Public Dreaming: The 1st Anniversary Post of SoJourn(al)!

The First Birthday by Frederick Daniel Hardy

Thanks to all the fellow dreamers, bloggers and visitors who have participated in SoJourn(al). Especially to Poet Tree, who has kept interest and continued to comment with unslaked interest in the content of Private Dreams to Public Art.

In the first year, this humble blogspot has garnered 10,000 pageviews from all over the world, including a whole lot from Russia!

Na zdorovye!

With a high of over 1500 views a month, that is more than many online literary journals!

In my first year of publishing creative writing, my imagination roamed freely into experimental literature as a visual experience. With a mainstay of dream journaling as a rooting practice in creative writing, and through imaginative reflections on dreaming and its awe-inspiring influence on the entirety of human culture throughout the ages, especially in art, literature and music, I have embarked on a path of creative development as a full-fledged dreamer. 

My blog, regularly updated with creative dream fiction and original poetry, features my art alongside as a complementary art form drawn from the seamless worlds of consciousness and dreaming. Inspired by the tremendous creative insights, which fulfill my being after reflecting on the wealth of imagery in dreams, whose sensual experiences are pregnant with symbolic mythopoesis, I have endeavored to experience my greatest passion, the act of creative writing, as a visual art form. 

What I originally referred to as spatial literature began its journey in the public mind with the asemic writing / post-literature community, where my work was first featured on The New Post-Literate: A Gallery of Asemic Writing. After only a few months, I have received ten exhibitions - in print, online and live at local galleries. 

The dream lives on in my daily life through the creative work of making new art, and in the unconscious wellspring of raw intentionality, to truly be an example of my art, as a positive and vibrant force of individuality. This is the greatest dream that my art reveals to me.

May We Continue Into All Forms of Consciousness to Create the Public Dream of an Art-Full World!

________

In a reprint of a philosophical musing on the experience of interpreting dreams through creative reflection on prominent imagery, or symbols, I have taken a step in another direction, a less conventional one, and one also corroborated by Freud (see my post: Free Association Beyond Symbols: The Interpretive Art of Freud) where the act of writing, is a willful and conscious movement towards free association, with an emphasis on free, which aligns with my creative aspiration, to see the entirety of my self through the lens of creative thought and its subsequent outpouring in language. Such is my raisons d'être for the SoJourn(al).

After contemplating the recent series of interpretations based on the application of generic dream dictionary usage, I have experienced the truth that in fact, the interpretation is in the writing, that meaning that in creatively writing the dream with imaginative insight into the narrative structure and enlightening detail, the interpretation is made, not as a definition or forecast, but as an act of creative impression in the waking mind of the public collective, where art and dream interfuse in a subtle rendering of meaning in the act of envisioning the import of the imagery on waking, through conscious language, yet still poetically, in a language that minds the unconscious relativity of creation, as a holistic creative act in tune with the entire phenomenal experience of being human. That finally, the dream and its interpretation are one.

As seen on my post: The Dark Ages Revivified by the Colour of Welsh Dream-Lore 

________

Interpretive Meaning

Interpret meaning in creative writing

Interpretation is the writing of creation

Meditating on dreams and the fleeting mind is to interpret

Creation is interpretation

The creative mind is interpretive

The world is open to interpretation

Create, and the mind is interpreted

Creation is the seamless measure of dream

When the unconscious is invoked in waking, a part becomes whole

Interpretation is literal recollection, a voluntary gathering of the involuntary

What is the outcome of a conscious recollection of the unconscious?

Writing is a means to creative interpretation

Writing is one way to mind the unconscious

When writing is a creative act, the mind is open to interpretation

When writing is a creative act, interpretation gives meaning

Thought, when creative, is meaningful

Silence, when thought, is interpreting

Be silent, think, and write a new interpretation

Interpretation is meaning

Interpretation is interpretation

Interpret meaning with meaning

Mean to interpret  

Librotraficante and Biblioburro Meet on the Road to Dreams

"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 on DemocracyNow!)

_________

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!

________

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. 

________

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)

________

poem for the children of the Biblioburro 

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

- excerpt from "Epistrophic Misdirection"

How All The Dreaming Began

Cyclical Wordplay

I was first turned on to Jerome Rothenberg through a keen interest in Ethnopoetics. When I stumbled upon "Poems and Poetics," I began to see the credibility behind writing a blog, where in his "prospectus" Rothenberg writes, "In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus."

JR's specific relation to Dream has been alluded to in his poetry foundation bio where it is written:

"Rothenberg has been particularly interested in the poetry of the North American Indians, both verbal and non-verbal: a poetry that can often be expressed, according to Rothenberg, in "music, non-verbal phonetic sounds, dance, gesture and event, game, dream, etc."

Patricia Monaghan stated: "[He] evokes the dream in, of, and through language more effectively than any other contemporary poet,"

Poem: Dreamwork Three by Jerome Rothenberg

__________

Eventually, I found a great online supporter, a student of Rothenberg, through "Poems and Poetics" 

This is How All The Dreaming Began, or as Poet Tree writes:

"The angels don't want to listen to your stories, for to them

Dreams are all equal, they are what got you there."

