Showing posts with label dreams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dreams. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 1, 2020
Happy New Year (and Decade)
Monday, April 9, 2018
Which is Almost a Post about Books and Dreaming, but Needs Editing
What Dreams May Come
All English Literature can be said to begin with a dream.
Caedmon, (flourished 658–680), first Old English Christian poet, whose fragmentary hymn to the creation remains a symbol of the adaptation of the aristocratic-heroic Anglo-Saxon verse tradition to the expression of Christian themes. His story is known from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which tells how Caedmon, an illiterate herdsman, retired from company one night in shame because he could not comply with the demand made of each guest to sing. Then in a dream a stranger appeared commanding him to sing of “the beginning of things,” and the herdsman found himself uttering “verses which he had never heard.”
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. Often cited as the world's first science fiction novel, Frankenstein was inspired by a vivid nightmare. At 18 years old, Shelley visited Lord Byron by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Stuck indoors and huddled around a log fire, Byron suggested they each write a ghost story - but, night after night, Shelley was unable to think of anything suitable. Then one evening, when discussion turned to the nature of life, Shelley suggested "perhaps a corpse could be re-animated" backed by the thought that "galvanism had given token of such things". Later that night after turning in, her imagination took hold and she experienced what she described as a vivid waking dream: "I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world."
“Kubla Khan” from Christabel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: One of the most famous examples of dream-inspired literature, the famous poem — printed in the book Christabel – wafted into Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s brain from a combination of sleep and opium. One of his most beloved works, he described it as a “fragment” rather than a whole, though most critics these days analyze it as the latter.
In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed up three key sequences from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. "For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers." While he was recovering in bed from a hemorrhage, Fanny Stevenson heard his screams resulting from an opium-induced nightmare. He promptly awoke and complained: "Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale."
H. P. Lovecraft ... a number of his menacing characters and strange storylines first appeared in dreams. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle tales are the most obvious example, set in dreamlike outer realms inhabited by strange creatures. One particular yarn from this series, the short story The Statement of Randolph Carter, was based on a dream Lovecraft transcribed, and to which he only added a preface for clarity. Similarly, his prose poem “Nyarlathotep” was inspired by a recurring nightmare Lovecraft had experienced since the age of ten.
Stuart Little, by E B White. E. B. White fell asleep on a train and “dreamed of a small character who had the features of a mouse, was nicely dressed, courageous, and questing.” White had eighteen nieces and nephews, who were always begging him to tell them a story, but he shied away from making one up off the top of his head. Instead, he set to writing, and stocked a desk drawer with tales about his “mouse-child . . . the only fictional figure ever to have honored and disturbed my sleep.” He named him Stuart. Inspiration for the talking rodent stemmed from a dream of E B White's in the 1920s, although it took him two decades to convert his notes into a novel.
J. R. R. Tolkien: Numenor "I say this about the 'heart' [of the Legendarium], for I have what some might call an Atlantis complex. Possibly inherited, though my parents died too young for me to know such things about them and too young to transfer such thing by words. Inherited from me (I suppose) by one only of my children, though I did not know that about my son [Michael] until recently, and he did not know it about me. I mean the terrible recurrent dream (beginning with memory) of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields. (I bequeathed it to Faramir.) I don't think I have had it since I wrote the 'Downfall of Nùmenor' as the last of the legends of the First and Second Age."--Letter to W. H. Auden , 7 June 1955
Book of Dreams by Jack Kerouac: Everything readers need to know about this novel comes straight from the title. Beat poster boy Jack Kerouac kept and published a book comprised entirely of his dreams, spanning from 1952 to 1960 and starring characters from many of his other works.
