The Dream Collector

1. Dragged up the stairs of accident and damage towards the broken concrete fortress, you stick your head through the broken tiles and collect what was left behind at school: dinosaurs, educational television, twigs for fingers when you couldn't write.

2. Put your dolls aside and face up to the day. Your family is a series of cut-out figures hidden in the forest and who knows what else might emerge? Always the shadow memory of moments from your past, the echoing cathedral of endurance.

3. You see faces in the rain and imagine riding a carousel horse away from the rotting and discarded now. The glass is always broken and missing, there are always steps and ladders to climb. There is no way out of everybody's dreams.

 text © Rupert M Loydell 2022

illus © A C Evans 1998

Medium Of Doubt

 

Collage, an ambiguous, complex medium of doubt, to quote Werner Spies, is an aesthetic of radical juxtaposition. In his personal treatise Beyond Painting (1947), Max Ernst, with reference to both Rimbaud, and the famous 'chance encounter' from Book 6 of Les Chants de Maldoror, defined collage as an 'alchemy of the image...' . However,the photomontage style of collage finds its origins in the work of the Berlin Dada Movement who in turn were inspired by the inadvertent imagery generated by early cinema special effects and the composite images of 'trick photography'. The term photomontage was invented by the Berlin 'monteurs', Raoul Hasmann and Hanna Hoch.

From the Freudian perspective it may be that collage exemplifies one of the two 'laws' governing the behaviour of unconscious processes or phenomena (such as dreams): the law of Condensation, or Compression, as it is also called. (The second 'law' is the law of Displacement.) Freud explained Condensation as the 'inclination to create new unities out of elements that we would certainly have kept separate in waking thought...' In 'The Enormous Face' section of his novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), J G Ballard refers to the 'planes of intersection' operative on 'a third level, the inner world of the psyche' where, as on other levels, such 'planes' interlock at oblique angles and where one finds 'fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies...'

Elsewhere is the same book Ballard asserts that images are born at the intersection of such planes, when 'some kind of valid reality begins to assert itself.'

Illustration: Psychic Citadel, 2002

Several Sonnets

Stephane Mallarme

Several Sonnets 1883-1887

I

When the shadow menaces with its fatal law
A particular old Dream, desire and evil of my vertebrae,
Afflicted at dying beneath funereal ceilings
It folds within me its indubitable wing.

Luxury, o hall of ebony where, to seduce a king
Ceremonial garlands writhe in death,
You are nothing but mendacious hubris uttered by shadows
In the eyes of a hermit dazzled by his faith.

Yes, I know that in the distances of this night, The Earth
Emits a giant flare extraordinary mystery
Beneath the hideous centuries that darken it the less.

Space like unto itself whether it expands or contracts
Unfurls in this boredom vile fires for witnesses
That a festive star has illuminated its genius

II

The virgin, the everlasting and beautiful today
Will it shatter for us with a drunken wing beat
The hard, forgotten lake haunted beneath frost
By the transparent glacier of flights not taken!

A swan of previous times recalls it is he who
Magnificent but hopeless surrenders himself
For not having sung the place of living
When sterile winter’s ennui gleamed.

All his neck will shake off that white agony
By space inflicted on the bird which negates,
But not the horror of plumage ensnared on the ground.

Phantom assigned here by his pure light,
He is paralysed in a cold dream of disdain
Assumed in useless exile The Swan.

III

Victoriously fled the beautiful suicide
Firebrand of glory, spume of blood, gold, storm!
Oh laugh if down there a purple spreads
To cover royally my absent tomb.

What! Of this flare not even a gleam
Remains, it is midnight, in the shadow celebrating us
Except that a head’s presumptive treasure
Tumbles its nonchalant caress without a torch

Yours as always the delight! Yours
Yes alone retaining from dissolved skies
A residue of puerile triumph rimmed

With light as you lay it on the cushions
Like the war-helmet of a girl-empress
From which to depict you cascade roses.

IV

Raised high her pure nails dedicate their onyx
Anguish, this midnight upholds her lampadophore
And many vesperal dreams burned by the Pheonix
Are Never gathered in any cinerary amphora

On the tables, in the empty salon: nul ptyx
Abolished trinket of sonorous emptyness
(For The Master has gone gathering tears in The Styx
With this solitary object that bestows honour on The Void)

But near a vacant north window, a gold
Expires complementing perhaps the décor
Of unicorns kicking fire towards a nixie,

She, defunct, naked in the mirror, while
In the abyss bordered by the frame, are fixed
So soon, the scintillations of The Seven Stars.

translated by AC 1996-1999

Sonnet IV, the first truly hermetic poem by Stephane Mallarme,  is also known as the 'Sonnet en X' (first version 1866)

Find out more here

Illustration: Dream Space, 2001

The Atom Smasher Of Dreams

To find the ultimate element of desire a team using Attention Theory and a temperature high enough to mimic conditions when the universe was just microseconds old have found our most recent dreams follow a mathematical vortex pattern.
Quarks loop through these vortices, even though shot pacing isn’t everything – good narrative, strong acting and a fireball about four trillion kelvin at its core, are probably more important. This is just the way you dream about far-away places, old girlfriends and alien cities built by insects. Later this year researchers will separate lower energies, helping to describe the human attention-span when dreaming about the future.
Is life a mathematical trick? That is exactly what the more negatively charged entities would like us to think. They expect the separation to disappear but we have seen signs of such vortices and fields created by gluons that can twist, forming dreamlike structures in the all-pervasive vacuum of space. This is what gives mass and substance to lurid, inhuman fantasies.
Perhaps the key lies in measuring desire with greater precision, although we now think that psychic films are more gripping because they resonate with other movies, not your memories. You may try to copy the style, but the galaxies will collide anyway. Explosions can create a series of waves, transforming the magnitude of ‘pink noise’ at random intersections in the brain – a property that has never been seen before. Others have observed the vortex in music, street fashion and air turbulence. This type of dream field should cause two particles to collide off-centre, smashing gold and copper ions head-on like a slow motion car crash in the Valley of Despair, tracking the eye-movements of dreamers like jets of matter expelled from backward spinning black holes.
Mutations are locked in and several different kinds of fantasy arise, helping to explain all kinds of non-material phenomena.
Always leave space for magnetic fields to build up in your dream life.
Never look back.

Illustration: Transtemporal Parapraxis II, 2002