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Thursday, August 21, 2008
TRUE STORY
Cadence Weapon
Afterparty Babies
Anti : 2008
[Buy It]
HECATE'S DREAM
Sir Richard Bishop
Polytheistic Fragments
Drag City : 2007
[Buy It]
BLOOD FOUNTAIN
Horseback
Impale Golden Horn
Burly Time/Revolver : 2007
[Buy It]
Today I happened to hear the writer Paul Auster on NPR, chatting with Diane Rehm. Auster is...how to put this...a writer I admire a lot, even though I dislike about half of his books. The New York Trilogy? Hell yes. Timbuktu? Hell no. At any rate, hearing the interview reminded me of probably my very favorite Auster book, which he didn't even write: I Thought My Father Was God, a collection of true, personal stories told orally by non-writers. Auster worked on this project for, I think, a year, and originally, he read the stories he collected on-air for NPR's National Story Project. The show was such a hit that eventually, many of the stories would be collected in the aforementioned book, edited by Auster, but with the stories told in the voices of the people who lived them. The book has sections on animals, objects, families, "slapstick," strangers, war, love, death, and (most compelling to me) dreams. Being reminded of this book today, I thought I would share a couple of the stories with you from the "dreams" section, as a sort of follow-up to my dream post last week. Perhaps it's not surprising that many of the stories in the dream section could also have been filed in the death section, or that the dreams that involve death are most compelling to me - dreams and death seem close cousins, a point which I'd intended to develop last week, until I'd written out the dreams and felt an immense silence pass over me. To write about dreams is to basically dream again, and one cannot understand a dream while still dreaming. Perhaps dreams say all they need to say on their own, without analysis or exegesis. Here are two from Auster's project. There's no way to know, of course, whether or not they are actually true, and what "true" even means in the context of such phantoms. But they do have the ring of truth, which is good enough to give me chills:
4:05 A.M.
I sleep soundly most of the time and seldom need an alarm clock to wake up in the morning. My dreams are usually about work, and I try to forget them as quickly as possible. The dreams I do want to rememeber I usually can't. Only a few times in my life have I had a nightmare.
The dream started simply. I was driving a truck down the Kansas Turnpike. I have never driven a truck, and although I lived in Kansas City at the time, I had never been on the Kansas Turnpike. It was night in the dream, and I could see only my hands on the steering wheel and what was illuminated by the truck's headlights. Suddenly in front of me, shining in the headlights, was a human arm. Horrified, I swerved to keep from hitting it as I frantically tried to step on the brake, but I couldn't slow the truck, and as soon as I got around one body part, another appeared up ahead. The farther I went, the more body parts I saw. They kept coming up at me, faster and faster, until I finally hit one with a grisly thump. A moment later, I sat up in bed screaming.
I realized that I was having a nightmare. I took a deep breath and looked at the clock, more to reassure myself than to find out the time. It was 4:05 A.M.
I enjoyed my Saturday and forgot about the dream. Sunday, I bought the weekend paper and read it in my usual leisurely fashion. Near the end of the first section there was a two-paragraph article about a truck driver who had run over a body lying on the Kansas Turnpike. The accident had occurred on Saturday, at 4:05 A.M.
submitted by Matthew Menary of Burlingame, California
Blood
In the summer of 1972, I went home to visit my parents in Burnsville, Minnesota, for a couple of weeks. I slept downstairs in the basement. Every now and then, a fourteen-year-old boy named Matthew would come to mow the lawn. Early one morning, as I was sleeping in, I heard him outside cutting the grass. I paid no attention and went back to sleep.
I dreamt that I was in the upstairs bathroom, standing in front of the sink and looking at my face in the mirror. It looked like my face, but at the same time there was something odd about it. I could see my black hair, my blue eyes, my mustache, but the shape of my face was different. I looked down at the sink, where the water was running in a counterclockwise circle down the drain. I held my hands unde the water and started scrubbing my hands with soap. Again, I looked at the face that wasn't my face. There was something different about it, but it didn't really trouble me.
