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"