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Saturday, November 15th, 2008
Last night's dream was taking place on a lot of different levels of narrative resolution, and I woke up remembering several of them. Unfortunately all that melted away very quickly -- the only bit of it I remember is this, which I believe was the enclosing story: I'm at my friend Michael's funeral. (It's just occurring to me now that maybe this was childhood friend Michael Lopes -- while the dream was happening I was only thinking of the friend as "Michael".) The proceedings were not exactly what I expect a funeral to be like; sort of a cross between reader's theater and a role-playing game. The mood was more levity than mourning. Near the end I sought out Michael's mother and asked her why they had set it up this way; her response was, "Because otherwise we would have to speak of him as if he were our son; and we can't do that." (Or possibly "and we are forbidden to do that.")
posted morning of November 15th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, November second, 2008
Lots of long, vivid dreams this weekend! Last night I was in a sort of huge video game/maze type of setting -- the introduction is our hero disembarking from a futuristic train into a deserted station lit with purple neon and reminiscent of If on a winter's night a traveller... -- he goes downstairs and out through a turnstile and sees too late that he has dropped his wallet in the hallway of the station. The action is trying to figure out how to get back into the part of the station where his wallet is: the turnstile is built so there's no way of jumping it, and when you go into the station's entrance you are in a completely different place, very crowded with Pokemon-style figures (the ones I remember best looked like Militank). I spent a long time going up through levels searching for the train platform (because I knew how to get to the exit from there) and being blocked by the figures, which were not actively opposing me but were behaving like a crowd -- moving with no regard for where I wanted to go and not allowing me to push past them. Occasionally I would get within sight of the platform but there was always some obstacle preventing me from getting there.
posted morning of November second, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, November first, 2008
Two extremely vivid dreams last night about very mundane activities, taking the dog for a walk and making tea for breakfast. Ellen and I were walking both dogs around the block. Somehow Pixie got off the leash but we were unconcerned and went on walking Lola until we got back to our door. There waiting for us on the lawn were two big doggy-poops which I needed to throw away. Yuck. When I woke up Pixie was anxiously waiting to go downstairs and out to the yard -- it was the middle of the night but I let her out figuring (a) the dream had some prophetic element and (b) the M&M's which Pixie snuck last night had given her diarrhœa. After I got back to sleep I was called on to make some mint tea for Sylvia's breakfast. Easy enough right? But somehow I kept doing things wrong, like using coffee instead of hot water, mixing up the creamer with the kettle, pouring hot water into a mug that had holes in it... This went on for ages and I don't think in the end I was able to make a cup of tea.
posted morning of November first, 2008: Respond
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Friday, October 31st, 2008
So I had this dream last night in which I was hosting a dinner party. My food strategy was to go to a dealer in prepared food, and buy roasts of beef -- several of them, I think I probably bought one roast for each guest. Then I realized I needed a side dish so I picked up a little take-out container of mac and cheese. Got home and I started carving up the beef. It was taking a long time, and I realized the dish of mac and cheese wasn't going to be enough, so I made a container of instant mac and cheese to supplement it. Also I thought a vegetable would be nice so I opened a jar of pickles, and sliced some rich cheese of some kind for an appetizer. Somehow everybody had arrived and was at the table, so I served them plates heaped with roast beef. Forgot the mac and cheese which I had left warming in the oven, and the pickles and cheese never made it to the table either. Everybody liked the roast beef but there was way too much of it, and people drifted away to other things... I have a clear memory of asking Sylvia if she liked the dinner and her saying she did, so it was not a total failure I guess.
posted morning of October 31st, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, October 5th, 2008
The centerpiece of last night's dream was a new book by Saramago -- wait no, seems like it was an early book of his, but one I had not known about previously. It was pretty fully-formed, wish I could remember how it went! The title was something like "The Sour Grill" and it was explicitly about Portuguese cuisine, something about the national character being rooted in the cooking. A long book! I believe I had checked it out from the library and it was now overdue.
posted morning of October 5th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about José Saramago
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Friday, August 8th, 2008
Today, I added a new quotation to the list of epigraphs for this site.
 Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream -- a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows -- is essentially poetry.
This seems like a beautiful description of what dreams are and how we can make use of them. I found it at deborahb's LiveJournal -- she had taken it from quoteworld, which rather bizarrely attributes it to Jesse Jackson. I believe the correct attribution is to Michel Leiris.
posted afternoon of August 8th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, May 19th, 2008
Last night I was reading Thomas Pynchon's new novel (!), Stockton (!!), out loud to Sylvia (!!!). Alas I cannot remember any of the content. The curious thing about the book was that it had these metallic spinners embedded in it with a word or words on each side; but no explicit direction for how to use them. The reader needed to experiment with each one as he came to it, and see how its words could be integrated into the surrounding text. The largest of these spinners contained the entire final sentence of the book, with several possible ways of constructing it.
posted morning of May 19th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
So last night I was maintaining code for a program which loaded a helper program for handling data files. Before it executed the helper program it would check the sum of the binary, I think because certain instances of the helper needed special handling; if the sum was not on a list of recognized values, the program would log an error and exit. Unfortunately the helper program was not stable and was being recompiled frequently; every time this happened I needed to edit the list of recognized sums, which was hard-coded into the main program, and recompile the main program. I was embarrassed about such a stupid bit of code being in the program so I was editing, compiling, and distributing the main program without mentioning it to anybody. What a stressful dream that was! (Sort of ties everything together in a way, that I woke up humming Bessie Smith's "Gimme Pigfoot", which was in Gertrude Sturdley's post this week and which I was working on a fiddle version of last night.)
posted morning of May 7th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Programming
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Sunday, March 16th, 2008
Wild -- I dreamt last night that the print edition of The Nation had a column of reader comment about blogs, and that someone using the handle "erms" (a sneaky pseud for Emerson? was my first thought) had written in to say READIN was "the second Google hit for anything book-related" and "the most consistently boring blog on the Internet". And I'm such a publicity hound, I was lapping it up! In the dream I was posting something here to the effect of "should I feel flattered or consider packing it in?" as an excuse for linking to the article.
posted morning of March 16th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, November 23rd, 2007
So I'm sitting at a desk with a couple of notebooks lying open on it, and with many drawers. Each drawer, when I open it, contains a jumble of books I am reading or have read or am planning to read, papers with partial paragraphs written in my hand -- mostly excerpts from stuff I have actually written or have actually intended to write -- and random junk like seashells, paperclips, lint, etc. I am trying to write, and I scribble a line here and there on a paper at the top of one of these piles, or on one of the notebooks open on top of the desk; but I can't bring myself to disturb the disorder in the drawers. (Rarely do I have a dream so amenable to interpretation.)
posted morning of November 23rd, 2007: Respond
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