I went on scrubbing my hands, but my left thumb hurt. The pain was fairly intense, and I wondered what I had done to make it hurt so badly. It was as though it were sprained.
Then I looked down at the sink again, and there was blood running into the water, going round and round in that counterclockwise circle. "What's going on?" I said to myself. Blood was gushing from my thumb, pouring out from the fatty part just below the knuckle, then running down my arm and dripping off my elbow into the sink. I grabbed my throbbing hand and said to myself, "What did you do, Jim? What did you do, Jim?"
I heard a voice calling out to me, "Jim! Jim!" I woke up and realized that it was my mother calling me from the top of the stairs. She told me to come quickly. I threw on some clothes and rushed up to her. Matthew had hurt himself cutting the grass, she said, and she wanted me to go to the bathroom to help him.
Still half asleep, I walked into the bathroom and was astonished to see Matthew standing in front of the mirror and holding his left thumb and first finger. Blood was running down his arm and into the water, going round and round as it flowed down the drain.
submitted by James Sharpsteen of Minneapolis, Minnesota
from I Thought My Father Was God
ed. Paul Auster
Henry Holt : 2001
[Buy It]
Labels: auster, brian, dreams
posted by Brian
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Wednesday, August 13, 2008
STRANGEST DREAM
Honeydrips
Here Comes the Future
Sincerely Yours : 2007
[Buy It]
LITTLE BROTHER (ELECTRIC)
Grizzly Bear
Friend EP
Warp : 2007
[Buy It]
I KNOW THAT'S NOT REALLY YOU
American Music Club
The Golden Age
Merge : 2008
[Buy It]
I dreamt that I was dreaming. This in and of itself was somewhat exceptional to me, as I didn't recall ever having a dream within a dream before. Beyond this nested quality, the nature of the dream, and the potency of its feeling, was also a bit beyond the pale. This was a couple weeks ago and some of the details are now blurred. But it is the nature of remembered dreams to take on a waking life of their own as their particulars fade, and certain elements of it remain with me clearly.
In the dream, I woke up in the bed of my childhood home. I woke up restlessly, I didn't remember the dream-within-the-dream, but I felt its texture - I knew that I had dreamed that my romantic partner had died, or was in grave danger of dying, or was simply gone - in the dream, there was no real distinction between the three, just an unsettling presentiment of loss. All I can remember clearly was that it was something to do with her breathing; she couldn't or was having difficulty breathing. I woke into the dream confused about whether this had really happened or I had dreamed it. I got out of the bed and began walking down the stairs. It was early in the morning, that time just before or around sunrise when the whole house was sleeping and I would get up early on Saturdays, as a child, to watch pro wrestling before the cartoons started. As my feet landed on each step, taking me down toward the living room, my sense of dread mounted - each step felt an increment closer to some calamity for which I was not prepared. When I arrived in the living room, my brother was there, sitting on the couch. The television was on, but he wasn't looking at it - his forearms were on his knees as he slumped in a somewhat weary posture. I sat down in the easy chair across from him, with my feeling of dread rising to a nearly unbearable pitch, and then, he looked up at me. His face was affectless, with a great empathy and sadness lurking behind the lack of affect, and as his eyes met mine, I knew with the inexorable certainty of dreams that it was true - she was gone from this world. The certainty came upon me in a feverish rush, and I felt a great cry rising up with in me. My brother came over and took me in his arms as immense sobs wracked my body. The feeling of knowing she was gone was so complex and terrible and real that I can only begin to describe it this way: I did not know what I was going to do. I saw the days and nights without her, getting used to her absence, fanning out impossibly ahead of me, and I repeat: I did not know what I was going to do, how I would possibly be able to go on. At that moment, sobbing in my brother's arms, I woke up, in my partner's bed. She was there, sleeping soundly, breathing easily. Tears rushed into my eyes as my gratitude mingled with the lingering feeling of despair from the dream - it had been so real that it was difficult to snap out of immediately. And also, this: when you've dreamed that you were dreaming, waking up for "the second time" fees much more tenuous than waking from a nightmare normally does; you're left with the lingering suspicion that perhaps you've woken up into another dream, and that you might pass through this one into another.
