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CHANCE SYNCHRONICITY & MIND-WRITING:
Write About A Dream
A Dream Within A Dream
by Edgar Allan Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
Cradle Song
by William Blake
Sleep, sleep, beauty bright,
Dreaming in the joys of night;
Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep
Little sorrows sit and weep.
Sweet babe, in thy face
Soft desires I can trace,
Secret joys and secret smiles,
Little pretty infant wiles.
As thy softest limbs I feel
Smiles as of the morning steal
O'er thy cheek, and o'er thy breast
Where thy little heart doth rest.
O the cunning wiles that creep
In thy little heart asleep!
When thy little heart doth wake,
Then the dreadful night shall break.
Narrow Escape
by Pat Nolan
I held the knife to her throat just below the ear. She struggled in my arms and the knife cut the flash there; just a scratch, but enough to draw blood. She was a tall good-looking blonde and she wouldn't tell me where the guns were. Footsteps on the stairs! They wre coming. I shoved her into the bathroom. The door wouldn't stay closed -- someone had stolen the doorknob. She was worried about the cut on her throat; she examined the blood on her fingers with a frown. I told her it wasn't serious. She told me where the guns were. But is was too late! They were at the door. I kissed her on the lips. There were as sweet and delicate as raspberries. She melting in my arms. They burst through the door. "Where's the girl?" I licked a drop of red juiice from the coner of my mouth.
The Nightingale in Badelunda
by Tomas Transtromer
In the green midnight of the nightingale's northern limit. Heavy leaves hang in trance, the deaf cars race toward the neon-line. The nightingale's voice rises without wavering to the side, it is as penetrating as a cock-crow, but beautiful and free of vanity. I was in prison and it visited me. I was sick and it vistied me. I didn't notice it then, but I do now. Time steams down from the sun and moon and into all the tick-tock thankful clocks. But right here there is no time. Only the nightingale's voice, the raw resonant notes that whet the the night sky's gleaming scythe.
3:33
I am startled awake for no reason. My heart pounding. 3:33.
Sometimes I wake from a dream with the feeling that someone is at the foot of the bed, observing. I lie still, controlling my breath until convinced I am alone. The clock says 3:33. Other nights I sleep fitfully, my back aches, I have intermittent pains in my shoulder or a cramp in my right calf. My heavy wool blankets creep toward one side of the bed, leaving my backside exposed and chilly. I resist, but eventually look at the clock. It is 3:33.
I used to have a book that equated times of day with the functioning of internal organs. The bladder and the kidney and the liver each dominate a few hours. Grief is associated with the lungs and the lungs have a period of effectiveness and an interval of weakness. You should shit between five a.m. and seven as a kindness to your bowels. I don’t know what system is operative at 3:33.
3:33 is a palindrome. It’s half of the mark of the beast. Added together it equals 9, which is the age my roommate was until yesterday when she became ten, double digits. The number five is sacred to Venus, but I don’t know who reveres the number three, unless it’s the earth, third planet from the sun. I wonder if I am being called back to earth at 3:33 from dreams, or if I’ve been abducted by very punctual aliens. I look for meaning in these small signs and my roommate tells me, “Not everything is magic.”
She doesn’t believe that, and neither do I. So, I look at the globe for a point in space. Is there a highway 333? An x-y coordinate? If I understood longitude and latitude perhaps I could identify a spot on the map that is calling me home.
Every night I ask for clarification in my dreams. But so far I’ve received one message only. 3:33. And it is beginning to seem less like a direction than a reminder. Each night, the clock reveals to me one moment of equilibrium – one small period when time reads the same forwards as backwards. An invitation to let go of the regrets and the schemes, and the heavy march forward. 3:33. A one second sutra inviting me into the whole of timeless space with its black nights and the bone chilling sliver of moon shining without judgment through the bamboo shade.
Lisa Thompson
From Lit Hub: What My Parents Really Think About My Memoir of Alcoholism - Sarah Hepola Interviews Her Mother and Father
People often say to me, “I’d love to write a memoir, but I could never do it while my parents are alive.” I don’t blame them. It’s one thing to open up to strangers about your bad decisions and your drunken sexual encounters, but it is quite another to do so while your parents are sitting in the front row, wearing their Land’s End casual knits and looking up at you with those big, innocent eyes. On more than one occasion, I called my folks right after a revealing radio interview. “Did I say anything that embarrassed you?” I asked, feeling like a frantic mother who has swiveled around in the car to check on her kids in the back seat. Is everyone all right in here?
