The Dreaming Body -- My Quest for Nocturnal Escape: Part Two, the Awakening

In my darkest days I tend to sleep a lot. Nap after nap comes in quick succession when turning off the world is as easy as clicking the light switch and settling into a light snooze. I have become reckless in my pursuit of sleep, searching for one long forgotten dream. Perhaps, I long for anything that will shut out the light.

When I was a kid, I had a recurring dream filled with creepy witches and small children, rendered in cartoon detail. This brain animation came weekly for a period, then just stopped. I've never had it again. Could this be the dreamworld I seek? Or, perhaps, there is another world buried deep in my psyche, asking to be explored? I've never had another dream that beat on the doors so often as this one. Most dreams come once and never return.

Dreams are always peopled with the strangest or most unexpected characters, random places from the past, and enough chicanery to make election year look like a triumph. Random classmates from grade school appear alongside college professors from your undergraduate years. The settings morph and shift in full fun house regalia transmitting your parent's house to the halls of your Alma mater with shocking quickness and a bit more clarity than your sanity will permit. Sometimes dreams will allow an elusive or exclusive look at what might have happened if life worked out differently, or if that long awaited one night stand did finally happen with a long ago love interest. Usually these dream scenarios have a habit of removing changes as quickly as they are wrought dumping you back in the present, wide awake and wondering what happened.

I have slept a lot lately, but I have not had many dreams. My escape has been empty and unsettling. I have not found that dream nor will I. I float through the dream world unable to make a connection, floundering and foundering on the shore of long ago and recent discontent. Why I keep going back for more is not really the question. We all have to sleep. I just want to make it more meaningful. I just want to find something that feels less like an empty escape when I lay my head on that pillow and drift off. That recurring childhood dream doesn't look so bad. I'll take witches.

"I'm in my room with the headphones on
Deep in the dream chamber
And then I'm awake and I'm guarding my face
Hoping you don't break my stereo
Because it's the one thing that I couldn't live without
So then I think about that, and then I sort of black out"

-- The Mountain Goats, "Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Contractions: Henry Standing Bear's Ethical Code

Image
I recently finished watching the last season of Longmire , a show that I believe only got better when it moved to Netflix. A & E cancelled it, despite good ratings, because it did not directly appeal to the 18-35 age demographic. The writing and plot development improved as the show started focusing more on major themes and story lines and not story-of-the-week subplots. While the show's general premise is typical cop show fare, the strong characterization and settings give the show a primacy over similar procedurals. While I enjoyed the show, I never got around to reading the books even though I watched dutifully for six seasons. Once I started reading The Cold Dish , I realized how hard it will be not to binge the book series. The books are a treat. Craig Johnson's prose is punchy, and the characters are even better realized. Walt Longmire's love for Rainier beer and obscure literary metaphors, as well as other character's predilections and habits, become crys...
Read more

Do you remember huH Magazine?

Image
The other day when I was writing the "Track This" for Jawbox's "Cooling Card," something jogged my memory about music magazines I had read in my formative years, particularly those published while I was still in High School. Many, if not most, of them are gone now. They gave way to blogs and online publications. These include zines like Flipside , which covered mainstream and underground bands -- they also had some of my favorite columnists of all time, Punk Planet , which ventured further into Indie rock as it progressed, and MRR , which is still going strong. The magazines that I read often included Alternative Press and Magnet , as well as Ray Gun Publishing's huH which turned me on to a ton of great music because it included a cd with each issue that served as a sampler for what had been released that month, divided by genre. While other magazines did this, huH undoubtedly was more inclusive in the types of bands these cds covered. In fact, these col...
Read more

Cal Smith: "So Long, Country Bumpkin"

Image
Cal Smith, born Calvin Grant Shofner on April 7, 1932, died on October 10. He was best known for the 1974 hit, "Country Bumpkin." A tangible part of my childhood, the song still echoes in my head whenever pumpkins are displayed or the newest batch of Pumpkin ales hits the store shelves.  Where I grew up in Northern Wisconsin, the old  Blues Brothers  adage rang true that there were two kinds of music, "country and western." My parents always listened to country music in our house (My mom preferred '90s country radio) and there was always a bunch of western in there as well.(Mostly from my dad). I remember hearing "Streets of Bakersfield" often drifting from car radios and home stereos. I developed an early attraction to some of these songs, even though years later I would hide it behind a sheen of four chords and punk rock. A secret shadow self of country knowledge and Western Swing bravado remained, only unsheathed for music trivia and in the dar...
Read more