Dream Passage of the Day

G. S. Carnivals

G. S. Carnivals

Our Temporary Supervisor
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"
​
 
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"
 
“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
​
 
"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"
​
 
"'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"​
 
"Prospero:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

W.Shakespeare, -The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158
 
"Well - in my dream I was, while walking in a familiar rural region, suddenly attacked by a swarm of swift-darting insects from the sky. They were tiny & streamlined, & seemed able to pierce my cranium & enter my brain as if their substance were not strictly material. No sooner had they entered my head, than my identity & position seemed to become very doubtful. I remembered alien & incredible scenes - crags & pinnacles lit by violet suns, fantastic piles of cyclopean masonry, varicoloured fungous vegetation, half-shapeless forms lumbering across illimitable plains, bizarre tiers of waterfalls, topless stone cylinders scaled by rope ladders like ships' ratlines, labyrinthine corridors & geometrically frescoed rooms, curious gardens with unrecognisable plants, robed amorphous beings speaking in non-vocal pipings - & innumerable incidents of vague nature & indefinite outcome. Just where I was, I could not be certain - but there was a powerful sense of infinite distance, & of complete alienage to the earth & to the human race. Nothing actually happened at any time - & I realised I was dreaming considerably before I actually awaked."

- HP Lovecraft writing to HR Barlow on 11 May 1935
​

Now don't tell me Lovecraft didn't have lucid dreams. :cool:
 
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“Parisian Dream” (pub. 1857), by Charles Baudelaire (trans. Edna St. Vincent Millay)

I.

That marvellous landscape of my dream—
Which no eye knows, nor ever will—
At moments, wide awake, I seem
To grasp, and it excites me still.

Sleep, how miraculous you are—
A strange caprice had urged my hand
To banish, as irregular,
All vegetation from that land;

And, proud of what my art had done,
I viewed my painting, knew the great
Intoxicating monotone
Of marble, water, steel and slate.

Staircases and arcades there were
In a long labyrinth, which led
To a vast palace; fountains there
Were gushing gold, and gushing lead.

And many a heavy cataract
Hung like a curtain,—did not fall,
As water does, but hung, compact,
Crystal, on many a metal wall.

Tall nymphs with Titan breasts and knees
Gazed at their images unblurred,
Where groves of colonnades, not trees,
Fringed a deep pool where nothing stirred.

Blue sheets of water, left and right,
Spread between quays of rose and green,
To the world’s end and out of sight,
And still expanded, though unseen.

Enchanted rivers, those—with jade
And jasper were their banks bedecked;
Enormous mirrors, dazzled, made
Dizzy by all they did reflect.

And many a Ganges, taciturn
And heedless, in the vaulted air,
Poured out the treasure of its urn
Into a gulf of diamond there.

As architect, it tempted me
To tame the ocean at its source;
And this I did,—I made the sea
Under a jeweled culvert course.

And every colour, even black,
Became prismatic, polished, bright;
The liquid gave its glory back
Mounted in iridescent light.

There was no moon, there was no sun,—
For why should sun and moon conspire
To light such prodigies?—each one
Blazed with its own essential fire!

A silence like eternity
Prevailed, there was no sound to hear;
These marvels all were for the eye,
And there was nothing for the ear.

II.

I woke; my mind was bright with flame;
I saw the cheap and sordid hole
I live in, and my cares all came
Burrowing back into my soul.

Brutally the twelve strokes of noon
Against my naked ear were hurled;
And a grey sky was drizzling down
Upon this sad, lethargic world.
 
It was too long to transcribe and my scanner is malfunctioning, so I thought I could take a picture of those 4 pages. Sorry for bad quality.
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-- HP Lovecraft writing to Alfred Galpin on December 11, 1919 (from Letters to Alphred Galpin, Hippocampus Press)
​


HPL soon afterward wrote the dream into the story "The Statement of Randolph Carter"
​
 
"Overworked by Dreams," from A Short History of Decay (1949), by E. M. Cioran (trans. Richard Howard)

If we could conserve the energy we lavish in that series of dreams we nightly leave behind us, the mind's depth and subtlety would reach unimaginable proportions. The scaffolding of a nightmare requires a nervous expenditure more exhausting than the best articulated theoretical construction. How, after waking, begin again the task of aligning ideas when, in our unconscious, we were mixed up with grotesque and marvelous spectacles, we were sailing among the spheres without the shackles of anti-poetic Causality? For hours we were like drunken gods--and suddenly, our open eyes erasing night's infinity, we must resume, in day's mediocrity, the enterprise of insipid problems, without any of the night's hallucinations to help us. The glorious and deadly fantasy was all for nothing then; sleep has exhausted us in vain. Waking, another kind of weariness awaits us; after having had just time enough to forget the night's, we are at grips with the dawn's. We have labored hours and hours in horizontal immobility without our brain's deriving the least advantage of its absurd activity. An imbecile who was not victimized by this waste, who might accumulate all his resources without dissipating them in dreams, would be able--owner of an ideal state of waking--to disentangle all the snags of the metaphysical lies or initiate himself into the most inextricable difficulties of mathematics.
After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams. This sleep's labor not only diminishes the power of our thought, but even that of our secrets . . .
 
