between the flickers.

  I've often wondered where dreams go when they die. I mean, the real ones that confuse you with their too-vivid reality, not the fluff ones. Those ones melt like candy floss in your mouth, to be expelled during your first morning bathroom stop. 

   I'd had one of the real ones the other night. Visceral and absolute, it had hit me like a suckerpunch, only to fade like a 3 day old bruise by my morning tea. The details pushed themselves further away with each attempt at remembrance... and yet... 

   The dream had driven my mundane life into unrecognisable shapes. Even the soft t-shirt I'd earned from a horrible relationship three boyfriends ago felt foreign. My beloved flipflops cradled my feet with a familiarity that grated, their very everydayness serving to cast a light upon my wish to revisit my melting dreamworld. There was a someone there, I knew, who burned with an importance that torched everything else to cinders. The tea I sipped tasted of liquid quicksilver, a leaden dose of reality seeping unwanted poison through my veins.

   The rest of my days passed with a testudinal slowness that ached at my already shredded psyche. How could a dream I couldn't even recall hold me with such power? How could a face I couldn't even draw on paper make me vibrate with a constant thrumming from the inside out? I eagerly put myself to sleep at night, hoping for a return to the mysterious self I had only just found and unfound all in the space of an opening eyelid.

   Resting my dog-eared copy of Stranger In A Strange Land face down onto the pillow beside my head, I closed my eyes and pondered Heinlein's meanings of grok: "to drink", "to be one with", "to understand thoroughly and intuitively". This One I longed to rendezvous with covered all those different meanings for me. I yearned to drink of his water, to infuse his life force into my own, and to pour my then over-filled cup into his no longer full one, thus completing both of us at once.

   With these feelings boiling inside me, a swirling cacophony of semi-lucid magma, I breathed deep. 

   Deeper... 

   Deepest...

Reviews

[Coyote Poetry]

Our dreams are door ways into life. If we have a dream three times. It support to come true. A very good chapter. I like how you are opening her mind up to the reader. A excellent chapter. I like how you ended the chapter.
Coyote

[Nobody.]

I really enjoyed having you read this to me. :)
Very powerful...emotional. great metaphor about pouring th rest of 'his' tea into yur own cup...sharing life forces. that image is striking.
another great story.

[Toon]

this story is really sad. even more so than the first chapter. your characters have a lot of interesting thoughts.

[Tony]

1. People who read Jung and books about dreams and history, the seekers of truth and purpose, those souls who have yet to understand the world of dreams and the strange powerful attraction it holds, will really appreciate this chapter. It touches the very hand of 'God', and yet shows that predictable human trait of 'keeping it real'. Of course, one cannot have their cake and eat it too.
Once again, Jenniewren has articulated well a human frustration.

2. Without saying as much, this piece hints at an ancient and hidden truth:
'Just the fact that we recall or are frustrated because we can't recall dreams and because we contemplate this is evidence of the 'supernatural'. Yet we are conditioned, and we condition ourselves to doubt and even ridicule anyone who claims to See things that we Know but disregard as we are quite busy doing our part in the Progress of Man. (How do we treat the raggedy old lady in the park who smells of urine and talks to the birds? What is our impression of her within this 'real world'?)
3. It seems that eventually, we usually turn these thing around in our minds,
(a swirling cacophony of semi-lucid magma) until we submit to sleep, and start the process over again. An endless revolution of frustration for the would be Seer who refuses to assume his/her real purpose.
4. Now I will go out here on the edge of the cliff, care to follow?:
Everything we create, and we create everything you see apart from nature's apparatus, has a source.
That source is thought. It is also God. If you think God is in heaven, the birds are going to beat you to his door. If you Know that you are merely an extension of It, then you must grudgingly admit that everything you see in 'Civilization' is anything but civilized.
In this concept one can find, oh you will love this.....New Sight, New Purpose.
5."Even the soft t-shirt I had earned from an awful relationship three boyfriends ago felt foreign."
The fact that she sees her life in this fashion is why I love Jenniewren.
That is all.

[Michael X]

i've read this twice and it feels consistant with the dream in ponder,
in such a way your words literally take the reader to another place and time,
in thought. and professionally in-tune with hindsight composition.
at the same time, the imagery is what story writing is all about, for

some strange reason this reminds me of a retro interpretation. which
honestly these impressions burn into the heart of the reader in such
soft ways, and flow limitless the way a dream can and do,
i love the way the peaceful passion is the deepest breath at the ending.
this is beautifully invented and colorful.

[Molafvt]

Groking can be more complicated than expected. Carl Jung the Swiss analytical psychologist, says that we have around four "major" dreams a year. These are dreams that can't be forgotten and leave an indelible image that can't be forgotten. He says they are prophetic and inform us of some future or present event. Interpreting dreams is a task that requires meditation on the symbols of the dream. He also says that all the character's in the dream are us. Great write and a poignant construction.

[alan peter kelly]

rich/luxurious language...edible...well...metaphorically it's brain food...kinda like literary omega three

[Willard Schlesinger]

I read through all of these, and was going to leave a review on the last piece of work, but decided other wise at the risk of my review taking on a double meaning. But what I was going to say was, that all of your writing has a nice feeling to it --I can't describe it much differently than that.
Also, you compose words magnificently -- you should be proud.

[Devons]

A meaningfully expressed sense of ennui radiates behind the lines of this urbane piece of writing. Of course, nocturnal dreams are elusive mysteries that haunt our subconscious throughout our lives, never to be given meaning or explanation. This abstract elusiveness is examined here in such a way that somehow the elusiveness itself becomes the meaning. The parallel between the dream and reality is thrown into relief by the way in which the dream has such power over waking life, making reality seem untenable and meaningless; and the pull of the dream becomes the potential salvation of this awful meaninglessness, absolved perhaps by the feelings experienced within it.
" I yearned to drink of his water, to infuse his life force into my own, and to pour my then over-filled cup into his no longer full one, thus completing both of us at once."
..This passage is just as enigmatic in meaning as the subject itself, but it exemplifies the very philosophical and somewhat existential nature of the writing as whole. Perhaps it may become a little esoteric when it brings Heinlein into this exploratory thesis, but overall there is an intelligent familiarity and persuasiveness about its telling which sets the mind off on its own journey through the machinations of its theme. Just like dreams, it is inconclusive, but takes us by the hand and leads along dark passageways with no end...and no beginning...
Well-written, and of course, inevitably though-provoking.