Stephen King: Salem's Lot. One eerie dream in particular during his childhood proved so haunting and Stephen King-esque that it would be used as an outline for Salem's Lot decades later. “It was a dream where I came up a hill and there was a gallows on top of this hill with birds all flying around it. There was a hang man there. He had died, not by having his neck broken, but by strangulation. I could tell because his face was all puffy and purple. And as I came close to him he opened his eyes, reached his hands out and grabbed me. Years later I began to work on Salem’s Lot... as I was looking around for a spooky house, a guy who works in the creative department of my brain said, ‘Well what about this nightmare you had when you were eight or nine years old? Will that work?’ And I remembered the nightmare, and I thought, yes, it’s perfect.”- Stephen King, Writers Dreaming. Also Misery by Stephen King, a most memorable horror story that began as King drifted off to sleep on a flight to London. He dreamed of a chilling tale about an insane woman who mutilates and kills her favorite writer, binding a book in his skin.
My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995) is the final novel by William S. Burroughs to be published before his death in 1997. It is a collection of dreams, taken from various decades, along with a few comments about the War on Drugs and paragraphs created with the cut-up technique. The title is explained in the very first dream, dated 1959: Burroughs is trying to board an airplane, but a woman at the ticket counter "with the cold waxen face of an intergalactic bureaucrat" refuses him passage, informing him, "You haven't had your education yet."
Other books and authors : William Styron, Sophie's Choice; Stephanie Myers,The Twilight Series; H. G. Wells, Twelve Stories and a Dream (no original citation for the dream). There is a whole genre of "dream literature" that is a form of telling a story by simply saying it was a dream, with, perhaps, no original dream that inspires it: The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland, The Book of the Duchess by Geoffrey Chaucer, A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare, The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis all fit in this category.
Sources, but so scrambled it's hard to tell sometimes what's from where. All original credit to them; I just stitched them together:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Caedmon
http://www.bachelorsdegreeonline.com/blog/2010/15-famous-books-inspired-by-dreams/
http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/10-famous-novels-inspired-by-dreams.html
http://flavorwire.com/390898/a-selection-of-writers-inspired-by-dreams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Education:_A_Book_of_Dreams
All English Literature can be said to begin with a dream.
Caedmon, (flourished 658–680), first Old English Christian poet, whose fragmentary hymn to the creation remains a symbol of the adaptation of the aristocratic-heroic Anglo-Saxon verse tradition to the expression of Christian themes. His story is known from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which tells how Caedmon, an illiterate herdsman, retired from company one night in shame because he could not comply with the demand made of each guest to sing. Then in a dream a stranger appeared commanding him to sing of “the beginning of things,” and the herdsman found himself uttering “verses which he had never heard.”
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. Often cited as the world's first science fiction novel, Frankenstein was inspired by a vivid nightmare. At 18 years old, Shelley visited Lord Byron by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Stuck indoors and huddled around a log fire, Byron suggested they each write a ghost story - but, night after night, Shelley was unable to think of anything suitable. Then one evening, when discussion turned to the nature of life, Shelley suggested "perhaps a corpse could be re-animated" backed by the thought that "galvanism had given token of such things". Later that night after turning in, her imagination took hold and she experienced what she described as a vivid waking dream: "I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world."
“Kubla Khan” from Christabel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: One of the most famous examples of dream-inspired literature, the famous poem — printed in the book Christabel – wafted into Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s brain from a combination of sleep and opium. One of his most beloved works, he described it as a “fragment” rather than a whole, though most critics these days analyze it as the latter.
In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed up three key sequences from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. "For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers." While he was recovering in bed from a hemorrhage, Fanny Stevenson heard his screams resulting from an opium-induced nightmare. He promptly awoke and complained: "Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale."
H. P. Lovecraft ... a number of his menacing characters and strange storylines first appeared in dreams. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle tales are the most obvious example, set in dreamlike outer realms inhabited by strange creatures. One particular yarn from this series, the short story The Statement of Randolph Carter, was based on a dream Lovecraft transcribed, and to which he only added a preface for clarity. Similarly, his prose poem “Nyarlathotep” was inspired by a recurring nightmare Lovecraft had experienced since the age of ten.
