Notes Toward a Journal of Lucid Dreaming,Nos. 17-35By Matt Patterson
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17.
Are you awake? --Yes. Are you awake? --Yes. Are you awake? 18. An investigation into the varieties of dream imagery. S. says that she is skeptical anything will come of all this. I pooh-pooh her sentiment and keep at it, asking myself if I am awake and answering in the affirmative if indeed it turns out that I am awake, which so far inevitably I have been. 19. Inexplicable phenomena of the natural world haunt the dreams of many. Fact: In southern Texas three years ago, upwards of 5,000 blackbirds mysteriously dropped from the sky, all of them suddenly and inexplicably dead. 20. The dream wherein we lived in the woods with a pack of talking coyotes, though it must be said that we encountered great difficulty understanding them and eventually parted ways. 21. First, we had the dream time, time out of mind, and there was no difference between the people and the animals. Then the animals and the people began to separate; we dreamed each other into being. Thus it was that I gazed upon the possum in my backyard with a sense of recognition. Unlovely creature: could it see anything with those eyes? 22. (a) The question, once again: Are you awake? --Yes. (b) Today, I make it my goal to clean things. All day long, I clean the kitchen, the cabinets, the backsplash, using the spray cleaner and paper towels. Drops of oil splattered here and there. The cabinets are filthy. You are preparing a dish, and you have cream or oil on your hands, but you must have a plate or a utensil, and you open the drawer or the cabinet, and you think you will wipe it off in a moment with a towel, but then you forget. The dog licks the spatter drops from the pulls on cabinet doors, from the floor around the range top. I continually ask myself if I am awake. S. keeps to herself, spends most of her time in the attic writing poetry, which is her profession of late. Later, I will clean the refrigerator. 23. The horned lark came to visit the bird feeder today, the one outside the kitchen window. --Yes, I am awake. I am making a rosemary-Dijon roasted chicken with sweet potatoes. --Therefore, I am awake. 24. Am I awake now? --Tomorrow, I will clean the floors. 25. Fact: The live bee display at the natural history museum has experienced colony collapse disorder seven of the last nine years, including twice each year during 2013 and 2015. 26. The dream wherein I keep residence for an unspecified time in the great halls of Elsinore, where Hamlet had lived. I remembered that I was anxious at the prospect of meeting him and a little worried that he might stab me through the arras, should I find myself in untoward circumstances. I recall being surprised that the halls of the castle were darker, heavier and more medieval, than I had imagined them, and dank with the blackening smoke of lit torches. Though once we’d climbed the parapets, we could look out at the ocean, which glistered cold and hard and white in the sober and extremely bright sunlight. 27. Fact: Several species of North American bats have suffered en masse in recent years a viral disease that causes their noses to turn white, at which point they die. 28. When I met the prince, I was too nervous to say anything. I appeared to be quite the fool, after all. S. complains of unease at night, that I toss and turn in the bed. 29. The dream wherein I am an eager student once again, and then I realize that the semester final is nearly due, but I forgot to attend class and have neglected to complete even the first steps of a project that should have taken weeks to complete, and what was I to do? I had wanted so to do well. Utter negligence is to blame, that is all. I woke up feeling that I was an irresponsible person. 30. To dream: --Yes, I am awake. But my eyes are sore with having seen so many things today. 31. The dream wherein: I marveled at the fact that what had once been an elementary school was now without prior expectation a field of something green that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be what I surmised to be oats. A field of oats. Then I realized that the elementary school in question had been the very one I had attended, a Catholic school, and I pondered the significance of the fact that I had been numb to anything like religious sentiment for some time now, for many years. The feeling of God’s being dead was odd, like a cold winter afternoon when you don’t quite know what to do with yourself, and not quite liberating. When I awoke, I realized that I knew nothing whatsoever about oats, and so how could I have identified the crop in question as oats? 32. S. has asked that I sleep on the couch, so that she can “get some goddamned sleep.” I acquiesce to her demands. 33. The dream wherein I dream that I dream, which is all that I wish for. 34. Are you awake? --Yes. Are you awake? --Yes. Are you awake? --No. 35. What Thoreau called “an infinite expectation of the dawn.” Matt Patterson is a writer and teacher. He has new work in Pithead Chapel. He lives with his family in Lawrence, Kansas.
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