Compare this with the Cioran passage:

"Do you know what dreams are?" she asked quietly, and then immediately began to answer her own question. "They are parasites-maggots of the mind and soul, feeding on the mind and soul as ordinary maggots feed on the body. And their feeding on the mind and soul in turn gnaws away at the body, which in turn again affects the mind and the soul, and so on until death. These things cannot be separated, nor can anything else. Because everything is terribly inseparable and affects every other thing. Even the most alien things are connected together with every other thing. And so if these dreams have no world of their own to nourish them, they may come into yours and possess it, exhaust it little by little each night. They use your world and use it up. They wear your face and the faces of things you know: things that are yours they use in ways that are theirs. And some persons are so easy for them to use, and they use them so hard. But they use everyone and have always used everyone, because they are from the old time, the time before all the worlds awoke from a long and helpless night. And these dreams, these things that are called dreams, are still working to throw us back into that great mad darkness, to exhaust each one of us in our lonely sleep and to use up everyone until death. Little by little, night after night, they take us away from ourselves and from the truth of things. I myself know very well what this can be like and what the dreams can do to us. They make us dance to their strange illusions until we are too exhausted to live. And they have found in you, child, an easy partner for their horrible dancing."

--Thomas Ligotti, Mrs Rinaldi's Angel
 
"Yet there are some structures that draw you into them, inviting you inside to wallow in their degraded wonders. From the first time I visited the site of this derelict warehouse, which I had already photographed from the outside, I knew that this was one of those places, if only because its exterior offered so little in the way of outward suggestiveness - a nameless shell whose history and hopes were held back from the outside observer. It all seemed so enticing, but like every other attraction along the world's midway the greatest part of its appeal lay in those moments of anticipation. And after it was all over, the particular attraction which had once promised so much would send you on your way unrewarded, purged of your curiosity and the poorer for being so. This derelict warehouse was, of course, no different.

At least there were no squatters inside that I was called upon to deal with, or none that I saw. And the structure was still fairly safe and solid, with steel stairways that hadn't come loose from their walls, allowing me to make a quick reconnaissance of the place from bottom to top. Aside from the usual array of refuse and junkyard leavings - liquor bottles, worn-out tires, parts of machines, parts of appliances, parts of parts - I did find a filing cabinet in a room on the uppermost floor of the warehouse. Within that cabinet's drawers there were a few pages from a receipt pad that bore the ink-stamped imprint of Murphy's Costumes and Theatrical Supplies, a business that evidently stored some of its eponymous inventory in the warehouse. After further investigation I found some items lying in the dirt and darkness of a shattered wall. These were: (1) a couple of mannikin hands, both lefties, and (2) a very dirty pair of oversized gloves, each with a set of four sausage-shaped fingers - the accurate but strangely impractical accoutrements for the outfitting of both amateurs and professionals called upon to impersonate a beloved and begloved cartoon star. How mysterious, how ridiculous, that my dreaming brain would discard the dismembered mannikin hands, which I found intriguing enough to take back home with me, and decide to feature in my nightmare about Richard those unnaturally large gloves, which I left behind as lesser mementos of that disappointing warehouse excursion."
Thomas Ligotti - "My Work Is Not Yet Done"
​
 
From Part III, “Rhetoric in Life,” of Persuasion and Rhetoric (wr. 1910; pub. 1913), by Carlo Michelstaedter (trans. R. S. Valentino, C. S. Blum, and D. J. Depew)

The light of pleasure darts through the pale streak that unites all things, and the dull radiations that accumulate within it illuminate now one thing, now another, so as to delude hunger in the next instant—without respite. The reality of men is the shape of a dream, and they talk about it as if narrating a tangle of dreams, “since the dream comes with a tangle of things and the voice of stupidity with a tangle of words” (Ecclesiastes 5:2). The dream is the intimate measure of life, what each person feels in relation to life such that he is unable to convey its sensations to others. And yet to communicate the tangle of dreams that is their reality people find conventional words for each single referent. The man in a dream is naked before god such as he is: he weighs only what he is worth. All the forms, contrivances, and words that are not his (but to which he has grown accustomed by convention) fall away. In the intimacy of the dream he is like his forefathers who lived alone and naked. Indeed, when men attempt to render these mysterious dream sensations, they find themselves before the impossible: they “don’t find the words” to “express what they are feeling.”
 
Dear Daisy,
Thanks for the dream passage. Carlo Michelstaedter is someone whom I need to read and contemplate. You can sure pick them!
Mr. D.
 