From "Momentary Anxiety"

A Procession of Shared Dreams

Corpus Christi Procession in Hofgastein by Adolf von Menzel

Orthodox Priests in Procession (dreamed by Poet Tree)

I was assigned to write a marketing brochure for Christmas that must include all the esoteric meanings, including the magi, the 12 stages of enlightenment, and the mas/death funerary aspects. This brochure unfolded in my brain as I dreamed, but it was completely lost the moment I woke up, like those Tibetan mandalas that are destroyed the moment they are created.

Transcendental Gadgetry

Apparently I migrated to a "vacant and available
house" somewhere in the middle astral domain. A
20-something guy with dark hair (who, as I later
realized, is in fact one of my very dear friends in
spirit...actually a joint/joined/shared
integration/incarnation of TWO of my very dear
friends...but that's a whole other story!) was walking
about the vacant house with me. We were discussing how
it might be used as a community meeting place.

At one point he said, "Let me check this room
out"...and literally SHOT across the room to look into
what apparently turned out to be an empty bedroom.
After checking it out, he then "reversed motion", and
zoomed back to me -- looking just like a video tape or
film loop being run in reverse! I asked, "Yo, what the
HELL did you just do...and how the HELL did you DO it,
anyway?"

He smiled and said, "Well, this helps!"...and I
noticed that he was holding in his hand something that
looked like the "remote control" to a video or
satellite receiver! I said, "WHAT is THAT"?!

He explained, "It's a time/space loop-around
transponder. It generates an energetic force field
which lets you navigate outside of conventional
time/space limitations, and basically 'fast forward'
to any place where you want to be in space/time, at
least within a bounded local domain such as ours.

Escaping the Primitive

I am with a childhood friend, enjoying the forest. Suddenly, there are wisps of arrow trails cutting through the air. One strikes a tree right next to me. I find my friend is evading an onrush of arrows. There must be at least 15 attackers. The arrows begin to fly in greater numbers. I duck and hide behind thin trees as the arrows pick up and speed and hit the trees around me with great thudding. In the tumult, an arrow strikes immediately next to my shoulder on the tree I'm huddled behind. I move slightly in the opposite direction and an arrow follows me before I can move past the thin tree trunk. I am immediately struck with a rush of adrenaline and bolt out through the forest. My friend seems to have survived, as we scatter leaves with a speed mustered only from animal surivial.

Next, we are on a ship. It seems as a migrant ship carrying immigrants across the sea. I lay back in comfort on the ship's deck. Enjoying cinema, and feeling a great pride at having passed beyond a reputation of near non-existence in a forest of mere survival instinct, enraged by the violent chaos. Soon I find this pride to be empty, and I feel no different than a bestial enemy being hunted in the thick forests of a newfound home. 

Caedmon and Dream

Caedmon is the father of English song. The first poet known in written English.

According to an 8th century monk, Bede, "...he was originally ignorant of "the art of song" but learned to compose one night in the course of a dream..." (quote found here.)


In a recent dialogue/discussion on the source of Caedmon's impact in our collective psyche the following has been written:

The first English poetry is directly intertwined with a fascinating way of exploring and/or identifying "dream"
             as inspiration or even a muse
That is so wildly intoxicating its subject

They under the spell found in the likes of Caedmon's song
             need no other medium
             through which to express their musing,
                          not even themselves

When the muse overtakes,
              all that's left is pure inspired expression
                          cast into history from a seed of dream.

How does the original source of written English "dream-speak" if you will, impart to us the wisdom of written poetic expression in the English language?

How do we reunite our written English poetry with that initial spark of dream which so moved Caedmon to inspire the entire forthcoming history of poetic expression in our written language, in our writing, and finally, in writing our dreams?


In an imaginative revisioning of a response by William A. Sigler

The bifurcation of the dream into experience and meaning is one aspect of the fall of man.


(this image is in the public domain, more info can be found here.)

Joseph, the great dream wizard of the Old Testament,
             whose powers got him both sold into slavery and the most trusted advisor of the pharaoh,

             did not distinguish between dream and interpretation.

But dreams have become,
              as Holderlin put it,

             “the all-perceiving abyss”
                      of this “destitute time.”

I sense this wonderful blog idea of yours to be more than a “waking life” journal
              that urges “dreamers unite” to “ease and relieve the burden of dreams”

              but a Holderlin-like journey
                      to the abyss,
                      the spaces between
                                 where the one is concealed and perhaps retrievable

                                 with the purest of poetic word.

Heidegger,
in his remarkable series of essays on Holderlin,

stresses that this dream space is the only trace left of our enlightened state,

the longing in dreams is the only true longing remaining to us
              now that the gods have left,
 and it is the poet’s singular task to recover these traces
              by journeying into the dream abyss with eyes open.

I’m feeling inspired
to take on a translation of Andenken
in honor of your own
transitional and open-ended state.



End Note:

Let's all continue this breathtaking and uniquely inspired dialogue!

What better place to imagine Holderlin's "abyss" than our own shrinking core of internet communications technology as it challenges us to further our reaches into our most hidden of corners in the home of our minds and most loosely tied knots on the docks of our realism.

Free Dream from Thought and Language...so we may enter Dream's innocent purity preceding its existence beside Ego and begin to imagine its refreshingly catastrophic gorgeous mastery over the human intellect!


(link to the source of this inspired dialoge/discussion)