The brain is so miraculous. That sentence is miraculously banal. When I think of the dreams that go on, have gone on, and of the tracks they run on, and where those tracks might be found. No, I will spare you the recounting of one or two. Couldn’t recount anything anyway since I don’t remember. Something Swedish, with balsa wood, and Jenga, and contention. And that was just one out of three full-length films I wrote and produced during the night.
The thing that astonishes is the capacity. Sometimes the credits are rolling when I wake up. When I said “Swedish” earlier, I meant not only fir trees and light snow but the whole social-democrat streetscape. Gestalt in a single still. Then I wake up and it vanishes, deleted, leaving a blank.
It’s all unreachable once I’m awake. As soon as I attach adjectives from waking life, the feeling of the dream disappears. As though it were a different language and the translation was being boycotted as inadequate, a book slammed shut by the native speaker. The fleeting memory is a page of gibberish that recedes as I grab for it. The arrogance in the conscious mind, the pre-frontal despot, is the thing that has to be swapped out. More humility is required. More submission and quietness. An active lying down and shutting up, a very concrete skill.
How does one coax the dream back when the words you use to describe what you find are lethal to it? Starts with the breath, no doubt, and the only thing I can relate it to is the tack one takes while walking the forest. That is, to look sideways, to lessen the focus not sharpen it with what you think. Lessen the focus, move the conscious mind out of the way to another quadrant. Then the forest begins to come alive with things that were right there in front of you, but you couldn’t see them. Kissed. Graced. Where the mind that “knows everything already” is laid to rest and, no harm done, the door to more worlds is opened.
