bird-cherry nights

like a soundless party upstairs,
the bitter-sweet fragrance creeps
into my dreams, perfectly
blending in, subtly
turning the stream of subconscious
in a stranger  route,

and i, asleep, watch
the white and the magic
dance, twine, grow
and then – nothing, as the wind
changes, and the nightingale
bubbles and gurgles
the sun awake.

the haunting

and so i enter the dream-within-dream.

and i am in some kind of himalayan foothill country. with people whose language is something like sanscrit (which i do not speak in life, but have heard in dreams). and there is some discussion about going to some place in the mountains where some benevolent entities, teachers, beings of light have been sleeping for centuries. according to the lore, this is the time they should be waking up… no idea why. so the people finally decide to go and see if anything is happening.

the path winds among rocks and tufts of grass, up and down slopes, till there is an almost invisible ravine with a river at the bottom. we turn along it, and suddenly there is this wall with something like sealed doors. the door frames are all different, but sort of roundish and pointy on top. the seals look like limestone gone grey with age, interspersed with reddish mortar. and there is one door with a clearly discernible additional seal, it looks like a huge splatter of hot wax, except it appears to be stone.

one of the people goes up and hits the seal. it crumbles.

the world of linguistic dreams and infiltrations

tonight i dreamed in greek. as this is a language i have learned from books, i do not know what it sounds like. so the little greek letters danced and moved about, making up chunks of text, sometimes understandable, sometimes totally unintelligible. and i thought in my dream – why am i dreaming this? it is not full moon, not any more.

then i woke up – in my dream. and talked to cats of various shades, at an official reception. the cats had come from another planet or something, and wanted to find other non-earthians. so we talked about what life is like on the earth, and what the best ways of travel are, and discussed infiltration techniques. i felt i envied the cats a little, because they could go and do things, get to places that my human form does not permit.

academic nightmares

thus

there is this dream:

there are course descriptions like little boats floating in the air.

and then there comes a leaviathan, a white whale (like moby dick in the film), and jumps, and eats them.

and i wake up in horror.

———————

parallel to the course description revision, i read. currently – rereading the prince by machiavelli.

nothing is new under the sun.

interpreter’s nightmares

last night i had this dream.

one of my interpreter colleagues asks me to pair him at a conference at the uni for simultaneous interpretation. unfortunately, i also have to present a paper there, a complication, no more.

so, i turn up, with full text of my paper in both languages, all set for interpreting.

first, it appears that the booth for simoultaneous has malfunctioned, and so we have to go to an adjacent hall and the techs are improvising the connection there. we cannot see the speakers, and

dysfunction

in my dreams, i am back at that hospital in 2005. talking to the surgeon. about how bro’s inner bleeding cannot be stopped. how the brain death is imminent. and in amoment, it has set in. about stopping the blood transfusion after that. detaching the artificial life-support. and in the dream, i am suddely aware i have to make this decision between life and death. the feeling of actually killing him. and then i wake up, and i do not know.

i know i took the only logical decision there was to take. there was nothing else i could have done, given the circumstances.

why, then, i do not know in my dreams? wherefrom the feeling of having actually killed him?

were it possible, i would have swapped. my life for his. as then, so now. but i cannot, and never will.

lost fingertips

so. here is this dream. it repeats – not regularly, but often enough to have accumulated variants that i remember. it is not a first person dream, and it usually contains no pictures, only textual descriptions and feelings. therefore i will use /me instead of me, and /them instead of them.

/me is walking through a city – or town – or place. /them are following me. /me does not know /them, but is aware of their pursuit. /me is not scared. nor does /me try to run away or escape.