When we lived on Gabriola Island, I went wandering down the road one fine Harvest-Moon night, enjoying the moonlit landscape under that deep purple sky, the banks of trees and a farmer's field that was not too far from our half acre.

At some point, a pretty girl who was also out wandering by herself saw the light glancing off my eyes as I looked up at the huge moon and said, "Nice, isn't it?" Girls on Gabriola, especially the hippy girls, of which Gabriola has a large population, tend not to be too afraid of old guys they bump into out on a dark country road at night.
​
I said, "Yeah, it's a harvest moon tonight."

She looked at me quizzically, like we had known each other for years, and said, "What exactly is a harvest moon?"

"Well," I said, as if I were an older relative of hers, "it's nothing special really, just the full moon that happens to be the closest to the autumn equinox, which is September 22nd, I think."

"Oh!" She looked up at it again. Then she cocked her head with that same quizzical look and said, "Why do you know all this about it?"

We were both warming to our little conversation out there in that eerily-bright light and cool evening scent of fall. So I told her the whole story. "My father grew up on a homestead out on the prairie in Alberta. All they had was grain crops and a little hay. At harvest time, somebody who owned a big threshing machine would move it onto each farm, one after the other, as soon as the grain was ready to harvest. All the guys from all the farms would come in with their wagons and teams of horses and work as late into the night as they possibly could, throwing all the sheaves of grain onto their wagons and then line them up at the threshing machine and toss them in, to separate the seeds from the straw, and then they would head back out to bring more in, and keep at it into the night until they either fell asleep standing up or that farm was all done. Then they would move the threshing machine to the next farm, and so on, and try to get all the farms done before it rained. They would do it all day and then into the night during the harvest moon and during as many nights as they could see well enough on each side of the harvest moon to get it all done as quickly as possible."

She listened intently, then said, "Wow. So now I know." And she gave me a big smile and walked off down the road into the night.

Since I've stopped waking up to an alarm clock, I’ve begun to notice my dreams again. At first I would just catch the tail ends of them, just barely noticing that I had dreamt, but then soon began evaluating them as I woke up, always saying “that’s boring”, and so letting them drift into non-existence. (Even really good dreams tend to seem boring when I'm still asleep.)

Not this morning. The scene in the dream was so good, you could say it woke me right up in my sleep: It was an outdoor scene, very bright, flooded with sunlight. It really took me by surprise. It was like I had just stepped outside into this unexpected environment. Probably misinterpreting it in my sleep, I seemed to be standing in front of a little cove with sail boats, where the ground sloped down to the water, but no, I was maybe a level up above the water and so couldn’t actually see any water from there. What made me think of sailboats were the masts. But they weren’t exactly masts, more tall thin spires. And they didn’t come up from the cabins and decks of boats but from the centres of domes. A cluster of fairly small domes, but really it was hard to tell. The domes (of something like churches or temples) were all down there at a lower level and I was looking down on them. But they were also a backdrop. What was really happening in the dream was with a young couple in the foreground in front of me. They were looking into each others’ eyes, he facing me and to one side and her away from me. They each had their arms up with their hands on each others’ shoulders. (He wore glasses, oddly. Maybe he represented me? He didn't look like me though, although I've noticed that my dream artist is lousy at copying faces from memory.) He had a big smile on his face and was saying something to her. I assumed she was smiling too. The conversation seemed quite intense. The image was very clear and brightly sun-lit. His face was perfectly rendered by the dream machine. All objects in the picture were sharp, perfectly coloured, solid. As I woke up I frantically tried to remember what had come just before this image. It seemed like I was thinking of taking a sweater out for someone. (I slept the night in my old, heavy sweater, which I had bought way back in 1981 on my big backpack trip when winter had started to set in.) The sweater idea may have had something to do with the dream or not. This is another thing I’ve noticed in the past, that the preceding action in a lot of these dreams, when you analyze them, is really irrelevant to the symbolic essence of the dreams It’s as if the dream mind is working up to saying something and can’t start it until a dream happens to arrive at the starting point by accident. Then, at that point, the dream mind brightens, sharpens, makes everything more solid so as to make it easier to remember it all from that point on.

So let’s assume that happened here. This image to me feels like a snapshot of my own personal kind of heaven. Even though I'm not religious. (Consciously, at any rate.) The heaven consists of two people who are very close, intimately close, and who are communicating perfectly. And, probably as a consequence, they have tremendous energy, and yet calm. All that in itself is what I’ve always wanted my whole life. Yes, it's like a heaven to me. Yet it always seemed hopeless.

But now I’m starting to see the possibility of it, as a result of these last two years of social organizing, and of learning some important social skills. I'm actually learning the art of conversing for the first time in my life, in my 60's. In the dream, the sun shining on it all is to me the ultimate positive nature of it. The domes and the spires: Okay, this just occurred to me now: The spires all come up to about the height of which we are standing, so that could mean that the people under the domes also aspire to this very thing that I am viewing here in the dream.

