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"

Requiem For Our Unconscious Friendship With Spirit, a Paradise Lost

In the description to the above post of Zbigniew Preisner's "Requiem for my friend" written to commemorate the death of brilliant filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski, a quote from John Milton reads, "Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth unseen, both when we sleep and when we awake." From Paradise Lost, Book IV Lines 675-6

"Evil into the mind of God or man
May come and go, so unreproved, and leave
No spot or blame behind: Which gives me hope
That what in sleep thou didst abhor to dream,
Waking thou never will consent to do."

From Paradise Lost, Book V, Lines 117-121

These lines speak to me today, as in yesterday's dream I experienced from myself such burning intense rage as I never feel for anything, never mind, as in my turmoiled sleep, directed at the smile of a new friend. And in the day after, the crooked seething in waking light transformed to deja vu and the peaceable contemplation of homeless sky, observing the street life and empty catharsis of the unreproved recollection of day, gathering myself inwardly to confront the daimonic psyche through an entropy of silence, night and dreams.

See my Reflection on Preisner's "Silence, Night and Dreams"

________

Two Latin men, both uncles of the word, they are as family, a safe haven of fraternity. Their abode, in relative disrepair, offers the kind of humble solace for a younger counterpart such as myself. When my family arrives to take me away, I shed tears of remorse for having become so loyal to their gentle friendship. Almost having left with a few of their possessions, they do gift us a curious metal mug, bedecked with silver broaches and a handle of aesthetic opulence. They warn us about a nearby volcano. If we are to mount, they say, we should not mount the East side, as the activity may fuse in a plume in that direction. 

With naïve innocence, adventurous, I lead my parents up the steaming mountain. Near the summit, the rumbling foment cracks the ground in a spray of unwelcomingly hot earth. Racing down to the foot of the mountain, the flowing lava is within earshot as the steam fills our lungs. Before the raging momentum engulfs us in its deathly cast, I raise the mysterious chalice to the sizzling winds and behold, the steam is vacuumed with the power of the entire energy of the volcanic surge into the mug, the handle remaining tepid at the touch. 

________

Interpretation: "Borges on Volcanic Riddles of the Unconscious"

________

"that squirrely rascal who defended his money based on numbers and licks,
a body caressed with growing sores,
living excrement fumigating the stringy jewish marriage,
wafting scrawny alzheimer's brains over the stovetop dream,
fanned and purring as the asian lynx,
whose stormy eyes behold the revolution
behind the First Kingdom's daring ring"

...

"where words exist as bones and sculpted mountains
fire myths into the freed air"

- excerpts from "unreliable fortune"