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There’s a benefit to waking throughout the night: catching all the dreams.

1/3/2017

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​I haven't solved my sleeping problem yet; I still wake up every few hours. But at least now it all adds up to a full night's sleep. Last night, for instance, I woke four times, each time after a dream.

One odd thing I’ve noticed is that each dream each night is completely unique. It seems to have no relationship to the others, either in terms of feeling, theme, location, characters or plot. And yet, there is only one person, me, who is dreaming them all, and all in the space of one night of my life, during which I presumably have one main outlook and feeling about myself and the world. This was a very unexpected discovery.

As well, when I thought back on as many dreams from the last few days as I could remember this morning, I noticed that all the people in them had distinct personalities, with distinct looks and characters as well, as if they were plucked right off a real street and popped into my dream whole. Even sometimes while I was dreaming I would be puzzling over one of them just as I would someone I met in real life, thinking what an interesting person. In the past, I've ignored their reality because I just assumed that what some psychologists said about dreams was the truth, that people in them represent different aspects of the dreamer's self. So, not understanding a character simply meant I didn’t understand what aspect of myself was being referred to. Well, that still may be true, just that the representations aren't simple symbols created from whole cloth as if they were chess pieces but instead are plucked straight from my memory base of real people and brought to life.

However, the more I think about that, the more I doubt that they represent parts of my psyche. Instead, they seem more likely to be parts of the drama of a dream, and it’s the whole of the drama which represents my ongoing feeling and outlook at the time.

One part of my general outlook now, and has been since I lost my shyness recently, is a newfound enjoyment of people, of the individuals they all are. I really like people, in all their uniqueness, all of them, the good, the bad, and the ugly. So, I think that interest is being represented in my dreams by making the individual characters in the drama fun to watch and think about. It uses these fascinating people as the building blocks for each dream. It's as if my dream mind were a story writer. Which would make sense too because stories are another thing I'm into consciously. As I have been most of my life.

Or is it the other way around; I'm into it consciously because my unconscious mind just naturally thinks in terms of stories? I don’t know the answer to that one. Although, If I think about it hard enough, maybe I’ll dream it up tonight.


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A sunny dream, with no fear.

1/3/2017

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​For the fun of it, I decided to climb out on the cabling of this vast, floating wind harvester, a machine that was part of a long stream of similar metal air ships, all of different colours, shapes and sizes, but all looking to some degree like massive grain combine harvesters. In the blue sky, the sun was cheerfully shining down onto wide fields of green farmland about half a mile below us. I was with a couple other guys, both of whom seemed less knowledgeable about all this than me, but who nevertheless followed me out onto the cables.

At one point I looked backwards into the stream of air harvesters behind us, and just above them a vast, new one in yellow was bearing down on us. It was longer and slimmer and obviously faster than the older, more upright, bulkier machines. It seemed to be coming right at us, but instead blew by just overhead, noiselessly but causing a tremendous wind.

I looked around to the front, in the direction it had disappeared, just as a small, old machine was blown out of the air and crashed, its wide catcher-conveyer section smashing into that of the machine I was on. I said, "Look at that," as it balanced there. Then it toppled over and fell out of sight towards the ground. I was trying to understand what happened and said to the others, "It's the big, flat forward section that makes these machines very vulnerable to a sudden wind."
​

As I was waking, I was amazed that I had no fear of heights at all way up there. Maybe that was the point of the dream, the exuberance that comes with a lack of fear, the way I'm feeling about people lately! And I thought the machines were like an air version of sperm whales that open their great mouths and sieve out plankton. I couldn't see any animals in the air that these machines were after, like birds, so maybe there were vast numbers of insects up here in this particular air stream on this planet. And where did the idea of the flying harvester come from? When I was a kid on the farm, I used to watch combines mow down wheat fields, lifting the stalks up into their bellies where the grain would be taken from the chaff that was shaken out the back. On large farms, a number of harvesters, one at an angle behind another, would mow down an entire field fairly quickly.
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Dream of a typed poem

12/29/2016

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I had a dream last night of a sheet of paper with a poem on it. The paper also included notes from several people, all typewritten as if from some kind of an online workshop. (Odd because I've never been a member of an online workshop.) The paper was perfectly still in my dream-space, like it was waiting for me to read it. The poem consisted of about twenty short lines. But I only got part way through it before it disappeared. Which was frustrating because I was intrigued by it. Then, half an hour later, the same sheet of paper with the same poem appeared again. But this time I was given even less time. Anyway, I don't think it would be possible to memorize a poem like that and get it out through the blood-brain barrier of the subconscious. So what was the point of it? Was my subconscious just showing me that it's been writing poems too? And why would it bother? Is it competing with me? And who were the people who attached notes to it? Maybe there's a little artificial community of poets in there. A funny idea, but it would make 

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Sherry Leigh Williams sounds important
Like · Reply · 29 December 2016 at 18:48

Sharon Berg You are being invited by your subconscious to capture the poem on paper. In other words, stop rationalizing that you could not get it past the blood-brain barriers, just sit and write. You may not end up with the same poem this time, but who is to say that you won't eventually capture it?
Like · Reply · 2 · 29 December 2016 at 18:54

Stan Burfield You're write! Will do. We'll see what happens.
Like · Reply · 29 December 2016 at 19:11

Aldous Richards Do you capture poem or give it life?Rhetocrial question.
Unlike · Reply · 1 · 30 December 2016 at 03:31
Write a reply...



