To Dream in Red is to Uncover the Veil of Consciousness

Judge

"Yesterday, I had a dream – I had a dream about you. You were 40 or 50 years old…and you were happy."

Student

"Do your dreams come true?"

Judge

"It’s been years since I’ve had a really pleasant dream." 

Dialogue between the two principal characters in the classic filmmaking masterpiece "Three Colors: Red" by Krzysztof Kieslowski

Along these lines of artistic development towards a pseudo-scientific theory of colour, the iconic German poet, Goethe, produced a volume entitled, "Theory of Colours". While not being received as proper theoretical discourse by the scientific community, this was Goethe's prideful involution into the realm of human experience beyond the sublimities of intellectual life. 

Should your glance on mornings lovely
Lift to drink the heaven's blue
Or when sun, veiled by sirocco,
Royal red sinks out of view –
Give to Nature praise and honor.
Blithe of heart and sound of eye,
Knowing for the world of colour
Where its broad foundations lie.
— Goethe

(Quoted from Wikipedia article, "Theory of Colours")

Also, see my previous post: Reflection on Zbigniew Preisner's "Silence, Night and Dreams"

_________

I wake with eyes closed. I won’t open. I can’t look. The bed feels dishearteningly unlike where I know myself to be in my present life, yet strangely familiar to the one bedroom I never wanted to wake in again. It’s my father’s, and stepmother’s.

Bedroom in Arles by Van Gogh

Cat litter sheets and the nauseous sky pelt the window by my ear, as I smell the cheap havoc about in tepid condensation of humidity, a feeling of being too close to home, where abuse reigns on every familial plane, as a tree bespattered with the lifeless trembling of a deadly morning earthquake.

The woman at the window by Jozef Israels

I sink deeper, and the outdoors opens as an unsheathed bronze, polished and brandished for timely wielding about the nascent plain of equal hue, enlightened by the western sun. As a beckoning from Manifest Destiny herself, I trudge through the yonder horizon with a mind for exploratory happiness, in pursuit of the ear and chaff of corn and grain, the dizzying panorama of emptied wilderness, where the Vanishing Indian now only lives as a politically corrected name.

Westward Ho! by Emanuel Leutze

I tip my hat squarely to the north with scythe in hand. I wander through the flooding dusk lit pasture, a son of the mindless hate staring me in the back, now buried in the lightless flat of night’s self-awakening. 

This and two other dream narratives (21st Century Space Race of Sustainable Housing & Mindscapes Interpenetrate Dream with Reality) feature subconscious experience surfacing amid the sensual spheres of daily waking.

_________

The western pathway to slavery lies feebly
over the chasm
         As a vile whore reminds us
         to put grace before prayer

In motionless wonder,
personifying the lush diligence of an ancient society
         Dismembered at the plan of a cursed monotony
               To stare into the black façade
               and feel dreams slip through sleep,
                         In and out

excerpt from "Blind Daemon"

Andamese Teaching: From Kill or Be Killed to Communicate or Be Killed

Talking History - A Lakota Storyteller

"Myths and legends were told...usually at night around the village fire and the telling was reserved to the "dreamers" or medicine-men, the Oko-jumu...There were three ways a man, and much more rarely a woman, could become an Oko-jumu. One was by "dying" and then coming back to life, for example by fainting or by having an epileptic fit and then recovering. Another way was to be "kept" in the jungle by spirits: if a person showed no fear of spirits, it was believed that they would refrain from killing but they could still keep their victim in the jungle for a while. Yet another way was by talking to the spirits in a dream. The spirits were the dead and any contact with them either killed a person or made him or her into an Oko-jumu." George Weber. The Andamese. Chapter 23: Myths and Legends.

This study, originally from A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, is especially pertinent to the study of rites of initiation, where the primary function of this social form of belonging, not only within the human group, but with humankind's higher spiritual faculties in cohesion with subtle ecological presence. This gives us insight into the source of human knowledge, as an intergenerational narrative, and even represents the role of conflict transformation and the relegation of the aggressive principle in human nature from a kill or be killed to a communicate or be killed.

