On Dreams and poetry...

Dreams are funny things. Normal dreams are fine - upon waking up, you normally either a) forget about the whole thing, or b) think "mmmm, that was a nice dream, wish it was real" or possibly sometimes c) wake up screaming with cranberry jelly encasing your whole body. c) isn't actually too bad, as you do then get eat the yummy jelly. So those ones are ok.

The trickier ones are the ones you have sort of halfway between sleeping and waking. Or between waking and sleeping. The dozetime. Stuff dreamt of there is a bit more plausible. It's maybe cos the dreams stick more in proper memory than dream memory and so linger longer. And so you can wake with the complete uncertainty as to whether something happened or not. Which can be confusing.

But they are not as bad as the times when you have a dream within which you go to sleep and have a dream. How dull/depressed/mental must you be to have to have dreams in which you need to escape your dreams by dreaming. And it gets confusing when you wake up from one of them but you're not sure which.

And where does all the detail come from? I'm sure there have been times when I've dreamt of being in (say) a library, and I've been able to pull books off the shelf and read them like real books. In the morning the details go, so there's no way of knowing whether you made up some great book wordings, or just have a memory of the contents without ever actually having dreamt them. Same thing with songs too. If I could wake up and remember the stuff and write it down, I could have some better songs. I believe Coleridge actually (well allegedly) could do the dream poetry thing. "Kubla Khan" was apparently dreamt and ended unfinished because he was interrupted by a stranger knocking on his dooor. I think. Ok, test for me: How much of said poem can I still remember:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan,
A stately pleasuredome decree.
With walls and ???? girdled round
and ???? measureless to man ???

Hmmm. Less than I was hoping for. I'm sure I used to have the whole thing committed to memory (for no good reason). Original version is here for anyone interested. Not making my recollection look too good... So the question you're all asking... Which poems can I still remember? Not many. "Jabberwocky" I think is stuck in there for ever. But otherwise just fragments and lines. And I can't blame my memory losses on being interupted by men from Porlock. I don't even know where that is.

Also never rule out the possibility that your mind is being messed with each night by the controllers.