That nighttime chaos that makes sense of the day, that third of our lives we remain insensible, add to this that fog of infancy and senility that bookmark the ends, all forgotten. In the morning they may float to the surface, the remnants of nocturnal sojourns, a disquieting foreboding, a prescience, a trigger might recall those events half-remembered, a Déjà-vu that you can't quite place, foreshadowed from this world or the other?
The day follows the dreamer into the night, all logic is seemingly discarded, broken up, fragmented, turned up-side-down and rearranged. Events, people, places, all fall past the dreamer like snow shaken up in a globe.
What rules remain? Perhaps this is the real world, those hidden ideas, relationships, symbols and narratives that are assembled upon waking, piecemeal, in a different world with different rules.
And yet, rejoin the morning, the day, refreshed, renewed, fresh insight, the night has served a purpose, the glue that binds the day. Or the days are the glue that bind the nights, since we came from the void and will be returning to it, and it's in the waking hours we have the fever dreams of science, of politics, poetry, language, logic...
"Sleep on it..."
Everyone knows the tale, "The Cobbler and his Elves" every evening despairing, laying out his work, impossible, the leather inadequate, insufficient to the task, yet by the morning the deft little elves will have woven, stitched and punched a perfect solution. These Elves, his dreams would by the morning have solved his problems, increase his wealth, and through his appreciation and gratitude the problems came eventually to solve themselves.
Skip the fairy tales, there are too many real-world examples - August Kekule and his dream of the serpent biting it's tail, which gave to him the structure of the Benzene ring. Otto Loewi's dream realization of the experiment he must try to prove that nerve impulses were transmitted chemically, killing two frogs with one experiment and winning the Nobel Prize to boot. Try Elias Howe, who under threat from a dream king to invent a sewing machine or die within 24 hours and having no inspiration, upon his being carried away noticed that the dream guard's spears were pierced on their tips, and begging the dream king for more time woke to invent the modern sewing machine.
And Mary Shelley, the mother of Frankenstein's monster, who had actually seen the character in a dream.
There are other, even more notable examples. The rags to riches dream Alchemy of Ms. Somporn Pinthong, not her stage name, who uncovered the numbers of 17 and 71 while playing with her shit in a dream, scatalogical as Alchemy often is, and playing those numbers won the lottery. As did an Unknown Baltimore winner, who dreamed of 3 magic 8 balls and playing those numbers won the jackpot. Alonzo Coleman of Virginia's dream of numbers all in a row, and too many more examples to list, show without a doubt that this world, the refuge of the dead and weary, that it runs and weaves into our daily lives in a thousand, million, unseen ways, tendrils creeping up from sleep, so our deepest imaginings, both of joy and horror, fulfill themselves upon the world.
*****
You can watch her sleeping and wonder what she is dreaming, if somehow you could meet her there, in whatever disguise she's chosen for you, because this, these waking hours together and her sleeping in your arms, they are not enough...
***
She dreams that she is floating, light, above Chagall's garden, with roosters, goats, doves and a luminous half moon, speckled gilt stars reflecting off of a wandering river, the domes and crosses of distant churches, gasping butterflies, a bride clutching a bouquet of roses...