A religious person could interpret the sunlight as being from God, and the domes as temples or churches. It’s interesting that my interpretation here is very similar. And maybe the desire for that intimate perfect communication with others is close to being a religious aspiration, or maybe actually is an essential part of religious aspiration. If that aspiration is strong enough in us, making it a deep part of our unconscious minds, and if we don't see our fellow humans as being perfect enough to be part of an ultimate aspiration, then that partner would have to be some perfect future image, which we can never quite reach.

I prefer to try for it here and now.

The other day I was helping a young friend focus on an essay he was trying to write for school. He was at the stage of grabbing relevant quotes from various publications. Quotes of course are good for making people take you more seriously than they otherwise would. I mean you can't just expound on something, no matter how true or profound. You have to surround yourself with the agreeing voices of a host of others. Then you can collectively sweep bystanders along with you. Because everybody knows what a mumbling individual looks like. Like an embarrasment, an irritation, an affront, an insult, like pretty much any negative thing you can think of. 

Well, anyway, to get back on topic, my friend of course was not allowed to take his quotes from the internet, especially from normal websites, which very well could be run by mumbling individuals, or even from wikipedia, which makes no guarantees about mumbling individuals. No, any website quote must come at least from a .gov or a .org site, and even they are not to be totally trusted. The rule is that the majority of quotes must be lifted from actual, real-world books made of paper. Books with bindings. It's not that the reality of the paper and binding correlate with the rest of reality in terms of truth. Or even that bound paper books tend to have older information in them than is  found on the internet, which might tend to correlate more closely with truth. No, it's just that for a mumbling individual to get his thoughts published in a bound book he must jump through more hoops, and it's difficult to imagine a mumbling individual doing that. Certainly not a series of hoops anyway. Like a dog on a stage. 

So anyway, my friend had to copy out laboriously letter by letter these quotes. Well, in this age of copy and paste, typing each letter is a huge setback in the otherwise smooth flow of essay formation. All of my friends’ mental processes which would have contributed to the unique ideas and points of view that are absolutely necessary to get a good mark were repeatedly forced to come to a total halt. The many scampering fingers of his goal seeking mind, each finger carrying on it's back the memories of relevant and semi-relevant information it had so far discovered and processed, were all told to take a break, to have a snooze. At which point those memories slid down and wandered off into the grass. 

It's not right. There must be a better way. I may not be able to write an essay, but I can definitely solve a problem. My mind is here and now clambering to solve this one. Because in this day and age of starter-buttoned, instantly-processed, hi-tech solutions, it's obviously anachronistic that my friend must type out letter-by-letter the quotes for his essay. He should be able to just hold a device to the relevant page of his book, press a button, and have it record the quote and transfer it into his essay. The device would necessarily be about the size of the book, which is the size of an ipad, and it would have a scanner built into the screen. He would set it on the page; it would read it; and then he would point out to it how much goes in the quote. So the back side of the ipad would have another screen which shows the page as the ipad sees it on its front side. On that screen he would select the quote and send it to the essay. Simple. All students need one of these. Their essay marks would be so much higher. And they would begin to be respected by their fellow students, their teachers, their relatives, their peers, and in fact by everybody who should respect them.

This new technology would mark the beginning of a new form of literature, the mental collage. The challenge would be not so much the creation of new ideas, which we know is impossible because every new idea is only a fresh take on an old idea, but the creation of new connections between others' ideas. Creative conjunctions. Which would result in new mental landscapes. New from old; that's what we seek. Rejuvenation; a new world. With a New Order. This device is not an invention; it is a Revolution!

I’ve always been intrigued by dreams. I guess it’s partly because I’ve always had a deep desire to understand everything, and dreams just aren’t easy. I’m attracted to them like mountain climbers to mountains.

With most dreams, you have to use everything you’ve got: your analytical ability, your experience of the world, your general feeling of reality, your best understanding of the workings of the unconscious mind, whatever knowledge of symbolism you have, and more than anything your intuition. And beyond all that, you have to try to get to know the dreamer, yourself if that’s who it is.

For most of my life, the great majority of my dreams have consisted of surreal adventures into  strange situations. Most have taken place in the country, surrounded by forests, valleys, sky, odd houses, small villages. I’ve always been amazed by the beautiful colour in them, the detail of the leaves in the trees, their shimmering movement, the feeling of walking through them. I grew up on a farm, so all this makes sense. Even after living out the bulk of my life in cities, I still feel like a farm boy. An outsider in the city. In my dreams, I've sometimes found myself walking into a city, or into city-like buildings, and they would always be strange and surreal, as would the few people I would meet, or pass, in them. 

A friend and I are putting together a new group, one which is cutting edge and yet at the same time attractive to a wide audience. We feel it will become an instant hit.  Not guaranteed, but likely. 

