...red spots develop under my cheeks, and as I powder them they become raised wheels, one on each side, which the thick powder whitens, six spokes, a central hub and an outer wheel, a relief scultpure of perhaps a millimeter depth, like something from myth, an archetypal drama of the ancients, which the attempt to hide with powder only accenuates. I feel no horror, or pain, but awe as I brush the powder on skin that has become wheels and spokes. Sculpted like Alchemical wheels of time, or Tarot wheels of Fortune, the configurations are mysterious, almost reverential, an embodied reference to the Wheels of Ezekiel, but also to the powdered faces of highly-stylized Oriental performance, and somehow the magnificent coiled antlers of Bighorn sheep...
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probably unecessary note: ...yes, it was a dream, the one I woke with today, but I have decided to treat dreams as real and as poetry in themselves... hence I've cut away the narratorial voice of the daytime ego that we use when relating dreams, as well as any analysis. There is resonance with the Symbolist and Surrealist poets, I know that...
technorati profile. technorati tags: dreams, symbolist poetry, surrealism, prose poetry, wheels in myth and symbolism, mandalas, mystics, writing.
Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
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Thanks to Sue O'Kieffe, the mandala lady, for mentioning mandalas, which I'd forgotten.
ReplyDeleteMandalas are the wheels of transformation of mystics, aren't they.
Could we say, Cheeky Mandalas? :)
A wonderfully evocative dream, symbolic in multiple ways that only you can really unerstand. I too have long felt that dreams are a form of art, one every human being creates spontaneously every night.
ReplyDeleteRichard, thank you for this comment which means more than you can know. As you say, "dreams are a form of art," and that is a stunning way to put it. Jung knew this. No wonder so many of us are attracted to his dream symbolism/interpretation! Writing the little post took more time than I expected because of the editing down and out: to the essence of a much longer dream, finding words for a very strange and tactile experience, clearing any analytical voice clutter by not attributing personal meaning to the dream, and letting it radiate out to the particular set of associations in literary and Biblical myth that came to me as I meditated on the symbol.
ReplyDeleteFor me, personally, it was yet another dream indicating art- it was Midoco Oriental performance, and Midoco is a local art store.
I like your strategies for getting a dream down on paper. Eliminating the boring and repetitive details, concentrating on the essence, showing the symbols, without stepping in to analyse them. I think lots of dream reports, including some of my own, suffer from lack of those strategies.
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