dreams

Ten Thousand Dreams

Posted on March 21st, 2022March 21st, 2022 by Patrick

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.

Footnotes[+]

Footnotes
↑1	As a student; I’ve never really left the place.
↑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.
↑3	aka “Palimpsests”.

In dreams

Posted on January 25th, 2022January 25th, 2022 by Patrick

I dreamed of summer last night, bike riding. When I woke up it was ‑33 before the wind chill.

Le sigh.

Strunk + White

Posted on February 10th, 2021February 9th, 2021 by Patrick

I had a dream the other night. I was visiting a friend—I don’t recall who, but it might have been one of the Craigs I know—and, left alone in a room, I was looking over the friend’s bookcase.

I found on there a copy of The Elements of Style, colloquially known as “Strunk + White” after the authors. In the real world it’s a thin book, not much more imposing than a pamphlet; I’ve read novellas that are longer. But in the dream it was a trade paperback, probably 400 pages long, and I pulled it off the shelf. I used to have a copy, in the dream, and I thought maybe I’d lent it to this friend.

But if it was my copy, I hadn’t put my name in the front, which I usually do when I lend out a book. So I hesitated, contemplated taking it anyway, then decided not to risk it. I put it back on the shelf.

I don’t remember the rest of the dream.

When I searched the Internet for “Strunk and White”, I found this article from Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, in which she lays out one reason why she doesn’t much care for The Elements of Style. (TL;DR: it’s a style guide that everyone treats like it’s a grammar book. In other words, it’s a set of suggestions that people instead treat like laws.)