Dream Archive 3: Washington Monument

Visited the Washington Monument. It was apparently hollow and made of thin, very hard plastic about half an inch thick, with a grid of tiny holes in it. There was a door on each face. Inside, four stairways went down into a shallow rotunda. You could look up the whole length of the monument. More stairs spiraled up, allowing you to climb to the top. At the top, you went outside onto a huge rocky slab set at a forty-five degree angle. You had to scramble up the rocks in order to get to the very top. The very top was above the clouds. You could gaze down at the ground, which was apparently several miles below. A great ocean filled the horizon, and massive tsunami waves crashed over the monument at regular intervals. If you flattened yourself onto the ground, you could avoid getting swept away by them. Everyone was afraid of the waves, but they went to the top anyway to see the view. The stairs on the inside of the monument were littered with old junk and machine parts from the early days of the United States. The parts seemed to be complex, but were made of stone and wood.

Dream Archive 2: Control Room

§here was a great city and we all woke up there it was filled with shadows and halogen and tungsten bulbs and moonlight (so many moons) and we could hear the howling in the distance where the mountains rose from the landscape and the water buried the shaft where some of us fell into the night which went for miles and we were transported through the pipes and hallways to a high castle filled with machines which ran the length of the world where we could look down on the landscape and see the twisted trees and the huge crocodile statues bending and reaching toward the place in the West where the light streamed down on the great city swallowed in mountains and where he told us he had made the world and he had complicated plans for what would happen there and the light shifted all day and the earthquakes rumbled and the storms were made in a huge chamber and the people roamed about in fear and confusion trying to find the ones they (we) had lost but he was made of shadows and his plans were wrong so we killed him and fled the control room and found a place which felt familiar and there was a house there with an open door and hollowed-out pumpkins and gourds with light inside that flickered in the darkness and we could see what we wanted but we were afraid to go in.

"My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke, and it caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone."

⎯Leonard Cohen

Suur Toll

Dream Archive 1: Tourist Trap

Last night I dreamed about... riding horses? I never ride horses.

Last week I dreamed about some kind of tour of a large mansion in Australia. It was apparently a tourist trap, but there was something else going on. All kinds of strange photos and artifacts from past decades. One of them was a map showing regions of the continent according to relative light or darkness. The darkest region was centered on Ayer's Rock, in the middle. There were tiny bright spots labeled things like "Reading under a tree" and "When we drew four spades in the card game."

"We can secure other people's approval if we do right and try hard; but our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that."

—Mark Twain

Trying to get "The Devil at Lourdes" on LET'S GET LIGHT, attempt two

December, 1999. A young Michael Stipe takes time out of his busy schedule of spice shopping and reading haiku to ponder the release of his band's new album, Reveal. It is shaping up to be their most creative and experimental album to date, filled with strange angular rhythms and crazy distorted guitars. Stipe thinks, "Hmmm. People I trust have told me that they really like these songs. But I don't know. I'm thinking maybe I'm gonna rewrite the whole thing as a syrupy, poppy Beach-Boys-meets-Radiohead kinda thing. Yeah, that sounds good. The kids'll like that." Feeling a little warm, he removes his t-shirt, which reads BORN TO BONE, to reveal another t-shirt underneath, bearing the legend LIVIN' THE WILDE LIFE.

October, 2010. A young Andrew Livingston takes time out of his busy schedule of shopping for exercise equipment and reading Michael Stipe: An Illustrated Biography to ponder the release of his band's new album, Let's Get Light. It is shaping up to be their most creative and experimental album to date, filled with strange angular rhythms and crazy distorted guitars. Livingston thinks, "Hmmm. People I trust have told me that they really like 'The Devil at Lourdes.' But I don't know. I'm thinking maybe I'm gonna scrap the whole thing and rewrite the album as a tribute to Reveal, which is my favorite R.E.M. album by far. I really like the syrupy, poppy Beach-Boys-meets-Radiohead thing. Yeah, that sounds good. The kids'll like that." Feeling a little warm, he removes his t-shirt, which reads KING OF THE ROD, to reveal (heh.) another shirt underneath bearing the legend FALL ON ME.

<3 JL