I was being paranoid, but those of us who write memoirs should never underestimate the damage they can cause. I’ve seen close relationships rocked by a memoir. I’ve seen parents stop speaking to their children for years. Memoirs pose a natural threat to the family mythology, those portraits framed on the mantel piece that say everyone is happy and nothing is wrong. A good memoir dares to admit that things are wrong, and often are. Not because people didn’t try. Often the most moving stories are when people tried their best, and messed up anyway. Read more...
OCEAN VUONG
Interviewed By: Kaveh Akbar
Yes. The piece in The New Yorker was nice. I worry, coming on the heels of that Calvin Trillin poem, that it looks like a piece reacting to that debacle. But it was an isolated columnist, Daniel Wenger, who did my profile, and he asked some really thoughtful, attentive questions, and I don’t want Trillin’s voice to cloud that sincere effort. What these two moments do speak to, however, is that this is very much our political climate—where a respected publication can celebrate and insult Asianess in one space—which seems to be an accurate microcosm of America as a whole. I don’t know whether this is progress of degeneration—but it’s where we live at the moment.
I was also glad the piece spoke of my background–how someone like me came into writing. The recognition of another life existing within these spaces is important because, as writers of color, we don't have a solid literary foundation to build on, whereas white writers enjoy the perpetual presence of a canon where their faces are faithfully reflected. For POC, the lineage is more tenuous, fractured, erased, cut out, and ghosted. So it's always important for me to say, "This is where I came from,” and that my making of this art is both an act of creation and survival at once.
One of the ways people whose bodies aren't necessarily acknowledged by history can preserve some element of themselves is through the stories they tell. And you talk about how your family was all functionally illiterate, and that's one of the themes of the book. But then you're about to preserve their stories and therefore preserve some part of them in this book.
Yeah, it's really interesting. I think my reckoning with the written word was also the reckoning with racism, which is sad, but also necessary and, in a way, a vital means of confronting the realities of my country, of America. You know, I didn't know how to read well until I was eleven, but I was fluent. I grew up here. I came here when I was two and I can speak and think clearly in English and Vietnamese. I think what I've learned is that for a lot of the white American gaze, to be illiterate is the equivalent of being unintelligent, of lacking in imagination and critical thinking. I’ve spent most of my life watching the way people look, with disdain, at my family when they fail to utter the language that permits their visibility, permits them access to the most basic levels of respect. I’ve seen cashiers literally reach their hands into my mother’s purse to count the money for her. At times it seems the crossing of physical borders is easier than that of the linguistic ones. Read more...
dream |drēm|
noun
a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep: I had a recurrent dream about falling from great heights.
• [ in sing. ] a state of mind in which someone is or seems to be unaware of their immediate surroundings: he had been walking around in a dream all day.
• a cherished aspiration, ambition, or ideal: I fulfilled a childhood dream when I became champion | the girl of my dreams | [ as modifier ] : they'd found their dream home.
• an unrealistic or self-deluding fantasy: maybe he could get a job and earn some money—but he knew this was just a dream.
• a person or thing perceived as wonderful or perfect: her new man's an absolute dream | it was a dream of a backhand | she's a couturier's dream.
verb (past and past participle dreamed or dreamt |dremt| ) [ no obj. ]
1 experience dreams during sleep: I dreamed about her last night.
• [ with obj. ] see, hear, or feel (something) in a dream: maybe you dreamed it | [ with clause ] : I dreamed that I was going to be executed.
• indulge in daydreams or fantasies, typically about something greatly desired: she had dreamed of a trip to Italy.
• [ with obj. ] (dream time away) waste one's time in a lazy, unproductive way.
2 [ with negative ] contemplate the possibility of doing something or that something might be the case: I wouldn't dream of foisting myself on you | [ with clause ] : I never dreamed anyone would take offense.
PHRASES
beyond one's wildest dreams bigger or better than could be reasonably expected: stockbrokers command salaries beyond the wildest dreams of most workers.
in your dreams used in spoken English to assert that something much desired is not likely ever to happen.
in one's wildest dreams [ with negative ] used to emphasize that a situation is beyond the scope of one's imagination: she could never in her wildest dreams have imagined the summer weather in New York.
like a dream informal very well or successfully: the car is still running like a dream.
PHRASAL VERBS
dream on [ in imperative ] informal used, especially in spoken English, as an ironic comment on the unlikely or impractical nature of a plan or aspiration: Dean thinks he's going to get the job. Dream on, babe.
dream something up imagine or invent something: he's been dreaming up new ways of attracting customers.
DERIVATIVES
dreamful |-fəl | adjective ( literary).
dreamless adjective
ORIGIN Middle English: of Germanic origin, related to Dutch droom and German Traum, and probably also to Old English drēam ‘joy, music.’
