In Your Dreams [5 years ago]: Swan song

With a twist

By Moristotle

[Published originally on April 1, 2017.]

I had a fascinating dream this week, perfect for recounting on the first day of a new month.

Goines On: Toe’s up!

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The very evening of the day Goines had reviled himself for uttering his “T”-cap joke to the landscaper, he stubbed a big toe on the stepping stone the landscaper had recently installed just off the lawn near the composting tumbler, which Mrs. Goines had suggested be positioned near their back porch for his convenience. He didn’t sleep well that night, with a throbbing, electric pain, about level 3 out of 10, but enough to slow his going to sleep, or back to sleep each time he awoke to pee.

Goines On: Visit from the nightmare

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It was an altogether strange morning, the one after Thanksgiving. Goines would peg its start to have been the dream of his (or someone’s dream – for could it really have been his?) coming upon a sort of raw croquette and lifting it to his mouth to eat, but, in doing so, waking a living creature inside the croquette (a small but long frog, Goines thought) and causing the creature to begin to struggle vigorously in protest against being taken into someone’s mouth.
    What horrified Goines – and shortly woke him up – was that he didn’t immediately put the croquette down but proceeded to try to kill the struggling creature by squeezing it as hard as he could with the fingers of both hands. It was during the squeezing that Goines awoke, and, he was thankful, stopped squeezing the creature in time – he hoped – to avoid killing it.

In Your Dreams: A bedtime serenade – The Bach Arioso

For Jennifer on her birthday, from Geoff & Dad

By Geoffrey Dean

[Originally published on Jennifer Neumann’s birthday two years ago: December 31, 2016, without a subtitle.]

A few months ago, roughly coinciding with our daughter Vera’s arrival, I put together a playlist of classical pieces that I considered suitably sleep-inducing. After mining my own memory for appropriate selections, I enriched our nighttime listening repertoire with a few “readymade” albums, such as “More Bedtime Serenades.” This compilation came up as I searched for one of my favorite pieces by J. S. Bach, the “Arioso,” which is perhaps best-known and most widely performed today as a cello solo with piano accompaniment. This is the version heard on More Bedtime Serenades, in an interpretation by Janos Starker that to me brings home the sense of Arioso as “almost an aria” – a piece striving towards full-fledged aria status, and almost getting there. Starker’s is a lyrical interpretation that still retains a hint of the spoken quality that was also an important element of Baroque music and the “rhetoric” behind it.

In Your Dreams: The confirmation vote

Subject to change

By Moristotle

Last night I had trouble sleeping. It seemed hours before I finally slept.

In Your Dreams: A national lottery

Tower of London chopping block

And the winner is

By Moristotle

Last night I had another installment of a recurring dream.

In Your Dreams (Ten Years Ago Today)

My dream of personal violence

By Moristotle

[Originally published on July 2, 2007, not one word different.]

Saturday night I had a vivid dream that left my heart pounding. Parked on a city street (in Manhattan?), after stepping out of my car for but a moment, I returned to find two young men—teenage boys—already sitting in it in the act (it was clear to me in the dream) of stealing it. Without a moment’s hesitation I pulled the nearer boy out of the front passenger seat, raised him up with a strength that I probably no longer possess, and threw him, “with prejudice,” up and over the rear of the car. Then I yanked the other boy out from behind the steering wheel, threw him to the pavement, and kicked him viciously....

In Your Dreams: For real

Accurate in detail  & intensely felt

By André Duvall

I can often recall many specific details about my dreams in the first few minutes upon awaking from them. In contrast, I have spoken with several people who say that they do not remember lots of details from their dreams, or who claim to not remember dreaming much at all. Perhaps their dreams do not cause them to awaken, and thus are forgotten entirely. I likely have many of those kinds of dreams as well, the memory of which is long lost in deep slumber earlier in the night. Yet, even though I can recall details of a dream quite well for a few precious minutes, if I do not record those details, the specifics of the dream often fall away, and I can recall only generalities later in the day.

In Your Dreams: Swan song

With a twist

By Moristotle

I had a fascinating dream this week, perfect for recounting on the first day of a new month.

