Stanley Francis Baconstrip had just finished reading the sentence, “The discoveries of modern science have no doubt given their own verdict of opposing alternatives – of either the Buddha or the bomb, for instance – and it is up to each of us to decide which path to follow [1],” when the old tea kettle began its gurgling, pre-whistle throat clearing.

“Better get to it before it screams and wakes the missus,” he said to no one including himself, being the only one at the early morning kitchen table. “Don’t want to send any sirens into her dreams.”

As he took the four steps to the stove, the plastic-covered foam cushion on the seat of the chair he’d been sitting on for the past half hour attempted a slow puffing up toward its usual fullness. He turned the dial on the front of the stove to OFF, causing the circling flame to retreat from the eye, and the gurgling water within the kettle to settle to a soft yet simmery stillness. Lifting the kettle from the stovetop, he hovered it above a Disneyworld mug which contained, flung over its rim like a kite crashed in a ditch, one small bag of Tetley tea attached to a string.

He began pouring the steaming water out of the kettle and into the mug, but that’s when a funny thing happened. His wife suddenly appeared in the kitchen doorway, slightly tussled from sleep but obviously well awake, holding the same mug into which he had just been pouring the water.

Startled at the sight, he looked down and saw that the mug was no longer on the counter – how could it be? – and the kettle was resting quietly on a back burner of the stove, rather than in his right hand. His right hand, and in fact the left as well, was pressed down upon the countertop, and his stance and demeanor were exactly like someone standing in a kitchen trying to remember what they were doing.

“Thanks for the tea,” she said, walking toward the sink to rinse the mug. “That was sweet of you to wake me with it.”

“Mmm,” he said, staring at the stove and trying to remember. He looked at the tiny clock above the burners in hopes of placing himself somewhere in time, but that did no good. He’d always considered clocks to be no more than measuring cups for time, using them only to gauge how long he had between, say, his dental appointment and his office meeting, and when he should arrive for each. They served him no purpose when he had no place to be, so he had no idea at what time he’d started tending the tea.

He turned to speak to her, but felt a sudden stinging in the fingers of his left hand and realized that he had overfilled the mug with hot water that had now flowed across the countertop and spread to the fingers he had resting there. He quickly placed the kettle back on the stove as he shook the water from his wet hand and wiped it on the leg of his pants. Grabbing a dish towel, he wiped the counter clean, as well as the sides and bottom of the mug, and took a breath to calm himself.

From the bedroom down the hall, he heard the chirping of his wife’s alarm clock, and then a muffled moan and thump to retrieve silence. He smiled thinking of her in those early morning moments when her guard was down from sleep, and decided that a fresh cup of hot tea might make her transition into the day a more pleasant one.

By the time he entered the bedroom, she had already forgotten that she’d been dreaming she was in the kitchen reading as the kettle threatened to boil.

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THE BUDDHA OR THE BOMB

You’ve got left and right
And you’ve got up and down
Would you recognize silence
If you didn’t know sound?
If I’m moving toward you
I’m moving away from something else
And anything I touch
Is being touched by a thing (called me)

Black and white
Day and night
Right or wrong
It’s the Buddha or the bomb

Consciousness is renewable
And evolving too
Just look at the spaces in
You think, you say, and you do
Everything is vibrating
But looks like sitting still
And even destiny aligns
To your own free will

Black and white
Day and night
Right or wrong
It’s the Buddha or the bomb

You’ve got left and right
And you’ve got up and down
How can anything intrude
On your hallowed ground?
Hallowed ground is everywhere
And everywhere is everything
So what I do to you
Circles ’round the ring (of life)

Black and white
Day and night
Right or wrong
It’s the Buddha or the bomb

[1] from Sri Aurobindo: Evolutionary Ideas Of Sri Aurobindo by Kishore Gandhi

I’ve recently become disappointed that none of the biographies I read devote any significant amount of time to the dream lives of their subjects. Considering we spend approximately 1/3 of our lives asleep, and much of that dreaming, that adds up to a considerable chunk of time. Granted, most dreams are forgotten by morning, and many of them appear to be little more than re-hashed if not twisted fodder from our waking hours, but I’d like to suggest that in order to get a true and complete picture of a person – a picture that allows us to really understand one another – peeking behind the curtain for an examination of the dreaming life is essential.

Dreams have inspired scientists and philosophers, artists and engineers, saints and politicians, probably even you and me at some point. They’ve been documented as providing lucid blueprints for some of our greatest discoveries. They’ve shone a light on our fears and anxieties, and uncovered feelings we never knew we had (and perhaps even created a few that we didn’t have). They’re a curious part of our existence, a unique playing ground for our imaginations and emotions…and possibly entire other parts of the Universe of which we’re unaware. They’re just too damn weird and common to be written off as insignificant, and like it or not, they are a large part of who you are.

So please, potentially famous readers. Keep a dream journal and maybe, when your story is told and sold in whatever may pass as a bookstore in the future, we’ll be blessed with a more complete picture of who you really were.

This month’s song is another random frequency experiment, but it felt like dreaming to me. (Up at the top, above the video.)

Several months ago, I had a dream that I was having a telephone conversation with the very funny comedienne Amy Poehler, the details of which are documented in this entry’s MP3.

It got me thinking again about the people that populate our dreams: usually they’re people we know, or occasionally celebrities of some sort, but many times people that aren’t familiar to us make appearances of varying degrees of note. Often I’m sure they’re huddled in the background, bit players in the performance, but sometimes they play a more dominant role – such as the unknown man who sold doughnuts in many of my childhood dreams. Paging Dr. Freud. Who are these people?

My first guess is that their faces are ones we’ve seen somewhat peripherally during our waking hours, whether on the street or maybe even in magazines or on television. But what if – sometimes – they were real people who happened to be having their own dream that got cross-referenced with our dream?

For instance, what if Amy Poehler actually had a dream that she was speaking with a stranger on the telephone while she was eating Chinese food, and that stranger was me having the same dream but from my point of view? You see, I would be a stranger to her since she doesn’t know me, and because of that the dream would probably offer little reason for her conscious mind to remember it. But – it was me on the phone, whether she knew it or not.

A simple movement or rhyme
Could be the smallest of signs

Don’t you just love early New Order? I like to think Amy Poehler does too, but that’s probably just me dreaming….