Stuart Little, by E B White. E. B. White fell asleep on a train and “dreamed of a small character who had the features of a mouse, was nicely dressed, courageous, and questing.” White had eighteen nieces and nephews, who were always begging him to tell them a story, but he shied away from making one up off the top of his head. Instead, he set to writing, and stocked a desk drawer with tales about his “mouse-child . . . the only fictional figure ever to have honored and disturbed my sleep.” He named him Stuart. Inspiration for the talking rodent stemmed from a dream of E B White's in the 1920s, although it took him two decades to convert his notes into a novel.
J. R. R. Tolkien: Numenor "I say this about the 'heart' [of the Legendarium], for I have what some might call an Atlantis complex. Possibly inherited, though my parents died too young for me to know such things about them and too young to transfer such thing by words. Inherited from me (I suppose) by one only of my children, though I did not know that about my son [Michael] until recently, and he did not know it about me. I mean the terrible recurrent dream (beginning with memory) of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields. (I bequeathed it to Faramir.) I don't think I have had it since I wrote the 'Downfall of Nùmenor' as the last of the legends of the First and Second Age."--Letter to W. H. Auden , 7 June 1955
Book of Dreams by Jack Kerouac: Everything readers need to know about this novel comes straight from the title. Beat poster boy Jack Kerouac kept and published a book comprised entirely of his dreams, spanning from 1952 to 1960 and starring characters from many of his other works.
Stephen King: Salem's Lot. One eerie dream in particular during his childhood proved so haunting and Stephen King-esque that it would be used as an outline for Salem's Lot decades later. “It was a dream where I came up a hill and there was a gallows on top of this hill with birds all flying around it. There was a hang man there. He had died, not by having his neck broken, but by strangulation. I could tell because his face was all puffy and purple. And as I came close to him he opened his eyes, reached his hands out and grabbed me. Years later I began to work on Salem’s Lot... as I was looking around for a spooky house, a guy who works in the creative department of my brain said, ‘Well what about this nightmare you had when you were eight or nine years old? Will that work?’ And I remembered the nightmare, and I thought, yes, it’s perfect.”- Stephen King, Writers Dreaming. Also Misery by Stephen King, a most memorable horror story that began as King drifted off to sleep on a flight to London. He dreamed of a chilling tale about an insane woman who mutilates and kills her favorite writer, binding a book in his skin.
My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995) is the final novel by William S. Burroughs to be published before his death in 1997. It is a collection of dreams, taken from various decades, along with a few comments about the War on Drugs and paragraphs created with the cut-up technique. The title is explained in the very first dream, dated 1959: Burroughs is trying to board an airplane, but a woman at the ticket counter "with the cold waxen face of an intergalactic bureaucrat" refuses him passage, informing him, "You haven't had your education yet."
Other books and authors : William Styron, Sophie's Choice; Stephanie Myers,The Twilight Series; H. G. Wells, Twelve Stories and a Dream (no original citation for the dream). There is a whole genre of "dream literature" that is a form of telling a story by simply saying it was a dream, with, perhaps, no original dream that inspires it: The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland, The Book of the Duchess by Geoffrey Chaucer, A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare, The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis all fit in this category.
Sources, but so scrambled it's hard to tell sometimes what's from where. All original credit to them; I just stitched them together:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Caedmon
http://www.bachelorsdegreeonline.com/blog/2010/15-famous-books-inspired-by-dreams/
http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/10-famous-novels-inspired-by-dreams.html
http://flavorwire.com/390898/a-selection-of-writers-inspired-by-dreams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Education:_A_Book_of_Dreams
Friday, May 27, 2016
Dream a Little Dream
So, the other day I woke up and wrote down a dream I just had. This was not unusual. I've been recording, on and off, strange dreams that have impressed me for years, at least since the middle 1990's. I had, in fact, written down two more during the past week. What was unusual was that I then read an article at Brain Pickings about Graham Greene and his dream diary.