Evolution of the Project:
I was driving my friend home from the mall the other day. He was scanning the radio. I had it on jazz. He can take jazz but thought we might be missing something better. He paused briefly on a heavy metal station, briefly because he knew I wasn't much into it. But at least it gave us something to talk about. He said there are two musical forms approaching each other from different directions, and which, together, may evolve into a new form. On the one side, there's heavy metal, and on the other, something called brostep, a derivative of an English electronic music called dubstep. Chance illustrated the difference between them by opening his mouth and uttering, twice, at the top of his lungs, a bruising combination of screams, gurgles, roars and grumbles. The first hit my face like a bucket of fermented excrement, the second like a bowl of unsavory offal. We looked at each other. Aha!

Wanted: five band members, must be into heavy metal: one drummer, one guitarist, one bassist, one pianist, one singer, all acappella. 

(Later: Another friend who's into music read this and said that maybe a heavy metal band would not be quite right as a warm up to a nice poetry reading.  Okay, I would have to agree. This blurb was supposed to be funny! The idea of five guys standing on the stage with no instruments, just vocalizing the noise of a heavy metal band, is, to me, hilarious.)

Like a lot of people in this newest age of discovery, in this age of immense and minute visions, I love to suddenly see the big picture. Any big picture. There’s nothing better than stepping back from the day’s difficult and distracting details to see an unexpected vision opening up around me. 

For instance, this one. 

I just read an article in Scientific American called The Origins of Creativity, by Heather Pringle. It goes back to the first inventions of early man. The interesting new finding from the article isn’t so much that those people had to have the mental capacity, the quantity and quality of brain cells, to think up new ways of doing things. That goes without saying. No, the interesting thing is a new computer modelling study which shows that for any invention to become part of the general culture, the population had to be fairly large. If someone in a tiny isolated tribe made a big discovery, it would have little chance of finding it’s way through the general population of isolated tribes. But in a large group, any useful new invention would be picked up and spread rapidly. And a large group would likely spread it to other large groups. The computer modelling correctly predicted when these cultural changes would begin happening in Africa.

Since we’ve taken up living in an apartment building, we don’t get visits anymore from the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Seventh Day Adventists. They seem like a thing of the past. Like Model T Fords. In those days, hearing their knock on the door was a regular thing. Others stood on the sidewalk with their ‘Watchtower’ magazines. True believers. Their lives in service to someone else. But they always seemed so calm. 

Well, the telephone is their new door. I just got off the phone after taking up about two hours of this woman’s time. Even though I was standing way over here on the evolution side of the canyon, she hung in there pretty good, probably because I told her I would never try to convince someone to leave their religion. She saw a little hope in that. A way in, maybe. I said the world is so full of horror, and not just out there in the world, but in our own lives if we have the open eyes to let it in, and all the moreso as we get older, that I would never try to argue someone out of the comfort and hope their religion gives them. They certainly wouldn’t find it in evolution. Evolution isn’t going to throw it’s arms around someone who is suffering and murmer sweet thoughts. It couldn’t care less. Suffer all you want. Die horribly. All it can do is remind you of the good days you had. A few laughs. A little sex. Hopefully it was okay. Some intimacy with another like you. A close feeling against the stress coming from everywhere else. And maybe you got caught up in something, like children, a friend, a job you actually liked, pop culture, a shooter computer game, an art. Maybe you created something.

I just now woke up. Got to sleep in late this morning without an alarm. I woke with a last short dream of a poem. It was written on a sheet of paper. Had maybe eight stanzas. The title was one word: ‘Familiar’. I was thinking about the title, its ramifications, associations, what a poem with that title could be about, for too many seconds and so I woke up without reading the poem itself. Damn. 

I kept thinking about it, drifting off and on, images came and went, some that seemed clumsy and dumb, like one of a big rough guy wearing a skirt, the kind the girls in the early 1960‘s loved, long and flaring. It just looked stupid on him, like on a World War ll soldier putting on a skit in a prisoner of war camp. A reminder of the common world when that isn’t available. 

So I thought of a different, more subtle familiarity.  More like the feeling of Carl Jung’s archetypes. The feelings that growing up in our common society gives us but the kind we may not want to think about. For instance the feeling of always being dragged down by common and seemingly important situations that should be positive but which always cause humiliation, personal injustice, and especially the injustice of never being able to defend against them. We can repress. Or attach ourselves to other, more common distractions that can easily bury them. We don’t even put names on these feelings. Names make their retrieval too easy. 

These must be some of the familiar feelings that move inside us when we read good poems. 

Now I’m going to go splash my face with water and make coffee. See ya. I’ll read this over later. And see if it sounds at all familiar. And try to figure out why my subconscious would be putting it to me. 

One of the braille magazines my dad liked most was called ‘Science Journal’. I was in junior high school then. My dad was a typical old-time farmer, I suppose, and never talked much, so I really paid attention when he would excitedly start telling tell me, a kid, about some discovery or scientific explanation of something that he had just read about.

I guess those things must have fascinated me as much as they did him, because all my life since those days my biggest love has been understanding things. I theorize all day long every day. Can’t stop myself. It’s not that I love theorizing. It’s that I want answers. I want to understand everything, to see how it all works, the beginning middle and end, the cause and effect. To see clearly.