The Dream Caster
Through hallways in an endless set
Of endless rooms that each beget
In varied shapes and furnishings
and colors, sheen and burnishings
That rival what a movie team
Concocts for viewing on a screen
With CGI computing power
From enormous server towers
Chock full of the latest tech.
Yet I with nerves perched on my neck
Can match them while I am asleep
With little effort, super cheap!
One animator, not a thousand,
In real time, with no Google browsin’,
Renders flying highways, scenes
of gravestones stacked like packed sardines
Or college dorms where sits my room
When floors and students come in bloom,
Or seek the place to take my test.
I search all night with little rest.
As dreamer, I must navigate
These landscapes, this nocturnal bait
Laid by a mind that’s not my own
That cannot operate a phone
Or run a camera worth a damn
But fills my nights with endless spam
That might mean something, maybe not.
By daylight, it’s mostly forgot
Except the nagging feeling I
Might profit if I just knew why
These wild excursions are me shown
Or should I focus on the tone?
Whoever dreams up these confections
Whose import escapes my detection,
It’s not the “I” who treads the Earth
Though we might share a single birth.
He — it? — communicates in signs
No one deciphers or defines
Not psychoanalytic Freud
Whose writings are of sense devoid;
Not Jung, his archetypes arrayed
Like chessmen, tamed and named and spayed;
Nor Campbell with his heroes’ tales;
At solving dreams each badly fails.
Meanwhile, the caster of my dreams
Spits spells in gushers, rills and streams.
If I unravel one in ten
I am the envy of wise men
With alchemy and crystal ball
And chainèd demons in their thrall
Who shrug their shoulders when I ask
Them for a peek beneath the mask
That curtains from my waking mind
What secret wisdom I might find
Wrapped tightly in a neural skein:
The yarn ball of my fevered brain.
How to catch the one who spews
Whole volumes? How to tap this muse
Who dashes by before I notice
Long epistles that he wrote us
Then moves on while dull me examines
Move one in this dream backgammon
When the caster is ten games
Beyond us while I eat his flames?
Each organ of our mortal bods—
has powers like the ancient gods—
A purpose simple, straight and clear:
An eye to see, an ear to hear,
A tongue to taste, bare skin to feel
A nose to smell, a knee to kneel.
The caster of my dreams just so
Must have a purpose. I must know
What it might be before I die—
What is eternal — he or I?
Image generated with Dream Studio.