Tag Archives: Dreams

What does the crow know?

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A killer is on the road and when I leave R.’s place early that morning, half-dream haunted (having slept haltingly under a bay window, shadowed lilacs moving  in the wind), a crow swoops down madly squawking. It’s five a.m. and there’s a chill in the morning air and all the way to my apartment, which is only a parenthesis away, the crow follows, swooping when my back is turned and never shutting up. Others have woken, crows and not crows. Is this a message? Has the killer climbed to my second floor balcony and slipped in through the open door? I wasn’t expecting to be out long but when the news of the shots came I stayed over. So who knew where he was. So who knew if he’d slipped through the police noose and made it to the dark park and the path that leads to me. Does the crow know?

I’ve always found it fitting that trauma comes from Traum, the German word for dream. “Es war kein Traum,” Kafka writes early in Die Verwandlung when Gregor wonders what has happened. It was hardly a dream. Read any post-catastrophe interview – after 9/11, for example – and all you see is, ‘It was surreal.’

We live in a safe world. Mostly.

There was no killer hiding in my bathroom shower, nor in the bedroom closet. These things aren’t far-fetched, and yet they are. When I checked my balcony door (chain-locked, right), the crow was out there, on the wires, waiting. “So this crow followed me all the way home,” I told R. later in the day while the killer was still on the road (in the bushes, really). “It was very annoyed with me,” I said, also stating that I thought it might have brain damage. “Maybe it’s the one you chased out of the yard last week,’ R. said, and she was right, I had done that, darted into the driveway in my silver Fusion and leaped from the thing to chase a crow from the torn trash.

A grudge. An obsession. Wronged when the wronging was not what it seemed to be. We’re not so different from crows.

How to disappear completely (part II)

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scoverbjpSix or so years ago I had the chance to talk with Yann Martel at a private party in Moncton. He’d taken part in a Frye Festival event – a fall Community Read around The Life of Pi  – and knowing his background in philosophy I asked him a question. See, he’d asked if I wrote and it turned out I did (surprise) and in fact my first book was to come out in a couple of months.  What’s it about?  I told him it was simply a book of dreams presented as a novel, though length wise and style wise it was closer to a book of prose poems. He asked if they were actual dreams or fictional dreams and I wondered aloud if there was a difference then specifically posed a question: If my book’s content is pretty much verbatim (?) accounts of dreams, dreams whose content I didn’t consciously create, is this then a work of fiction or non-fiction? Or do we need another category? He thought for a minute.

But you chose what to write down, how to write it, present it, so it’s fiction, he said.

I may have nodded (slowly).

I still think it needs its own category. Why? Because though I chose the ordering of the words, I didn’t choose the who, the what, the where (yet, who else chose those? ). I had been dreaming of the same event (break up) and person (S.) for over a year as if my mind had decided to take a vacation from reality, “I like it better here”, or was on some obsessive quest for explanations.

After playing with the idea of including these dreams in the novel I wanted to write (I’d been noting the dreams in my e-journal, or on paper in the middle of the night, sometimes just a few lines), I wondered how a novel of dreams would read/feel. Maybe it was record keeping, too.  I sold the idea, literally, to friends, supporters, wrote till the dreams stopped, printed and hand bound 26 subscriber copies of “S. a novel in [xxx] dreams”, had a launch and thought that would be the end of it (and it was the end of the dreams, fortunately).  But one of the subscribers was a reader for a publisher (Broken Jaw press), talked up the manuscript, and long story short a couple of years later it appeared again.

To this date the one book I didn’t intend for publication is the one book I’ve had published. Sadly I had little means to promote it at the time, and it’s a bit of an odd sell, and the publisher was barely hanging on, had no distribution, so even though only 400 copies appeared, I doubt more than half have been moved. Those who have read it, however, have experienced it the way I hoped: puzzled, amused, moved, frustrated, wanting more yet strangely satisfied…

When I was writing the book, the title kept changing – 40 dreams, 50 dreams, 60 dreams – so I just wrote “[xxx] dreams” after a while. The final count, I believe, is 69.

Interested in a copy? Click the image of the book, or write me.  There are some kind reviews on Goodreads, too.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6385209-s-a-novel-in-xxx-dreams