This page renders best in Firefox (or Safari, or Chrome)
Dreams
Occasionally I wake up remembering bits of my nighttime reality. Here I have striven to reassemble them as nearly as I can, to try and recreate that reality. But the reader should bear in mind what Shekure says about recounting your dreams...
Also am including some poetry about dreams, and some other writers' observations.
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
In the dream it was a sunny morning after a night of heavy rain. Everyone was nervy because of an ancient prophesy: The morning sun sparkling on the waters of River X (which had been dry for all of recorded time -- the river had a name but I've forgotten it) would portend the end of days. So we walked down to and along the bed of the river, at every waystation I was pointing out to my friends how it was dry, nothing to worry about. We passed a concrete embankment with a light rill of water running down it, the sunlight sparkling. Beyond that was an ocean, where none had been before; its vastness was dumbfounding. Thousands were gathered there, standing on the shore, gawking.
Los sueños más extraños, los
que uno no recuerda
(ni ha nunca podido recordar
ni pide que los recuerde), de esos mismos
indescriptibles
se componen los arquetipos
que en la imaginación
se van siempre confluyendo
hasta formar la imagen del mundo
que uno la concibe y percibe
que uno en sus pasos la lleva
dÃa por dÃa:
mientras se mueve
se está en viva.
No se pueden realmente
describir, no en terminos
humanos.
posted evening of November 15th, 2013: Respond ➳ More posts about Poetry
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires--and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings--the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes...
las sombras y los sueños en que se consisten
las paredes y puertas de la casa en que moro
las palabras y frases que salen a chorros:
en que mi tiempo sea corto insisten
If a dream affords the dreamer some lucidity, some poetry, some regal slumber
why forget it then, why discard
the glittering shards of irreality
that pierce your consciousnessless repose
that hold your dreaming brane
like pushpins on the void
Strikingly, memorably visual. Our vaguely Filipino protagonist is standing on the threshold of his employer's bedroom, cigarette (lit and half-smoked) dangling from his lip, fighting not to take a drag as she tells him she will be going to a wedding next week and needs an outfit; he is her tailor/costumer. He drops the cigarette on the gleaming white tile of the passageway as he envisions the dark green dress he will make and the white scarf and sun hat that will accompany it.
In last night's dream, I was listening to a radio program devoted to pop standards whose original versions were written about, or in, Modesto, CA. This was followed by a number of secondary dreams concerned with explicating and recording the original dream -- the secondary dreams were not always clear on the "dream" status of the original dream.
Only song I remember at all from the radio program, is a Hank Williams-y tune that started out, "Standin on the corner, waitin for the bus to Oakland, or Encina; and if the bus don't come,..."
Me and Sylvia were watching The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo with Monique's family. I was initially a bit surprised that we were deeming it age-appropriate for the younger kids; but it turned out Bree-Ann was totally into the book, and kept piping up to say what was going to happen. The remote control for Monique's entertainment center had way too many buttons and knobs on it and I could not figure out how to operate it.
I was translating (just starting to translate, I was on the first page) into English a translation into Croatian of Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage. It seemed like it was going to be a magnum opus...
posted morning of January 10th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Translation