Near the end of his life, Greene put together over a quarter century's worth of the most interesting of his dreams and published them in a book. Here is what he says in the introduction:
"It can be a comfort sometimes to know that there is a world which is purely one’s own — the experience in that world, of travel, danger, happiness, is shared with no one else. There are no witnesses. No libel actions. The characters I meet there have no memory of meeting me, no journalist or would-be biographer can check my account with another’s. I can hardly be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for any incident connected with the security services. I have spoken with Khruschev at a dinner party, I have been sent by the Secret Service to murder Goebbels. I am not lying — and yet, of all the witnesses who share these scenes with me, there is not one who can claim from his personal knowledge that what I describe is untrue." -- A World of My Own: A Dream Diary, by Graham Greene.
I thought of other author's who kept dream journals, like William S. Burroughs or Stephen King, and all the people who did it as a form of therapy. Suddenly it struck me that I had over twenty years of my own recorded dreams, scattered here and there in my files. I always wanted to collect them, put them in some cohesive order. Just now, I have plenty of down time. Why not do it at last?
That is what I've been doing for the past two weeks. I had most of the dreams gathered in a paper file. Some were typed, some hand written. There were detailed accounts, and cryptic notes. They were recorded on all sizes of ruled paper, on typing paper, and on folded tray liners from work.
I kept finding more. I recorded five "primordial" dreams that I had in childhood. I had finished typing up everything in the folder and numbering them, in chronological order, when I discovered a new cache in my journals. The numbering had to be re-done. I cursed myself every time I had not dated a dream, and even now I'm not entirely sure of the order. I kept tweaking refinements to the format, made titles for quick identification of the dreams, made an index of title and number. And most mornings would bring new dreams.
A big part of the joy of this exercise has been simply editorial. I've cut big gobs of run-on prose (my usual dream writing style) into more easily handled slices. I've removed countless "seems like"s and "kind of"s, but had to insert quite a few "that"s for clarity's sake. Also, I replaced a few unclear pronouns with definite nouns. But mostly I didn't cut or add anything to the original recounting.
One thing I've realized is that, as I've written dreams over the years, I've gotten better at recording a readable dream. You can't just write down the bare facts. You've got to put down the atmosphere, what you were feeling, the point of view. Perhaps because of all the books and movies I've consumed, my point of view isn't always me. A lot of times I'm looking at things from third person limited, or through another person. And what adventures we've had.
I've seen aliens, sasquatches, and sea monsters. I've met J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula K. LeGuin, C. S. Lewis, Mark Twain, Quentin Crisp, and the Queen of England. There were fairies, ghosts, and wizards. I have met (and been) Gandalf, Goku, and the Scarecrow. I've encountered family and familiar places in crisis situations, from floods, volcanoes, and robbery, to crashing space stations.
I've been to my grandmother's haunted (and haunting) house more times than I can remember. I've visited labyrinthine cemeteries, lost valleys, vast wooded back country, and monolithic cities, and I've wandered dark, winding streets. I go to stores with no money, find prizes that slip through my fingers, try to get a ride home, and plunge along highways out of control.
I've flown on my own, and in a surprising number of hovercars. I cast spells, perform exorcisms, and have done incredible feats of martial arts. I've changed form, both at will, and not. While I'm personally involved in most dreams, some are perfectly contained little tales of their own that I observe from afar. I've got the skeletons for at least a dozen short stories here.
Well! It's been fun collecting all these dreams into a uniform, active document. Patterns have emerged, and old times have been recalled. None have been prophetic...so far. I just added a new one today. This brings the count up to one hundred and sixty-nine, and there is no end in sight. I'm sure that, as in the past, I will grow weary of recording them, or things will get too busy. But I'm also sure that eventually, given the chance, I will come back to them. And the Dream will continue.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
St. Thomas Aquinas: "The Dumb Ox"
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Merlin Lives
Merlin: Lies. Stories. You brought me back. Your love brought me back. Back to where you are now...in the land of dreams.
Arthur: Are you just a dream? Merlin?
Merlin: A dream to some...A nightmare to others!
***
Kay: I was dreaming.
Arthur: Of Merlin?
Kay: Yes. He spoke to me...
Arthur: I dreamed of him, too. Merlin lives. He lives in our dreams now. He speaks to us from there.
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