For a comparative study between the Lakota and Andamese peoples with relation to the role of dreams in the making of traditional storytellers, read From Social function to Pedagogical Function on Mythic Dreams.

_________

Tramping through the corridor of my grandparents in the Hampton hills of New York, the beige linoleum lies dirtied with a score of recent visitors, and the angel light of the winter’s day breathes with an icicle heart onto the feet of the whitened doorstop. With a running muck of puppies, my father swings the door open and shoots me out into the dizzying cacophony of wild dogs, huge and menacing. Their growling eyes bear down with starving, cannibalistic teeth.

Ceremonial Orgies by Dog-eaters by Anonymous

As my father quickens back through the warm house, the slow-motion snow gathers under my frosted eyelids, as I work myself back up to my feet in the subzero temperatures, at eye-level with a host of swarming canines, wild and diseased. I notice the back leg of one dog’s been bitten clean to the bone. Their wounded sting of necessity chokes my well-wishing brain into a heady daze of a feral calling.

Gypsy dog-killers by Anonymous

And in the mind of my love, a dream of lightening news props up our necks to an after-life view. Our grandfather, recently deceased, visits us. He’s traveled hundreds and hundreds of miles away across the entire scope of the prairies, a young man of excellent hue, whose eyes invigorate the humble walls of our sleepy apartment. Again in his prime, he offers a blessing of material coordination with our passionate, creative hearts. An ingeniously crafted wooden box, shaped of his exceptional Norwegian whittling hand I presume, is handed over, as a gift, to us.

The Willow flute by Christian Skredsvig

Within the glorious arboreal artwork, two handcrafted wooden flutes of a celestial order are presented hearteningly. They appear as long bamboo flutes, however with a sound equal to a half-Shakuhachi, half-recorder timbre. We play them with delight, and upon sounding the first note, the golden presence of our late grandfather vanishes in a heartbeat of silence; a gift from the prime centre of our earliest known life.

_________

Drift of a fist to the sky
In the activist’s pause
Before standing unannounced
At the gates of eternal misery
Where strife finds embittered ground
And the inglorious suffering breeds childless offspring
Mourning for ancestral greed
Sprouting from a native gourd
With cracked shell
Lying abandoned and weakened at the skin
With taught shell-string clacking
With fortune’s boisterous western noise
Shrinking into the mist
Without echo
From musician’s deep sleep
Over the ancient soundscapes passing
Through electric wilderness
To heart

excerpt from "Ancient Soundscapes, Scholarly Jazzdoms"

The Future of Sharks = The Future of Our Oceans = The Future of Us

Watson and the Shark by J.S. Copley 

The stigma of sharks has been with me since I can remember, having my first memories only a driveway away from the Atlantic coast. I lived under the shadow of Martha's Vineyard and Spielberg's Jaws. The above painting shows the old, now antiquated, adage that sharks are killers and need to be killed. As shown in my previous post (Reflection on "Save the Humans" lecture by Rob Stewart), sharks are not killers, and indeed their threatened survival on Earth due to illegal shark fin harvesting is as crucial an issue as climate change in the continued survival of the human species.

Read my story of activism for a shark fin free world on Media Co-op

Also see related groups Shark Fin Free Calgary & WildAid

________

Innumerable anemones, dim at the ocean floor, float and dance in the scintillating deep, a whirlwind of ocean currents spinning tendrils in the wondrous underworld of subconscious, inner space. The beauty of the sea is a palpable silence, a prenatal yearning within the sky’s reflective murder of inanimate light, into the shattered eye of a submerged mountain of a seemingly infinite myriad of species, blooming in the breathable space of instinctual lowering.

Samudramantham (Churning of the Ocean of Milk) by Anonymous 

The eye craves the strength of mammalian fear in the world beyond worlds. Octopi, shark and jellyfish sweep the wobbling invertebrate mind with a bodiless air of unlit terror. A shark darts and flees past in a show of wise defense, and the octopi bleed ink in a haze of warring tests far enough to provoke the mirage-lust end of human sight, and jellyfish, unnervingly absent as the mind’s eye sleeps in a soporific atrophy of inhuman might.

