“I briefly roomed with a guy in college who claimed he could choose the contents of his dreams in advance like dishes off a menu. All of his dreams, he assured me, were happy and fulfilling. This was surprising because his diurnal life was neither. He impressed me as one of the most maladjusted people I’d ever known, belonging to a species not quite native to the human habitat. I felt no envy for his claim. The best thing about dreams, even scary ones, is their arrival by way of unmediated serendipity. In my private lexicon, “dreamlike” means unexpected or unforeseeable rather than unreal or imaginary. My dreams tend to be assembled from existing parts, like found objects, then twisted slightly out of shape — no dragons or unicorns. Three times in the last week or so I’ve dreamed, shortly before waking, about the bookstore in Cleveland where I worked in 1975.”
(For years I’ve pecked at the wonderful blog Anecdotal Evidence, but found it difficult to perch over entries for long because of the way his posts were laid out on the chosen blogger template. (I have no doubt many people think exactly the same thing about this blog, but I am OCD about the colours, which are not random and are additionally coded by theme or emotion. What would I ever do if I switched to wordpress?) A few weeks ago, however, I added Anecdotal Evidence to Feedly (where I read everything else) and presto! Up came swaths of clear, large, readable text arranged in a wide column and easy to scroll through and I can’t stop linking and re-posting.)
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird