Showing posts with label dreaming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dreaming. Show all posts

Monday, January 22, 2024

The Dreaming Mind Versus You

A squat building, five floors
tops, with a flat roof. This structure
features in recent dreams. One dream:
you live on the roof in a truck with a camper.
Another: You watch commuters
in cars compete to use an exterior
off-ramp to get off the roof.
They rage and roar as you

stand in the maelstrom. In another,
you perch alone on the roof
and stare at big leafy trees
and know you're stranded. Beyond
the trees a campus may lie--
you can't know.

The dreaming mind is mulish. It
conjures what it will and does not
serve you. You serve it. Sleeping,
you can't leave the theater 
or even close your interior eyes.

Which is only fair, as your ridiculous will
pushes your mind all day and into
night, often not wisely. On that
flat roof of a nondescript, unglamorous
building, you feel a useless,
barren loneliness. Get used to it. 
Says the dreaming mind. 


Hans Ostrom 2024

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Neuron Rogues

Images from anywhere--
dark wet street meets
moon-faced flea-market
vendor meets mandolin
and fire: this is dream--

freed from time because
a sleeping brain is off the clock,
its rogue crew of neurons
free to cook a dewy stew and eat it
behind a turquoise waterfall
or in a plaid nylon shack.

Dreaming's a freedom
one's will can't boss--
a cinema playing beside itself.

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Rational Dreamer

"By one estimate, . . . people dream through half their waking hours."
--The Atlantic, October 2017

The mind is smarter than us. It knows
living's a strain, at best. So it wants
to dream, flushing the toxins of perception
from receptors of reality.  It orders
body to sleep.  Even when

body's awake, half the time mind
goes down an alley or into a clearing,
gossips with the past, or drifts
to the edge of the crowd.

Mind is a professional and will
concentrate if necessary. But
the world is dangerous, and many
people in power are insane
and depraved, so mind likes
to keep its distance. It is perhaps
most rational when it's dreaming.


hans ostrom 2017

Sunday, March 19, 2017

And the Feelings Thus Conjured

She's dipping her hands in the paint
that neuron networks manufacture.
She's rising from sleep and adorning
the darkness with bright looping
smears her fingertips eject.

The fog shows up, a loose collection
of gray blobs held inside a pale
amorphous balloon. There is a sound
of grinding, a sound of grinding,
a grinding, a sound. She says to no one,

"Sing with me: 'I am stuck on 
the balcony of REM sleep . . .!'"
We don't have to call it anything, you
know. We can just experience it
and the feelings thus conjured,

and live an entire lifetime
there in a mind-sponsored moment.


hans ostrom 2017