Still Life with Flowers, Shells, a Shark's Head, and Petrifications by Antoine Berjon

Memory entangles my feet with the concrete ingenuity of familial presence. At the opposite stance from my underwater lung, I breathe the damp air of a midsummer day’s stretch aside my grandfather’s elder chair. His sitting comforts me into a warm bottom, a deathless life of generative following, to stare back into the eyes of immortal sight, the human heights of belonging, and I am content, a mind at rest, awake, conscious, and filled with reverberating speech. 

_________

A dripping hunger instills those following to go beyond sleep and be
       In conscious wonderment, in the living dance
Dream today in a new and timeless breath,
       To stave off the mindless, parasitic asp
Climbing inside mind through dreamless eye-shutters
       Blocked by old-fashioned stone, brick and wooden carved hands

Holding my dancer, lover and beauty
      To the song of my dreams
Woman of my life
      Who holds no passion in sleep, and dreams awake
...
On the pedestal of a forlorn warning
      That no shore is safe in this dreamless state without dance,
Yet to sing and become a new dance and dream anew
      Before naked freedom announces song’s ending

excerpt "Impassioned Road to Being"

21st Century Space Race of Sustainable Housing

“My version of the American Dream…it’s not about having stuff, although I do have nice things and I like them, what I like even more is time, time not to have to work to pay for a lot of crap that you probably don’t really need that you bought because you think you were supposed to have it. If you don’t have a mortgage and the taxes are low, how much do you really need to keep going?”

From the film: We The Tiny House People (Documentary): Small Homes, Tiny Flats and Wee Shelters by Kirsten Dirksen

Sustainable housing and the race to own is part of the fundamental underlying psychology of American and Western life. Making the shift is becoming tougher as the laws that govern mass society tighten their hold. I live in an apartment that is 18 (width) x 21 (length) feet. I've been living here comfortably with my wife for almost two years without complaints.

Read one of my recent publications on this theme at Outward Link

_________

With unspoken clarity, the Voodoo eyes of an Andean homunculus trespasses my mind with the depth of innumerable multicultural narratives; a grandeur of spiritual insight in the night of youth’s upbringing, synchronized in the silent sweep of imaginary play and the experiential divide of my true, hard-felt ascension atop a cavern mount of an empty and dark fate. Memory brushes oblong throughout the imperceptible, brittle light, a medium of failed intent in the thoughtful bondage of gross time. I look up, and to opaque, starless night.

Effigy Bottle by Anonymous (Recuay)

The human sky of night’s imagination dawns, as a cloth of plaster and wood, incinerating in the buzz of a static electric mire of projected brain, as follicles of neurons splay magically in a host of speechless disquiet, the air is pockmarked with the living breath of subconscious flesh downpouring its rain of enmeshed golden ash onto my waking perception with the rife torrent of singular mystery, the subtle crossing, tread between inner sight and the outer eye.

Travellers surprised by rain by Hiroshige 

The mountain seethes. My father’s forecast beckons truth from my brain, spouting a translucent passion, to see through the entertaining fires of apocalyptic forbearance. Yet, it is true, and in three days, the temperature rises through the Earth. The seas boil and the atmosphere blinds with stinging fright. The core, inflamed, invites solar lust in an embrace of human extinction. The rich, whose dire plans to descend into the safety of well-stocked caves, are burnt away as the fire breathes an exhale from below, and all else are incinerated with the dry lick of the inhaled flares of our sun, dying at an astronomical rate in a cloudless space of astral silence.    

________

We drank in the rains
        Big drops that fell like ignorance
        over the spout-stopped Manhattan rubber
                Atop the fashioned grave, splitting at the seams
                         To unravel the blistering mummified dives
                                  In the panegyric future
                                  of the African ankh

...
In the breastfed porridge soup American city,
        Our children bred to be poor
              After the Baby’s boom
              turns to the Baby-bust generation

excerpt from "Daily Bread: Drug of the Illiterate"