Way back in my University days[1]As a student; I’ve never really left the place., one of my friends had a fat paperback copy of a book titled Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted. It was a strange book, full of all kinds of psychobabble, and a list of dreams and their alleged meanings. We looked up a lot—a lot—of dreams. One sticks out in my mind to this day, mainly because of the hyper-weird specificity (or the hyper-specific weirdness) of it:
To see a horse in human flesh, descending on a hammock through the air, and as it nears your house is metamorphosed into a man, and he approaches your door and throws something at you which seems to be rubber but turns into great bees, denotes miscarriage of hopes and useless endeavors to regain lost valuables.
—Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted, by Gustavus Hindman Miller
And no, I didn’t remember that off the cuff[2]Though I’ve yet to forget, over the last thirty years, the phrase “a horse in human flesh”, and trust me, I’ve tried.. I just copied ‘n’ pasted it from the ever-helpful Project Gutenberg’s copy of Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted.
Turns out it’s in the public domain. Also turns out I’ll be making use of it in “Dried Flowers”[3]aka “Palimpsests”., which has more than a few dream sequences.