let my wife know that she is loved and cared for. I walk across the room to see my grandmother. She is very happy to greet me and asks if the musician at the front end on the stage can play a popular blues song. I go over to the front stage. Light pours in from the warehouse doors. Curiously, the light is a dim predawn glow. The musician is a good friend of mine, the younger brother of one of my best friends. He is bringing in his piano. I am delighted to receive him in the hall for my family, and he appears ready to entertain.
After the reunion events have finished, night begins to fall. I find my friend and we begin to go biking across a high ridge along some hills in the prairie groves. We bike all night, as we enjoy the frosty air precipitate with the coming of dawn. As we bike along a final ridge along the hills before breaking off the forest path into the urbanized valley below, we see a great huge sign, saying “be saved!” and people rush madly like vermin past a monstrous department store sign into the unnatural intensity of the warehouse lighting stretching out into the dark street like shards of glass. “To save or be saved?” we ask frustratingly, passing beyond into the immediate darkness of a fresher air.
_________
Family
"To dream of one's family as harmonious and happy, is significant of health and easy circumstances..."
"Some believe that this dream usually has nothing to do with your actual family members, but rather the male and female sides of your own personality or self." (Carl Jung refers to the animus and anima)
"If you dream of a large family this means that your fortunes in life are looking up..."
Bicycle
"To dream of riding a bicycle up hill, signifies bright prospects."
"To dream that you are riding a bicycle signifies the need to balance work and pleasure in your life."
(iDream)
_________
"only bludgeoning the scalp of a painted sky
choking graves with free dreaming
orchards poor with the rakish wife of the storm-brought blues
"I am Santiago Bar. I'm 26 years old and I work as a cook. Who would have said that I would end up doing this job?"
- from the 1st Dream Sequence in "Jews in Space" by Gabriel Lichtmann
_____________
I observe a cousin of mine who’s recently lost her grandmother as the centerpiece of a Japanese talk show. The television studio set is behind me as I watch her interviewed in a fashion befitting an American teen superstar. She sits next to a Japanese keyboardist as they begin playing some flashy pop music. My eyes zoom into the fingers of the keyboardist flying across the keys with exceptional agility. In mid-song he invites me to sit, after which the audience watches our duet. There is an overwhelming sense of anticipated incestuous romance between my cousin and me from the unusually silent excitement of the teeming crowd.
____________
Curiously enough, this film is about an anticipated romance of a kind between two Jewish cousins, which my dream points to here as well, interestingly cross-hatched by an overall dramascape of show biz.
"To dream of an affectionate correspondence with one's cousin denotes a fatal rupture between families." (iDream)
___________
to drive and arrange to meet
the feeding
worldly and distanced
urge to the fair
agreement with curse,
breathing childish meaning
to sink anxiously into a night felt
to create feeling,
I read signs, undeniable and in my immediate vision before me. The signs foretell an oncoming fate of humankind with regard to energy resources. The future is a grim façade of a past latching on through the thinly laid dreams of a survivalist upon a bed of bloody nails, a failed magic trick.
My vision clarifies with the acuity of a fish-eye optic nerve straightening over the bluff of a wide forest hill. The forest seems damaged, almost burnt, with an intense inbound potency of fear and isolation in every direction.
I am as in the middle of another world, drowned in the trauma of unbridled change, a natural force looms, ever pervading, with another history, another worldview. I seem to move under the low hovering gray of sky when the tantalizing drip of adrenaline stirs in me.
I feel a wolf near. This wolf seems more ferocious and starved than any I’ve imagined in the world before, this wolf eats human flesh. I move into a patch of dark grove, and with time edge my way off beyond the absolute wilderness of my strange, quiet surroundings.
Human song echoes across the abandoned suburban neighborhoods. The sounds are of the nature of prayer, chanted and primal. I begin to see smoke rising from a hut made from animal hide and forest wood.
As I approach, the scene quickly turns into an entirely new mode of experience outside the pale of a direct relationship with the bald face of nature, alone. Human interaction stirs a Medieval predilection.
As I near the inhabitants of the small family camp, two of my friends soon appear behind me. With swords in hand, we face off with the camp’s inhabitants. My friends are quick to be aggressive and violent, however I seem to be the most nimble with a sword and quickly disarm them so as not to harm the innocent people of the camp.
There is an air of blind unconcern for any solace in humanity, there is only bare personal need and pack mentality. I saunter off with my friends, who wonder about leaving me behind based on my insubordination, then to their ultimate liking accept me as one of the most skilled in the group. We walk through a completely emptied, silent suburban neighborhood. Once affluent, the residents have long since abandoned this obsolete way of life.
_______
An outside view
abundant hovels of eastern North America
"speak!
of a history that cowers with tragic hesitation
in a sick thirst for music
to transform the silent yawning of a near-frozen despair."
"Verily, the works of those gone before us have become instances and examples to men of our modern day, that folk may view what admonishing chances befel other folk and may therefrom take warning.
Introduction to the Arabian Nights"
"A street in Baghdad, dream city of the ancient East -"
Sheikh
“Toil –
for by toil the sweets of human life are found.”
Theif
“Thou
liest! What I want – I take. My reward is here. Paradise
is a fool’s dream and Allah is a myth.”
End of Film starlight forms a message as the thief and his love fly through on a magic carpet
“Happiness
must be earned”
_________
My face brims with a Cheshire
grin as I watch myself practicing lively positions from the Kama Sutra.
Hovering above, and fading in and out of my view in my space of “practice” His
Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada appears smiling with equal
grace directly into my eyes as I lay down under my “dakini consort” if you
will. He says to me without speaking, “Enlightenment is in a smile.” As if
never there, he fades from my vision and my “practice” vanishes with equal
mystery.
Standing up in the opaque darkness of my surroundings, I
open a door to a small theatre. My wife accompanies me, wrapped around my arm.
We are attending a slew of Spoken Word performances. The first performance
portrays a sterling might and inventive will unlike anything we have seen pass
through the English language outside of song. The subsequent acts are less
impressive however we enjoy the entire show.
Walking from the theatre venue, the road reflects the night
sky as flood lights bedeck our footsteps along the thin, snow-laden sidewalk. We
continue on without a glace forward, watching our feeble footsteps upon the icy
pavement. Without heed, we enter a rundown apartment duplex in our small,
industrial city.
As we walk in, we find there are a number of past friends
and friends of friends sitting on couches and occupying the entirety of the now
tense indoor space. The silence is masked with intensive body language, mostly
through the eyes. Our compatriots are from Colombia. I ask them about their
experiences in Colombia.
Two popular African-American entertainers, sit comfortably upon the upholstery and creaking wooden chairs. Lauryn Hill
begins an eloquent diatribe about the situation of the people in the room,
connecting the struggles of each and every one present to us all.