I spent all of last week in Oslo, reporting on a big music festival there, and I had another disturbing dream, which also involved my brother, in an unfamiliar hotel bed. This one was more complex than the other one, and the details are sketchier, yet I can roughly reconstruct it around the ones that still stand out clearly. I had been shot in the stomach several times. I don't recall how this came to happen, although I have the impression that I'd come across a weapon by accident (no gun appeared in the dream), and that the wounds were self-inflicted. I never pulled up my shirt to look at the wounds, but I was certain they were there - in my mind's eye, I could see holes in my torso, with blood trickling out of them. Sometimes, when I looked down, the front of my shirt was soaked with blood, sometimes it was clean. I'd shoved a notebook down the front of my pants, I guess as a sort of bandage - it was one of those black marbled composition books, the same kind I'd been using to take notes at the festival all week, which has thick, cardboard covers, which made it seem like more of a shield than a bandage. I didn't feel any pain in the dream, just a panicky sense of life draining out of me. I remember making phone calls - I believe trying to get someone to take me to the hospital - but I couldn't get ahold of anyone, and my attempts were accompanied by a mounting sense of frustration, fear, and anger that no one would help me. Then, in one of those uncanny dream shifts, my brother was with me. Where we were is not clear - it was an unfamiliar room, which now strikes me as being evocative of a hotel room, not the one I was sleeping in, but a hotel room nonetheless. Suddenly my brother was standing in the corner of the room, and I lashed out at him angrily, as closely as I can remember I took out my frustration about all my thwarted attempts to get help on him. This time, it was my brother who burst into sobs, as I lashed out at him, and simultaneously, a vile green ooze burst out of his mouth. I'd recently watched the movie The Sixth Sense, which contains that truly horrifying scene where the little boy who sees dead people flees into his tent, his "safe place," and looks over to see a dead girl who'd been poisoned with a similarly greenish, vomity ooze falling out of her mouth; I believe this is where that particular image came from. The effect of my brother's sobs and vomit, in the dream, was accompanied by the feeling that they were manifestations of his pent up sadness or interior trauma rising helplessly to the surface. He said something to me through his sobs and I can't remember exactly what, but it was something along the lines of, "You've been so cruel to me, Brian," which only made me angrier - I was bleeding, I was dying! His sobs redoubled as I began to shout at him along these lines, chastizing him for putting some kind of guilt trip on me when I needed help. At last, I jerked the notebook out of my pants and lifted my shirt to show him the wounds. In fact, there were no holes in my torso - just tracers of blood slicked over the smooth skin of my stomach.Labels: brian, dreams
posted by Brian
LINK |
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
SHOUSETSU
Radicalfashion
Odori
Hefty : 2007
[buy it]
I like "dreamy" music, sure, but I love music that actually replicates the stuff of dreams. This seemingly benign composition by Japan's Radicalfashion frightens me in ways I can't quite pin down. It holds me in such perfect thrall that I don't want to say to much, save that I think it has something to do with the sense of dreamtime imposing itself on the waking world. The lovely piano nocturne is pure aether, but the rhythm track is staunchly corporeal; they hold each other in a trembling suspension, like a memory just on the verge of recollection. Do you hear it as a semi-lucid deathbed reverie too, or something entirely other? I'm listening to it right now, and everything banal in my little office seems transformed, imbued with the ineffable significance of dreams. My cigarette, in a bright shaft of sunlight, looks like something bleeding underwater. The paler sunlight playing on the walls, come to think of it, looks sub-aquatic as well, as if I'm in an aquarium. Submersion is one of the music's qualities, then, but there are others - ordinary objects are transformed into portents; I feel as if I could read the scatter of pens on my desk as if they were the bones of a bird. Birds, too, suffuse this song, ruffling dark feathers, held aloft by their delicate and perfectly balanced bone structures. Images flip and transpose, all sky-bound. Stars or starlings? Either way, it's a pleasure to observe their gentle pirouettes earthward, bathed in whatever soft glow, for these several breath-arresting minutes.Labels: brian, dreams, electronic, piano
posted by Brian
LINK |
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