Dream Passage of the Day

"And even when I abandoned my home, with its hideous attic storeroom, Plomb still followed me in my dreams. He now travels with me to the ends of the earth, initiating me night after night into his unspeakable wonders. I can only hope that we will not meet in another place, one where the mysteries are always new and dreams never end. Oh, Plomb, will you not stay in that box where they have put your riven body?"
Thomas Ligotti - "The Spectacles in the Drawer"
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I hope to untangle knots; but new ones emerge everywhere I look.

I dreamt last night of Diane Arbus and her bush-baby, and of Mini-Me in Big Brother – and other photographs in the sense-shrinking night.

One choice of the on-screen menu was the Oba-Manitou or Man-Oba as he told me to call him. Yesterday I suspected Man-Oba was actually within me – primed simply to be dreamed. Instead, the dream had me experiencing Man-Oba in the digital form of a separate creature come to save the world from within a puppet-like youtube ... a continuing narrative of Government before, during and after. As if that would make any difference!

He had a cigarette going, I simply knew, but it wasn’t in frame. And an invisible drink beside him. Dreams have margins beyond which you cannot see. Photos (colour, sepia and brownie) and videos, too. It is as if our world harbours a monster twitching its old-film feelers over parts of the hidden image - shaking and shivering like a monster’s insect-legs just beyond the frame, but often, fleetingly, within it.

That monster can grow tentacles like Cthulhu ... slowly knotting beyond any untanglement by mankind, even by Man-Oba’s planted manipulations.

Even vows are botched. I promised yesterday that I would untangle the knot I tangled into existence. But first I need to know what knot I’m dealing with. Sometimes you don’t know your own intricacies of tangling them. Terminal Knot, Overhand-knot, Reef-Knot, Sheet-Bend, Carrick-Bend, True-Lover's Knot, Ooggee-Knot, Ligottum, Timber Hitch, Constrictor, The Eight, Bowstring, the running bowline, hangman, the monkey fist, Dolly (trucker-hitch)...

Each has its own end. It’s just a matter of finding it.
D. F. Lewis - "Entry Two"
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"After a storm had disturbed the sand-flats, he stood on the balcony of the beach-house inhaling the carbonated air, trying to free himself from the uneasy dreams that had filled the night, a system of demented metaphors. In front of him the surface of the sand-flats was covered with dozens of pieces of rusting metal, aircraft parts shaken loose by the storm. As Helen Winthrop watched from the bedroom window, he stepped onto the beach and walked across the ruffled sand, counting the fragments of carburettor and exhaust manifold, trim-tab and tail-wheel, that lay around him as if left here by the receding tide of his dreams."
J. G. Ballard - "My Dream of Flying to Wake Island"
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"At certain times I could almost dissolve entirely into this inner realm of awful purity and emptiness. I remember those invisible moments when in disguise I drifted through the streets of Mirocaw, untouched by the drunken, noisy forms around me: untouchable. But instantly I recoil at this grotesque nostalgia, for I realize what is happening and what I do not want to be true, though Thoss proclaimed it was. I recall his command to those others as I lay helplessly prone in the tunnel. They could have apprehended me, but Thoss, my old master, called them back. His voice echoed throughout that cavern, and it now reverberates within my own psychic chambers of memory.

'He is one of us,' it said. 'He has always been one of us.'

It is this voice which now fills my dreams and my days and my long winter nights. I have seen you, Dr. Thoss, through the snow outside my window. Soon I will celebrate, alone, that last feast which will kill your words, only to prove how well I have learned their truth."
Thomas Ligotti - "The Last Feast of Harlequin"​
 
"Sunlit bazaars in exotic cities thronged with faces that were transparent masks for insect-like countenances; moonlit streets in antique towns harbored a strange-eyed slithering within their very stones; dim galleries of empty museums sprouted a ghostly mold that mirrored the sullen hues of old paintings; the land at the edge of oceans gave birth to a new evolution transcending biology and remote islands offered themselves as a haven for these fantastic forms having no analogy outside of dreams; jungles teemed with beast-like shapes that moved beside the sticky luxuriance as well as through the depths of its pulpy warmth; deserts were alive with an uncanny flux of sounds which might enter and animate the world of substance; and subterranean landscapes heaved with cadaverous generations that had sunken and merged into sculptures of human coral, bodies heaped and unwhole, limbs projecting without order, eyes scattered and searching the darkness.

