Oneirology

I dream of a book and I wake to the memory of it; small, square, accordion folded; thick white pages; a Jacob’s ladder of pages, climbing and falling away from each other. I collapse it together with my fingers and tuck it into my shoe, so that now we both walk with a limp like sockets wrenched by a wrestling angel.

Why talk of dreams in an age without prophets? (But have I told you the one where I wake inside a dream and rush to you in a late panic? That you only touch my shoulder and take me inside, smiling, through your door, past the old woman in the rocker on the porch, into a waiting newness? How I know, even inside the dream, that despite appearances it’s me forgiving you?)

a.) The skinny cows ate the fat cows because they were hungry.
b.) The many sheaves of grain bowed to the single sheaf because grains have hierarchies.
The meanings are obvious and scientific.

The prophet Wikipedia on dreams:

1. They are ever-present excitations of long term memory

2. They have the function to erase (a) sensory impressions which were not fully worked up and (b) ideas which were not fully developed during the day

3. Dreams are a memory reinforcing itself.

All those times I could fly. I want to remember flying.

I dreamt of the book and woke to a fierce rain breaking the new spring flowers, climbed from my bed onto the porch to watch the streets flood. The shower
a.) finicky faucet, now hard, now soft
b.) a curtain lowering and blowing itself before me.
On the last pouring rush I took off my coat and walked from under the roof, shoeless over the flowing ditches and stood bare armed, bare legged in the empty road. Rain babbling in its mother tongue, untranslated through clothing. Why talk of rain in an age without forecasts? (But what does this really mean? The way it will still fall on barren ground - oiled roads that only wick it away and send it elsewhere.)