Dreamways

Padlock & Chain of Love

"Love, in all its splendor and mess, found a fit expression on Rome’s oldest bridge last year. Inspired by a best-selling book, then the movie version, young couples wrote their names on a padlock. They chained their lock around lampposts on Ponte Milvio. Then they symbolically cut off escape by tossing the keys into the wine-dark Tiber below." So begins Ian Fisher's article "Love Rite on a Bridge, but Is the Romance Fading?" in The New York Times (06 Aug 07).
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The fellow referred to in the title of Alex Witchel’s article "Mr. Wicked“ (The New York Times Magazine, 11 Mar 07) is author Gregory Maguire, best known for the immensely popular novel Wicked and the equally popular musical spun off from it. The article looks at how the themes in Mr. Maguire’s writing reflect the major themes of his life, which have strong elements of the realm of fairy tales. And the world of fairy tales is also the world of dreams.
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The Sandman: Dream Country (vol. 3) (1995). New York: DC Comics. This book is stitched together of loosely-connected chapters. Loosely connected, like dreams in the course of a deep-sleep night. The first dream has Richard Madoc, a writer suffering from writer’s block, taking captive Calliope, the Greek goddess, raping and abusing her to arouse his artistic inspiration. He bashes her and attains the creativity that he had been lacking. When Morpheus, the god of sleep and dreams, rescues her, he condemns Madoc: "You want ideas? You want dreams? You want stories?  read more »

This short short story by Tim Pratt (Little Gods, Prime Books, 2006) marvelously captures the the fuzzy-bordered nature of sleep dreams, how they interweave with our longings and desire, with art, with the events of waking life. The spiralings of dreamfulness make for rich mystery.

"The Heart, a Chambered Nautilus“
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In his enormously compelling and tremendously disconcerting novel, The Life and Times of Captain N. (1993. New York: Alfred A. Knopf), author Douglas Glover tells a brutally-paced, hair-raising tale of lives and cultures in conflict during the American Revolutionary War. The war zone where the story takes place is the forest lands of 1700’s New York state along the Canadian border. This forest is a borderland, a violently contested space where not just armies, but also attitudes and relationships come into blood-curdling and heart-wrenching conflict.  read more »

"Don't Tell Your Dreams to the Wrong People." From Things NOT To Do Before You Die. Robert W. Harris. (2007. New York: St. Martin's Press.) "Our big dreams are so important to us that we often feel the need to share them with someone. But if you tell you dream to people who really don’t care about you and your happiness, you possibly will be told that your dream is ridiculous and not worth pursuing. It might be with an explicit comment or a dismissive look or a joke. However it happens, it could be devastating.  read more »

Hector Tobar, Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States. (2005.  New York: Riverhead Books) This is a fascinating and eminently readable journalistic exploration of the movement of Latinos and Latinidad across the U.S. in the 21st century. The author, Hector Tobar, journeys to various venues where he explores aspects of Latino life in the U.S. These travels are like a great dream, where Tobar finds situations and realities beautiful and horrendous that he could not have imagined in his "right" mind.  read more »

The dream world journey presented in the second volume of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series (The Sandman: The Doll’s House, 1995. New York: DC Comics) opens with an African male initiation ceremony. At the close of the ceremony a warning is issued: „Love is no part of the dream-world. Love belongs to desire, and desire is always cruel.“ This seems a bit melodramatic, but these assertions are good food for thought. Perhaps the key question is: what is love?  read more »

The Life and Times of Captain N. by Douglas Glover (1993. New York: Alfred A. Knopf) is an hallucinogenic novel of dreams.  "As it happens, I have dreamed a dream. It comes often, whenever I have a headache. When the pain fades, I fall asleep, or doze, and go into a gray world. I am building a house. I am up on the roof, tacking hand-split shingles. Margrethe and the children stand at the foot of the ladder, watching. No one lends a hand or says a word. My boy Oskar points and draws their attention to some aspect of my work. But I cannot hear his words.  read more »

The following excerpt from lucid dreaming expert Stephen LeBerge and Howard Rheingold's book (1990. New York: Ballantine Books.) brings together ideas of humanistic, client-centered psychology pioneer, Carl Rogers, regarding creativity with LeBerge’s ideas about lucid dreaming. I think that all of the attributes that LeBerge ascribes to lucid dreaming can be applied to mindful and heartful dream work in general. Working with dreams is practicing a creative stance. Dreamfulness cultivates the three Rogerian attributes of creativity.