Dream Passage of the Day

[G. S. Carnivals]

He rolls the dice. The clitter-clatter on the tabletop wakes me from a dream. He picks up the dice and rolls them again. Another clitter-clatter across the wood. "Go back to sleep," he tells me, picking up the dice for yet another roll. "I'm just deciding the fate of worlds."

Thomas Wiloch - "The Apocalypse Is a Mirror"

[gveranon]

I was thinking of a series of dreams
Where nothing comes up to the top
Everything stays down where it's wounded
And comes to a permanent stop
Wasn't thinking of anything specific
Like in a dream, when someone wakes up and screams
Nothing too very scientific
Just thinking of a series of dreams

Thinking of a series of dreams
Where the time and the tempo fly
And there's no exit in any direction
'Cept the one that you can't see with your eyes
Wasn't making any great connection
Wasn't falling for any intricate scheme
Nothing that would pass inspection
Just thinking of a series of dreams

Dreams where the umbrella is folded
Into the path you are hurled
And the cards are no good that you're holding
Unless they're from another world

In one, numbers were burning
In another, I witnessed a crime
In one, I was running, and in another
All I seemed to be doing was climb
Wasn't looking for any special assistance
Not going to any great extremes
I'd already gone the distance
Just thinking of a series of dreams

-- Bob Dylan, "Series of Dreams"

[yellowish haze]

“I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?”

-- Chuang Tzu

[G. S. Carnivals]

"But suppose I start admitting weird things about Miss L? Suppose I admit that she was somehow just a dream. (Then she must have been my secretary's dream too, for she saw her.) Suppose I even admit that Miss Locher was not a girl but actually a multi-selved thing - part Man, part mannikin - and with your assistance dreamed itself for a time into existence, reproduced itself in human form just as we reproduce ourselves as an infinite variety of images and shapes, all those impersonations of our flesh?"

Thomas Ligotti - "Dream of a Mannikin"

[Aetherwing]

"Dreams make no promises."

Graffiti seen on a wall beneath a suicide in an alley,
Sandman # 12
Neal Gaiman

[G. S. Carnivals]

"'But how could I have desired this to be? I now wonder, fully sober following my debauch of dreams. Perhaps I am too repentant of my prayer and try to reassure myself by my very inability to give it a rational place in the history of the world. The mere memory of my adventure and my delirium, I expect, will serve to carry me through many of the barren days ahead, though only to abandon me in the end to a pathetic demise of meaningless pain. By then I may have forgotten the god I encountered, along with the one who served him like a slave. Both seem to have disappeared from the vicoli, their temple standing empty and abandoned. And now I am free to imagine that it was not I who came to the vicoli to meet the god, but the god who came to meet me.'"

Thomas Ligotti - "The Prodigy of Dreams"

[Nemonymous]

I must thanks GSC for discovering that last quote about R Mildeyes and dreams. It was a forgotten dream I've just rediscoverd thanks to him!

[G. S. Carnivals]

‘What do you want the money for?’

He stared across the large leather-topped desk, empty except for a blotter. His eyes were sporadically hidden behind glasses that reflected the window with the rhythm of his head movements, much like a pair of erratic lighthouses. So, the power of the stare was magnified by my inability to follow his look...

‘To ease cash flow problems.’ It was a pretentious way of saying I was stony broke. Better than showing him the holes in my pockets.

I eased out into day-dreaming: the bank manager was laid out in an open-topped coffin, one with curlicue knobs on. Sovereigns rested upon his eyes, glinting in the communal flame of many closely-stemmed candles. His hands, embossed with ring-studs of onyx and old gold, were poised in tranquil prayer upon the imperceptible rising and falling of his chest. The cuff-links were designed in the shape of black horses...

I unravelled myself from reverie, only to find it was my turn to say something. Conversations tend to be like that: duties on both aides (except, of course, my late mother, who’d only required someone’s silent face to bounce off a continuous flow of gossip and counter-gossip).

‘Sorry, could you please repeat the question?’

'What security can you offer on a loan, Mr White?'

I found myself idly looking out of the bank’s high rise window, where light was quickly dying from the sky. It was as if blueblack ink was seeping from one quarter of the universe to the other. A herd of dark clouds stampeded over the horizon. A union jack upon the flagpole of another building attempted to flee its perch, and join the pair of long johns that had escaped from some old dear’s washing-line; no doubt to create together some act of carnal patriotism in the night sky, in memory of the world wars that have grown out of fashion...

I was again stirred from my dusk-dreaming, only to find that my friendly bank manager was searching through his waste paper bin. He had it upon his desk, one of its jagged corners scoring the flesh of the work surface. He seemed desperate to find something or other. A scrunched up ball of paper. Evidently, I’d been let off the hook, at least for a while, so I returned to the back of my mind, where I felt safest...

I returned to the front parlour of candleflame and corpse. This time, I could see the faint ringworm blotches of moulder. The patches were randomly situated, one faintly outlined in bottle green upon the cheek, others in close fester around the knuckle joints of the left hand and a particularly large one on the sole of his bare right foot, made up of inflamed pores and overnourished goose pimples, threatening to turn all the colours that a rainbow disowned. The chest still rose and fell with the rhythm of the flickering waxlight, but I suspected it was that sluggish pulse inherent in body decay which caused this mockery of life...

'Ah, I’ve found it, Mr White. I thought I’d filed it there.'

He replaced the bin under his desk with a flourish, and started unscrewing the paper he’d retrieved. I guessed it must be some computerised rubbish confirming that I was uncreditworthy, because I’d once defaulted with a company that sent me assorted stamps through the post, as a result of answering an advert in the Beano comic. Who wanted ten identical editions of a Spanish stamp hearing the moustachioed features of an old geezer who looked more like my late Dad than was good for him, anyway?

Out of the window, I could see a whole fleet of ladies’ frilly underwear sailing into the dark blow of the night.

I decided: Why the hell do I need money in a dream anyway? I stormed from the interview room, leaving a bemused pile of bespectacled chunky green slime trying to slither from the chair into the gaping confines of the wastepaper bin carefully placed to receive him.

Only the jewellery retained any sort of integrity...

D. F. Lewis - "The Loan"

[G. S. Carnivals]

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."

--Oscar Wilde

[Odalisque]

Quote Originally Posted by G. S. Carnivals

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." --Oscar Wilde

Somehow, that reminds me of "If you close the door the night could last forever"... from a Velvet Underground song.