My own eyes suddenly closed, shutting out the visions for a moment. And during that moment I once again became aware of the sterile quality of the house, of its 'innocent ambiance'. It was then that I realized that this house was possibly the only place on earth, perhaps in the entire universe, that had been cured of the plague of phantoms that raged everywhere. This achievement, however futile or perverse, now elicited from me tremendous admiration as a monument to Terror and the stricken ingenuity it may inspire."
Thomas Ligotti - "In the Shadow of Another World"
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Jede Nacht besucht uns ein Traum [Every Night We Are Haunted By A Dream], c. 1902-1903, by Alfred Kubin

AlfredKubin-EveryNightaDreamVisitsUs.InkBwash.jpg
 
"He dreamed he was a boy again in Maricopa, Arizona. A boy of fifteen running along a blackened street. He was running alone and eventually he came to a place where a woman was performing on a trapeze. From neck to ankles the woman was garbed in a skin-tight costume of bright orange satin. The woman's hair was darkish orange. The woman had drab brown eyes and her skin was tanned. It was the artificial tan that came from a violet-ray lamp. The woman was about five feet four inches tall and she was very thin and she was not at all pretty but there was nothing in her face to suggest ugliness. It was just that she was not a pretty woman. But she was a wonderful acrobat. She smiled at him. She took the trapeze way up high and sailed away from it. She described three slow somersaults going backwards, going up, going over and coming down on the trapeze again as it whizzed back. Elephants in the three rings far below lifted their trunks and lifted their eyes and watched her admiringly. The trapeze whizzed again and she left the trapeze again, going up and up and up, almost to the top of the tent until she described the wonderful series of backward somersaults that brought her down again to the trapeze. She was tiny way up there and then she grew as she came down. She stepped off the trapeze and came sliding down a rope. she bowed to the elephants. She bowed to everybody. She came over to him. He told her she was wonderful on the trapeze. She said it was really not at all difficult and anyone could do it. He could do it. He said he couldn't do it. He told her he was afraid. She laughed and told him he was silly to be afraid. She took his arm and led him toward the rope. The bright orange satin was a flash of flame on her thin body. She opened her mouth to laugh at him and he saw many gold inlays among her teeth. He pleaded with her to take him away from this high, dizzy place, this swirling peril. The trapeze came up to the limit of its whizzing arc and she left the trapeze, took him with her and they went up, somersaulting backward together, going up and over and he fought to get away from her and she laughed at him and he fought and fought until he got away from her. He went down alone. Down fast, face foremost, watching the sawdust and the faces and the colossal dull green elephants coming toward him. Down there they were attempting to do something for him. They were trying to arrange a net to catch him. Before they could get the net connected he was in amongst them, plunging past them and landing on his face. He felt the impact hammering into his face, the pain tearing through his face, hitting the back of his head and bouncing back and running all over his face. He was flat on his back, his arms wide, his legs spread wide as he looked up at the faces looking down on him. The pain was fierce and he moaned and the mob stood there and pitied him. He could see her high up there. The orange satin twirled and glimmered as she went away from the trapeze in another backward somersault. She came down wonderfully on the trapeze and although she was way up there her face was very close to his eyes and she was laughing at him and the gold inlays were dazzling in her laughing mouth."
David Goodis - Dark Passage
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Spotbowserfido2 said:
Daisy said:
Jede Nacht besucht uns ein Traum [Every Night We Are Haunted By A Dream], c. 1902-1903, by Alfred Kubin
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Daisy, the only things I can see in your post are your words. Mr. Kubin's art is invisible to me.:confused:
Click to expand...
This may be a case where the image has been prohibited from viewing outside the realm of the original domain. I have downloaded the image and attached it for viewing.
 

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"A Dream" by Count Eric Stanislas Stenbock

The rain fell fast, the wind was wild,
I saw the image of my child
As in a vision of the night,
At the first grey streak of the morning light.