In Your Dreams: A bedtime serenade – The Bach Arioso

By Geoffrey Dean

A few months ago, roughly coinciding with our daughter Vera’s arrival, I put together a playlist of classical pieces that I considered suitably sleep-inducing. After mining my own memory for appropriate selections, I enriched our nighttime listening repertoire with a few “readymade” albums, such as “More Bedtime Serenades.” This compilation came up as I searched for one of my favorite pieces by J. S. Bach, the “Arioso,” which is perhaps best-known and most widely performed today as a cello solo with piano accompaniment. This is the version heard on More Bedtime Serenades, in an interpretation by Janos Starker that to me brings home the sense of Arioso as “almost an aria” – a piece striving towards full-fledged aria status, and almost getting there. Starker’s is a lyrical interpretation that still retains a hint of the spoken quality that was also an important element of Baroque music and the “rhetoric” behind it.

In Your Dreams: Dream music

By Geoffrey Dean

Last week, a student in a music class I teach mentioned the music of the 2001 Japanese anime film Spirited Away. I remembered that as I woke up today, with the feeling that I must listen to the film’s song, “One Summer’s Day.” When I discovered this song while in Osaka five years ago, I fell in love with the unabashedly sentimental music of Joe Hisaishi and the pure, heartfelt singing of Ayaka Hirahara. I hear this song with a nostalgia for something unreachable, far away:

In Your Dreams: Escape to a parallel reality

By Sharon Stoner

This experience (I don’t call it a dream) occurred about twenty-five years ago, when I was in my early 40s and had lived in my own house in Tulare, California for about fifteen years. I experienced waking up in my house. I was hearing voices coming from the living room. When I got out of bed and put my feet on the floor, I noticed that it was a bare wooden floor, not carpeted as usual. As I moved toward the door, I realized that the room was larger, and it was decorated better. I was totally bewildered! I was in my own bedroom, in my own home, but it was different, and better.

In Your Dreams: Attend your own funeral

And who was that prostitute?

By Moristotle

The first dream (night of August 3-4). Because my funeral was scheduled to commence in a couple of hours (around 1 p.m.), and I was on the program to perform a classical piano selection for it, we (that is, my over-the-shoulder assistant – or perhaps my manager – and I) had to decide whether I knew the music well enough to do it. We judged that I didn’t, so we decided that we would play a recording of the music and I would sit at the piano and play along with it – sort of finger-syncing.
    We had to get to the venue in time for me to retrieve the sheet music. We arrived – it didn’t seem to be a church (“thank God!”) – but I dilly-dallied the time away and, seconds away from when I was scheduled to start, I had not yet assembled the sheet music I was to “play” from.
    I woke up.

Considerations. Well, the first point has to be that I was supposedly attending my own funeral. If it was someone else’s funeral, I failed to comprehend that, and I did have the sense as the dream went along that it was my funeral, and this didn’t seem strange to me or my assistant manager.
    The second point is that I can’t play anything on a piano, let alone classical music. And not only could I not play such music, neither could I convincingly “finger-sync” doing so.
    A perhaps obvious “meaning” of the dream might be that I have been ill-prepared to live my life, I have not known its “music” but have only gone through the motions of living, so that being alive at my own funeral isn’t strange – I have been dead the whole time anyway. And my being in no hurry to find the sheet music suggests that I have not applied myself to finding the music of living my life.
    All of which seems absurd somehow, and singularly off the mark. Perhaps nothing more is “meant” than that I have some second-thoughts about the actual music that has been my life’s soundtrack?
    Was the only constructive thing I did in the entire dream…to wake up? And is my task now simply to consider what other kinds of music I might pursue?
    One thing strikes me about my life: I work hard, and I am future-oriented in planning projects I need to get done, whether to get through a day or a week of home life or to publish whichever of Moristotle & Co.’s recurring columns have recently accrued. All of these activities are enjoyable, but....Could they be more enjoyable if I could “be present” more in the moment of doing them, and less “in the future” planning my next move?