Stan Burfield I've done this before. Writing the words that come to mind, then the next and then the next. A few of my best poems have come that way, but usually it's a combination of obvious things and nonsense. Which is what happened this time. But partly it's a matter of priming the pump properly before doing it. Which I'll try in future. Now that I know there is something there waiting to get out.
Like · Reply · 29 December 2016 at 20:41

Stan Burfield Here's another possibility: My subconscious is simply excited by the fact that it has learned how to type, just like I do, but with no fingers! So It's showing me the new trick.
Like · Reply · 29 December 2016 at 22:40 · Edited

Cambridge N Calvin Keenan I think your sub cocious is trying to remind you about that online poetry group you were going to start up for us littler poets that know not what we do lol lol xox💜❤💜
Unlike · Reply · 1 · 30 December 2016 at 02:52

Lynn Tait Might have to do with you leaving the London Open Mic. Maybe you are giving you self permission to do so in your dreams.
Unlike · Reply · 1 · 30 December 2016 at 08:25

Martin Hayter Either that or "Life is like a poem..."
Unlike · Reply · 2 · 30 December 2016 at 11:38
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Fire!

11/26/2016

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Last night I I woke to a fire in the house, in the house I was living in in my dream. I was half-heartedly trying to put it out, but it quickly got out of control. I gave up and woke up. I lay there sweating, thinking about my life. If there really were a fire in our apartment, so much of my life would disappear. I still have boxes of bits and pieces from all back through the last sixty years. I never look at them. But I've never been able to throw them out. And now my life is nearly over. I'm still obsessing on all the unfinished attempts at things, the directions, the false starts. The longer my life drags on, the more of them I drag behind me. Pacing around the apartment, wide awake now, anxious, I thought I'd better just start living right now. And forget the past. It's finally time. If I'm ever going to. No more living a little now but mostly back then, mostly over there and there. I need to slash it all off and jump right in and be WHOLLY here for the first time in my life. Clean. Complete.

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​A Quarto of Milk, Fresh from the Dreamery

3/2/2016

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Upon waking on this white morning of open-mic night, where I will once again reluctantly present myself before an audience to be judged, there were two guys having at it, one shorter and more intense, the other over 6', neatly dressed in white shirt and jacket. The short guy had the other guy by the collar, was shaking him. The tall guy was in agony,  his head stretched back, snout pointing straight up. The short guy was shouting, "You don't know who you are at all, do you? If you think you do, then you haven't got a clue." 

A feminine voice came from the side: "Aw look how cute he is, so stressed out."

Okay, yes, the big guy was a dog, Man's best friend. Maybe the short guy was me. But I think the tall guy was also me, with his lack of self esteem, just needing to be appreciated. And suffering badly because he so wanted to please the short guy but couldn't because the short guy just would not be pleased by somebody who just wanted to be pleased.


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Martin Hayter I, for one, won't be judging you, Stan...I have a yellow snow drawing competition on which to exercise my judgement...and I appreciate you.
Unlike · Reply · 1 · 2 March at 14:49 · Edited

Al Broudy I respond here to the "Aw look how cute he is" with a vignette from my past. After I left New Hampshire for Quebec, I was in the habit of motorbiking down to NH to visit. It was only 300 miles or so. But I usually took a motel as soon as I crossed into Vermont. It was cheap and it was nice. So I take a room one night and head for the bar..still wearing my leathers. I had, like, bugs in my teeth. Bugs in my fuckin' teeth. I thought I was looking quite the fearsome dangeroso. And I ordered a fearsome dangeroso kind of drink. "Beer, whiskey chaser," I growled. I guzzled some beer and raised the whiskey to my lips. I heard a woman across the bar say to her husband, soto voce, "Oh, how cute..he's drinking boiler-makers."
Like · Reply · 2 March at 20:16

Stan Burfield ha ha. The kind of thing you'd never forget! Also, I gotta say, Al, you can really tell a story.

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    Stan Burfield's Blog

    Organizer of London Open Mic Poetry. former support worker for people with autism and developmental disabilities.  former farm boy, former adventurer, former florist.
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    *The Pow Wow
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