Tinkering the Universe: The Art of Dream

I dreamed a theory of the universe:
that a man could be generated from a snowflake,
if only the snowflake would not melt
before the process was complete.
In the generation of a man is much heat,
thus snowflakes tend not to produce men.
I see a snowflake with
Leonardo's stretch man floating.

Dreams, like snowflakes, melt in the daylight. In this dream the snowflake man, like the Vitruvian man of Leonardo, swirled through space a perfect being, almost to be transmuted into existence. Only upon awakening does the theory of origins, along with its universe, evaporate.

In waketime, the beautiful dream man on the snowflake wheel is a mock recipe calling for irreconcilable temperatures and the miracle of life is slightly askew. In dreams the beautiful and the grotesque are interchangeable; in dreams one can be just a little bit pregnant. This is odd, isn't it, that dream should spoof creative energy, as a dream is, after all, nothing but creativity? Dream is spontaneous generation with no yield, a biogenesis with no staying power. Dream is poetic energy with disdain for the poem. Dream creates universes and leaves them, like snowflakes, to dissipate upon our pillows.

Daylight dissipates dream imagery—but too late—as dream has already unhinged daylight's prerogatives. The dream world undoes the sensible one, the suggestive nonsense of dream miraculously sets in motion our conscious capacity to make the world—and maybe love. Although dreams do not bestow convenient meanings to waketime, they do something more—by their very scrambling and scorching and patching scraps of the dependable, daylight world, they remake our own imaginative capacities. Dreams explode sense with surprising combinations, but unlike myth, dreams do not produce coherent narratives upon which cultures are strung and knotted. Instead, they undo the knots, tangle the threads. The handful of dreams recorded in this essay echo and fracture the narrative qualities of other forms. Is it that dreams can seem uncannily prescient because there's always enough white space to write in the notes of our fascinations when we awaken? Or is it that the dreams create possibilities for breaking apart and reimagining the waking world?

This snowflake dream dilemma catches on the contradictory elements of the given and the giving. Sure, we have plenty of mythic and poetic formulae to reconcile opposites, but I don't want to treat dream as a comparative literature exercise (although it's agreeable to me to treat dream as literature or to treat literature comparatively, just now we don't want to be distracted from the dreams themselves). This snowflake dream, unlike those myths of creation, is a failed cosmogony that won't resolve hot and cold, leaving the potential man to spin slowly through space. Can it be that the dream idiom makes fun of making? So to define: dream falls down laughing at our daytime arrangements—logical, theological, biological, even psychological. Dream caricatures the creative, and loves to make the world in its own feral image.

I don't want to treat dream as an exotic land from which we can return like insatiable anthropologists or inspired priests (although it's fine with me for dreams to be treated anthropologically or devotionally—from the outside or the inside of the dreamer's view). The world has generated plenty of bees from rotting flesh, barnacle geese from barnacles, golem from clay, vultures emulating the Virgin birth, as well as virgin births, to indicate that the world's storytellers have never tired of this dream theme—to make the world by odd means. I offer neither a dream theory nor a critique of dream theories. Dream is not a how-to book for the waking. Dreams are not convenient tokens, like video-game devices, that we expend in order to succeed on our bio-maze (I do not oppose the manipulation of dreams as keys to stations on life's journey...