"Thy face is somewhat pale," I said,
"And thine hair is tangled about thine head;"
"The wind is wild; no wonder then
My hair is tangled," he said again.

"But from thine head unto thy feet
Thy form is wrapped in a long white sheet;"
"My clothes were wet through with the rain,
I put on thi sheet till they dry again."

"Come hither, darling, and I will fold
Thee to mine heart, for they hands are cold;"
"No wonder my hands are cold." he said,
"For very cold are the hands of the dead."
 
"Patiently Traven waited for them to speak to him, thinking of the great blocks whose entrance was guarded by the seated figure of the dead archangel, as the waves broke on the distant shore and the burning bombers fell through his dreams."
J. G. Ballard - "The Terminal Beach"
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From "The Terrors of the Night" by Thomas Nashe:
The glasses of our sight, in the night, are like the prospective glasses one Hostius made in Rome, which represented the images of things far greater than they were. Each mote in the dark they make a monster, and every slight glimmering a giant.

A solitary man in his bed is like a poor bed-red lazar lying by the highway-side unto whose displayed wounds and sores a number of stinging flies do swarm for pastance and beverage. His naked wounds are his inward heart-griping woes, the wasps and flies his idle wandering thoughts; who to that secret smarting pain he hath already do add a further sting of impatience and new-lance his sleeping griefs and vexations.​
 
"'Anne...?' The light in the bedroom had become brighter, there was a curious glare, like the white runways of his dreams. Nothing moved, for a moment Mallory felt that they were waxworks in a museum tableau, or in a painting by Edward Hopper of a tired couple in a provincial hotel. The dream-time was creeping up on him, about to enfold him."
J. G. Ballard - "Memories of the Space Age"
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"In her dream, she knew the name of the tower that soared with impossible height from the caverns below... soared to touch the crust of the waking world. Koth, it was called...

And she knew the beings were called Gugs, before even she could discern them. At first, they were merely shambling hulks, dark and dark-furred. If only they hadn't reached that circle of stones. In its center, they had lit a bonfire. The light of its flames illuminated the silent procession... and their terrible activities at the megaliths they had erected. Each of these was a brother to the stone in Robert's pasture...

The flames seemed to glow inside pink eyes set on jagged-hooded projections of bone. And mouths gaped wide, soundlessly. Mouths that gaped vertically in hideous faces... fangs that flashed back the colors of fire and blood.

And what were they doing. What were they doing... God help her that she ever should have seen. The Great Ones had banished them for just such practices...

And there was something more horrible yet...

...and that was that the creatures seemed to be aware she was observing them. First one, then another, then all turned to gaze directly at her invisible dreamer's form, amongst them, spying on them.

It was then that the first of the Gugs started toward her.

It was then that Judith awoke with a gasp."
Jeffrey Thomas - "Through Obscure Glass"
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"He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him down to the last detail and project him into the world of reality."
Jorge Luis Borges - "The Circular Ruins"
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"For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the river, but then he realized that death was coming to crown his years and to release him from his labors. He walked into the leaping pennants of flame. They did not bite into his flesh, but caressed him and flooded him without heat or burning. In relief, in humiliation, in terror, he understood that he, too, was an appearance, that someone else was dreaming him."
Jorge Luis Borges - "The Circular Ruins"
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"'But Doctor,' cried the young man in despair, 'I am due to hit the ground at any moment!'

'But only in a dream,' said the psychiatrist reassuringly. 'Be sure to remember it clearly, and note particularly if you bounce. Meanwhile, return to your office, carry on with your work, and worry as little as possible about it.'

'I will try to do so,' said the young man. 'But really you are astonishingly like yourself as I saw you in my dream, even to that little pearl tie-pin.'

'That,' said the psychiatrist, as he bowed him smilingly out, 'was a gift from a very well-known lady, who was always falling in her dreams.' So saying, he closed the door behind his visitor, who departed shaking his head in obstinate melancholy. The psychiatrist then seated himself at his desk and placed the tips of his fingers together, as psychiatrists always do while they are pondering over how much a new patient may be good for."
John Collier - "Interpretation of a Dream"
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"Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it!"
Fyodor Dostoevsky - "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man"
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