Dreamways

In this comic episode of Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury (Sunday 02 Sep 07), we are in the broadcast booth, up close with the mustachioed, soul-patched, droopy-eyed radio DJ who spends five frames reporting: “Fun fact, okay?  read more »

Mondegreen is the term used to describe skewed song lyrics that come into being when people misunderstand what a song is saying. These misapprehensions are not parody, which involves the intentional rephrasing of lyrics, but are unintended mis-hearings. Mondegreens have a dream-like quality in that while they often make little or no sense when examined with a rational mind, somehow the listener accepts them as the real thing.

In her article “The Tilted Earth at Its ‘Equal Night of Spring’” (The New York Times, 20 Mar 07), Natalie Angier writes about a dream-like waking vision that appears in Mexico on the day of Vernal Equinox, the first day of spring. "In the 1,500-year-old Mayan city of Chichen Itza, in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, the magnificent Kukulcan Pyramid practically slithers to life each spring equinox evening, as the waning sun casts a shadow along its steps of seven perfectly symmetrical isosceles triangles, a pattern suggesting the diamondback skin of a snake.  read more »

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 »

A cat on a piano bench. Nothing strange about that. The bench is at a piano. Perfectly domestic and normal. The cat is perched on its hind quarters, sitting upright, quite human-like. Cats don’t often do that, but some do. The cat has its paws on the keyboard. Hm. This is a bit less normal.

In his article “When Germs Talk, Maybe Humans Can Answer” (The New York Times, 25 Feb 07, section 3, pg. 3) Michael Fitzgerald reports on stuff of dreams (or “B” science fiction movies): communication between and among single-celled bacteria.

“Bacteria work in groups, and take action only when their numbers are large enough to achieve their goals, something they determine by using what scientists call ‘quorum sensing.’ If you can keep the bacteria from communicating, they can’t form a quorum – they won’t act.”

An article in the 07 Feb 07 Denver Post inquires in its headline: „Was Prince’s guitar a “malfunction“?  The article goes on to explain: In the sensitive post-wardrobe-malfunction world, some are questioning whether a guitar was just a guitar during Prince’s Super Bowl halftime show.

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 Alarm Clock as a Moving Target. Catch It if You Can." So reads a headline in the weekly section featuring new electronic gadgetry in The New York Times (08 Feb 07.) The article goes on to inform the savvy consumer: „If a screeching buzzer is not enough to get you moving in the morning, consider Clocky. This alarm clock doesn’t just make noise, it breaks the snooze-button habit: after the first snooze period, Clocky rolls off the nightstand and runs away.“ Clocky?

"One night I walked home very late and fell asleep in somebody’s satellite dish. My dreams were showing up on TV’s all over the world.“  - Steven Wright.  This comedic quip demonstrates one of the hallmarks of dreamfulness, which is the erasure of „normal“ boundaries. In the world of sleep, it could happen in the blink of an REM eye that our dream visions are being broadcast to television sets everywhere. Our waking mind says that such a thing could never happen. But dream world knows no such boundaries.