Dream Traveler
Friday, December 3, 2021
There’s a storm starting up outside my window, and there has been a storm brewing in my heart for a while now. I feel that everything I have carried out in the past will soon come home to either haunt me right up till my death or fly like a vulture over my body, just waiting till I stop breathing. I woke up from a dream just now, where I was wandering in a foreign city, and I’m not sure if it was Paris or Tokyo, but it’s a location that I often visit in my dreams. Bookstores are very much part of my dream world. I have at least three bookshops that I see in my dreams. I’m sure that they are based on actual stores, but to this day, I can’t figure out which store or in what location. The bookstore last night was a second-hand store that always sold exciting titles and mostly was Penguin editions from the 1940s. The store was located on a side street off the giant arcade. I remember there were Americans on the road, but tourists of some sort and manner. I couldn’t find the store, and when I woke up, I felt a great depression upon me. I think through my dreams, I’m trying to see heaven, but alas, it is so close to me that I can almost feel it - but then I awake, and I’m left with a storm outside, representing how I feel inside my heart and soul.
I’m not a great traveler, but I do travel time-to-time, and it’s always for the pleasure of looking for satisfaction in some area of the world that will spark my imagination. I often dream of going to the cinema, and it is always a theater located in a very urban part of the city - meaning not in the suburbs. I know it’s a film by Jean-Luc Godard, with a soundtrack by Nino Rota, but as far as I know, the soundtrack or the Godard film does not exist in the awakening life. But my dream of the film is in great detail, and it is an actual movie, including credits, stars, and so forth. And even though the soundtrack was by Rota, I made up the music and orchestration in my dream. This is unbelievable to me because I’m utterly tone-deaf and couldn’t carry a melody if your life depended on it. Nevertheless, I have the entire orchestration and the narrative of this film in great detail in my dream life.
“Tell me, can one at all denote thinking and feeling as things entirely separable? I cannot imagine a sublime intellect without the ardor of emotion.” In my awakened life, I try to separate my feelings from my daily actions. A sense of detachment is essential for a writer, so in theory, that artist can see his work placed in a bigger context. Yet, in my dreams, I’m consistently emotional, and when I do see a film in that state or landscape, it fits perfectly with how I’m feeling at that moment. When I’m conscious and writing in a library or my studio, I think not connected to the written page in front of me. “My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof.” Yet, I lose focus once my morning starts, and I have to face the afternoon and then the dread of the evening. Only in dreams do I seem to exist in my most total capacity as a writer and human being.
“Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.” Therefore I feel dead, yet only alive in my deepest dream. On the other hand, “knowing this to be a worthless life to live, why do I keep living on? Because life contains something called beauty.” And for me, the beauty in my life is in a dream.