I am not an alchemist — I make no claims of being able to turn common metals into gold or silver, of having found the philosopher’s stone or the elixir of life. That is an enterprise for greater sorcerers, scientists, conjurers and talents than I, for those artists whose music, painting, poetry, photography and other arts manage to transmute the vile into the sublime, the base into the divine. In part, this space is my humble but heartfelt tribute to those artists. It is for them that I will pad this pillow with links to their artful renderings and commentary on the inspiration they provide in their response to alchemy’s abiding call to dream.
Ah, yes, to dream. Therein lies the famous rub and herein goes a sad confession from this pillow and dream obsessed majordomo: I do not dream. More precisely, I do not dream at night, or still more precisely, I never remember my sleeping dreams. Someone once said that ‘I do my best dreaming while awake’ [yes, I know … in the AG era (After Google) no one every says “someone once said … ” anymore, but in a brief and harmless fit of nostalgia for the BG era, I’ll just leave it at that], which is all well and good, but my trouble is that I do my
only dreaming while awake. And though my wakeful dreaming can be vivifying and exhilarating, I have been schooled and grown convinced that dreams are a vital link to our unconscious, a vast reservoir of universal myths and imagination, an umbilical cord to a great mystery we can only shun to the grave peril of any hope of creative vitality. Where if not in dreams where will we ever be able to steal any moments “from the wings of fleeting time”? If sleep is a dress rehearsal for death (and Hypnos/Somnos the twin brother of Thanatos/Mors), then dreamless sleep is a bit too close to the main show. To sleep and never dream is to drink overlong and oversoon from the river Lethe.
Which brings me to the other part of this blog’s mission. After all, what is a good pillow for if not a resting place for weary dreamers and nesting space for fresh new dreams? So this pillow also aspires to be an incubator for your dreams and perhaps for ones that have for far too long remained locked up inside me, a portal through which I can climb back into my silent fallow dreamscape and see if I can shake a few tree limbs and whip up a breeze or two.
These, then, are the hopes I will stuff into the pillow and fluff up each night before surrendering to sleep, perchance to …