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The second dream (night of August 5-6). I was sitting in an upholstered chair in a sort of student center (a busy, crowded, large, public sort of room, anyway), with a fair amount of my “stuff” lying in the seat on other side of me. A woman I recognized from about 40 years earlier at IBM rushed up, desperately in need of using the toilet, which my upholstered chair in the crowded public space had suddenly become (or been revealed to be, although it still looked like an ordinary upholstered chair with a fairly wide and deep seat). There was no question that, of course, I would get up and let her “use the toilet.”
    Nothing else passed between us; we didn’t say hello or anything else. I simply stood up and gathered my stuff, which mainly included several lemons and several limes. I stuffed as many as I could into my pockets and carried the rest away in my hands.
    I didn’t watch her “go to the toilet.”
    In the next scene I was reconnoitering with my team of detectives in another area of the “center” - it seems we were there investigating something, although I can’t remember whether I had a sense of this as I was sitting in the upholstered chair. One of my colleagues asked, “Who was that prostitute?”
    Without hesitation I said the name of the woman who had asked to “use the toilet” and told them what years she had worked at IBM. My colleagues were amazed that I knew her and even knew “all about her.”
    I didn’t question the term “prostitute,” although the woman had never been a prostitute to my knowledge.
    And then I woke up.

Considerations. I don’t think I’d dreamed about the woman in many years, and I can’t remember when I ever did, although I suppose I must have. The most striking thing about this dream (even more striking than the strange “toilet chair”) is that this person showed up in it. And I suppose that the dream’s “meaning” must somehow involve her identity and be centered on the fact that the chair I was sitting in was the one that she wanted to use, not someone else’s – couldn’t all of the chairs in the large room have had the same property? (This question didn’t come up in the dream.)
    And what about those lemons & limes? Why citrus fruits? Vitamin C? The colors – bright green & yellow? Beats me.
    Or could “prostitute” be my psyche’s assessment of my dealings with the woman, and the dream’s message be that I have now evacuated all its remains?

Copyright © 2016 by Moristotle

The ouroboros, a metaphor for dreaming

“Ouroboros,” By anonymous medieval illuminator;
Public Domain

Dreamsourcing

By Morris Dean

[Note: The unedited, dictated version of the following account was appended on June 15 to the May 27 Dreamsourcing column, “Sleeping and waking.” It was the approximately sixteenth set of “dream notes” posted as comments on that column.
    The revised account below is my first attempt at a new Dreamsourcing column since May 27.]

Voting commercial

Dreamsourcing

By Bob Boldt

The Dream. Our marketing firm had been hired to produce a commercial to encourage folks to take voting more seriously. We decided to audition some sample presentations to see if someone had a sufficiently innovative way to present the material in a new and catchy way. The first to audition was a troop of clowns who brought into the studio a huge cardboard cutout of a TV screen behind which they did a series of juggling and acrobatic acts.

Australia

Dreamsourcing

By Bob Boldt

The Dream. I was packing up some ten or twelve equipment cases of various sizes and descriptions with cameras, lights, cables, and costumes from a feature film shoot we had just completed in Australia. There just didn’t seem to be enough room for everything. I was in the process of collapsing a huge down jacket – compressing it to remove the air – when I thought of something I had left behind in the hotel.

9/11

Dreamsourcing

By Bob Boldt

The Dream. I was nine years old, visiting New York with my mother on the morning of September 11, 2001. We went to the World Trade Center.

Sleeping and waking

“Iris,” by Auguste Rodin (detail)
photo by the author, April 27

Dreamsourcing

By Morris Dean

[Editor’s Note: The following account was dreamt early this morning, and we are pleased to assume that Bob Boldt’s post of yesterday (“Tony”) deserves some credit for it – at least for the fact that the dreamer wrote the account.]

It’s early morning as I start to write. Coming to my chair, I had the thought that I was dreaming even then, that “dreaming”as ordinarily understood – something we do in our sleep – extends, really, to our waking life as well. That is, our very life is a dream.

Tony

“Peter,” a dream invention by the author

Dreamsourcing

By Bob Boldt

[Editor’s Note: This post renews the author’s January 31 “Invitation to recount our dreams here,” which provoked a fair amount of commentary but has so far prompted no one else to recount a dream. The invitation still stands, and we hope that other dreamers will take us up on it soon.]

An invitation to recount our dreams here

Dreamsourcing

By Bob Boldt

One of the ways many so-called primitive cultures strengthen their communal bonds is through the telling of dreams. I like to think of the diverse group of individuals involved in Moristotle & Co. as a kind of community, albeit a virtual one. Accordingly, it might be fun – and productive – for the members of this community to share some of their dreams. Consider this an invitation.