Thank you for your kind note, Mr. D.! Here, for your interest, is another dream passage from Michelstaedter’s Persuasion and Rhetoric:

Life takes charge of the stupefying: being alive becomes a habit; things that don’t attract are no longer watched; the others are tightly linked; the weave becomes smooth—the child becomes a man. The fearful hours are reduced to the dull, continuous, measured pain trickling beneath all things. But when the edge of the weave is lifted for reasons beyond men’s control, they too know frightful moments. Dreams come to them in sleep, when the organism, relaxed, lives the obscure pain of singular determinations, for which, in the thinning of the weave of illusion, the obscurity appears more menacing . . . . Sarcastic laughter disturbs, ruins, corrupts the tranquil, familiar images they would like to retain in vain, and it weighs upon them with dark images of menace and reproach . . .
They awake, open their eyes wide in the dark . . . , and the relieving match gives them peace—the sweet wife is just beside; here the clothes with the body’s imprint, here in the pictures the familiar faces of loved ones; all the dear, dear familiar things. “It’s okay. Okay. What time is it? Oh! Late. Gotta get up tomorrow. Damn dreams. God, dreams! Okay. Tomorrow. Let’s see if we can get right back to sleep.” Reassured, they put out the light again, but the images remaining in the eyes decompose, the plans for tomorrow and the next day cease—man finds himself once more without first name and last, wife or loved ones, things to do, clothes. He is alone, naked, with eyes open to the darkness.
 
Daisy said:
From Part III, “Rhetoric in Life,” of Persuasion and Rhetoric (wr. 1910; pub. 1913), by Carlo Michelstaedter (trans. R. S. Valentino, C. S. Blum, and D. J. Depew)

The light of pleasure darts through the pale streak that unites all things, and the dull radiations that accumulate within it illuminate now one thing, now another, so as to delude hunger in the next instant—without respite. The reality of men is the shape of a dream, and they talk about it as if narrating a tangle of dreams, “since the dream comes with a tangle of things and the voice of stupidity with a tangle of words” (Ecclesiastes 5:2). The dream is the intimate measure of life, what each person feels in relation to life such that he is unable to convey its sensations to others. And yet to communicate the tangle of dreams that is their reality people find conventional words for each single referent. The man in a dream is naked before god such as he is: he weighs only what he is worth. All the forms, contrivances, and words that are not his (but to which he has grown accustomed by convention) fall away. In the intimacy of the dream he is like his forefathers who lived alone and naked. Indeed, when men attempt to render these mysterious dream sensations, they find themselves before the impossible: they “don’t find the words” to “express what they are feeling.”
Click to expand...

I bought a copy of Persuasion and Rhetoric several months ago, but I had hardly even looked at it (so many books, so little time). After reading this amazing passage last night, I was moved to take a look at the book. I realized pretty quickly that I had a different translation. Here is the same passage that Daisy quoted, as translated by Wilhelm Snyman and Giuseppe Stellardi:

Whence the light of pleasure is moved through the cycle of a pale strip which joins all things together; it runs, and in it are gathered all the faint radiations of all things, lighting up, in turn, one thing or another, deceiving the hunger of the next moment -- without repose. Man's reality is the dream figure of which they speak, talking of it as if narrating an entanglement of dreams. "For dreams occur within an entanglement of things and the voice of the fool is expressed as the entanglement of words" (Ecclesiastes, V, 2). But while dreaming is the intimate measure of life, that which everyone feels in regard to life -- so that men do not know how to communicate the sensation of dreaming; in order to communicate the entanglement of the dreams pertaining to their reality they find conventional words, suited to every particular reference. -- Man in his dreams is naked before god, as he is, having the same weight as he is worth; all the forms, all the tricks and words that are not his and to which he has adapted himself in accordance with convention, fall away. In the intimacy of his dreams he is like his ancestors, who lived alone and naked. In fact, when men try to communicate those strange sensations of dreams, they find themselves faced with the impossible, "they don't find the words" to "express what they feel."

Good grief! I don't know which translation is more accurate, but I certainly know which I'd rather read. I bought the wrong translation, and it wasn't cheap. :mad: I offer this as a public service announcement for anyone else who is considering buying this book.
 
"I, the II King's jester, live on alone in the highest Palace attic - my only task to speak his thoughts. As transcriber of moods, taster of titbits, keeper of the royal mind's eye, nurturer of jokes, I will soon descend - so as to remove his frilly body from the window, as he babbles of green stained red and then black.

But I fear I, too, am a splinter of his dreams and memories..."
D. F. Lewis - "The II King"
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"'Despite what you expected, it's turning out very predictable.'

The II King just sat and began to stare me out. There was no answer possible, especially in the context of light and shade. His flat made me feel as if I were in a black and white film. The pierrot make-up caused him to look more a clown in a dream than a ghost in a real memory."
D. F. Lewis - "The II King"
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gveranon said:
Good grief! I don't know which translation is more accurate, but I certainly know which I'd rather read. I bought the wrong translation, and it wasn't cheap. :mad: I offer this as a public service announcement for anyone else who is considering buying this book.
Click to expand...

Many thanks, gveranon, for noting the discrepancy in quality between the two English translations of Michelstaedter's Persuasion and Rhetoric. If you wish to acquire the version I've used, it's the one published by Yale University Press in 2004, with an introduction and commentary by Russell Scott Valentino, Cinzia Sartini Blum, and David J. Depew. Copies are available on both Amazon and Abebooks.
 
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