The Wordless Dream Language of Myth

Chinese Goddess Nuwa by Unknown

"Until we get to dreams, there is a tendency to think of stories as 'words.' In dreams we experience stories as structures and patterns that evoke images and experiences, often without words...In dealing with dreams, such noted authorities as James Hillman have instructed us to "hold the image."By 'Holding the image,' the conscious mind can begin to discern patterns and structures that can eventually reveal rich psychic content...Some have said that, 'Myths are cultural dreams.'" Ontogenic Mythotypes by G. Charles Andersen

What is the relationship between language and dream? Dream is a language in and of itself. Language is mutable to Dream Language, when traditional dream interpretation is foregone, and creative writing is utilized as a means to "hold the image" in the mind of James Hillman. Such psychological import brings to mind the psychoactive artistry of Laurence Caruana and others who have respected the imagination as a prehuman remnant of archaic information. "The world is made of language" says Terence McKenna. And so, in using that language, we may hear our mythic vocation, a calling towards that which we had never dreamed, unearthed as from the unsaid and unconscious mysteries of our own psychic invention. 

__________

What a breath of fresh air! To drink, and see. I could feel my brother’s weeping, his heart caving in his shaking flesh as he triumphed again over a nervous breakdown, carrying him by air through the over-privileged dome of Western skies. And into the darkened haunt of old coast bumhood, and the numbing agents of a musical life amid the New England smile of selfish mockery and divulging swine. The ruthless remark, a self intensified in the bitter alcoholic night, the cobblestone streets, swept of hurricane feet and tires of his once-sickened flight returning.

Lombard Landscape by Fulvia Bisi

At home, lost to the time of his forgetting, he returns, an old man in his distant youth. The tingling respite of belonging in the gutters of Eastern fame, the ruinous gold of a mind enslaved to eternal seeking, he clambered down tumbling steps of creaking wood and linoleum brains, as I stared immobilized into the dark porch silhouette. A large man sat there, with dreadlocks lower than his back, and as he lifted an ember of smoke to his lips, his dark skin shone with the muscular life of a physical laborer on break, alone, a nameless body of the historic present.

Man with a Hoe by Jean-Francois Millet

I could only see him clearly under the bar lighting. The dizzying indoor lunacy of the drinker’s habit, a hovel of bored and roughened life spoke through his bristling mouth. After the rare silence of a few pints, he ended the night with means to see each other again. And like that, he disappeared in the great fog of blackness, opaque as the light-polluted air of a once booming industrial city, now smoking upward with the final ashen gasp of smoky incineration. 

__________

“What grievous horror betook these dumb streets?”

Touched with the unkindness of a meek following
From the near elderly, an old town deemed to inquietude
...
Taking off the English hat of a long gone America
Seeing no one in the mist fired laugh from this war

Breathing ocean
Suffocated by the calm before the storm
...
Clucking behind the chicken wire of suburban fate
...
Gripping for death at the edge of the western, manifest

As nature’s law thrives in disbelief

excerpts from "Calm before the Storm"

In The Burning Memory of the Thousand-Dreamt Rimbaud

"montage en rouge: Arthur Rimbaud et éruption volcanique" by PRA

“A thousand Dreams within me softly burn” 

― Arthur Rimbaud

In the spirit of dream interpretation, I endeavour a creative interpretation of Rimbaud's oft-quoted line. All know the saying, "a picture is a thousand words" refers to the ability of the human eye to perceive new realities through the image, to a mode of internal perception awakening Dream, Realization, Insight, Beauty & Truth. Taking into consideration the outlandish tragedy of Rimbaud's life I would wonder to suggest that "softly burn" is an allegory on the fleeting nature of existence, which dream-like, escapes as a softly burning wick, where the wick is the body, tormented by the passing of life, in pain, and at once when life is realized as a dream, that passing burn is soft. Memories, awakenings, visions, are of those thousand dream-images through which the mind of the poet-seer burns, within. 

For a worthwhile initiation into another living mind revisiting this quote, please explore THE DREAMING, full of gorgeous mystical dream-mind renderings from the Yukon and beyond

________

The Hindu temple receives a multitude of bodies. Coffins too small for the eye bedeck the well-draped floor. Exotic designs move the carpeting fur under our crossed legs as we admonish the tragedy of a younger generation lost to the violent wave of an incredulous doom. The air is blameless while heavy with the intensity of childless mourning. I visit many coffins, pressing my hand over their delicately sheathed frames, wondering about the unwilling instant of realizing early death at hand. Luxurious instrumentation lightly carries our tears to the sky with a playful tabla swing, impassioned, vibrating the moment’s curse into a blessing of mysterious, celestial hosts. We supplicate for the presence of extra-human understanding.

The demons return to the doorstep of the temple. A slew of bodies fall limp to the floor, blood gushes, filling the red and gold henna-flavored carpet with monochromatic travesty. I hide myself in the ceiling. I can hear the marauders bellowing hotly underneath. Am I the sole survivor? The panicking sets in when bullets and swords pierce through the unprotected foam insulation, serving as a ceiling in between the stone encasing stone structure. The murderers smash idols and burn the priests’ fabrics. Then, they notice me. My heart shakes like a rattlesnake in a rib cage. Gently lowered by the facetious grin of a gangster, I retain my pride. Led to the doorway after bitter interrogation, I am let off, grieving now for the un-mourned, and un-passed, those whose deaths remained undreamt and survive with the turning flesh of burning memory.

_______

Temple

"To dream about a temple represents a need to be appreciated by those you love." (iDream)

_______

she, a mother-in-law, struck a few chords after work and fled to his new apt.
clean and unused, they spread genital juices all over the face of the linoleum floor,
not asking lawyers how to clean it up, they left it for dead
& fled the crime scene to her stepsister's house
where they indulged in mushroom chocolates
& fled the known universe

now legally insane, they saw themselves all perfectly unfit for more
in their mentally unbalanced state, slept soundlessly on the floor,
only he had a dream, that he was back in his home country,
though living on the border, officially, since 3,
& saw a mythical beast riding high in the military fly zone
just before the horizon, not a dragon, nor bird of sorts,
a great golden rabbit appeared, star-cast and beaten from eggshell glory

the profound gaze sent him into a subconscious stupor,
an eyes-glazed reverence serenaded his being with lightly caressing gusts
& breezes echoed sweetly from each celestial hop, the rabbit,
suddenly frozen in space
moved its ears at a lightning pace, and the resounding effect, a divine music
so piercing as to exhale a skeletal release from all human friction,
that generous, breathtaking gorge of sound streamed and crashed into depths unknown
with a lightness and eager wish for interdependent eternity

- excerpt from "how in the year of the rabbit, the pure still need things"

Statement of L. Caruana

Pandora by Odilon Redon

"Through the endless interplay of art, myth, and dream - and the underlying 'image-language' that they share - I have come to see life as a gradual unfolding of the Sacred.
At night, we speak a more ancient language. During the day, our thoughts are guided by our spoken language, as words fall into subject and predicate arrangements. But in dreams, we think in a much older way, as images fall into enigmatic arrangements which are nevertheless recognizable to us through ancient myth and sacred art."

- L. Caruana