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Big Flaming Airplanes Trying to Land

Dreamed late Oct. 1953 by Jack Kerouac

Plane breaks up over New York, sketch by Wayan of dream by Jack Kerouac. Click to enlarge.


BIG FLAMING AIRPLANES TRYING TO LAND in the New York-New Jersey airport in broad daylight disaster two of them are floundering across the sky to crash in the meadows of junk---I'm watching from the field after a bus trip from somewhere North where I had a suitcase and a bag of big marbles (big bag) and stored them in the bus compartment myself in an attempt to save the marbles (for Lil Luke) after I'd goofed and taken a walk down the bus hiway city then saw I had to get back as soon as possible and only way to be on time was cab, more expensive than the bus trip itself!---so hurried---and now in field the DC-6's falling in orange sweptback flame---

Later according to instructions contained in the Almanac of Mystery and mark't on the Map of Bayonne I go to Bayonne to the Ottoman Temple older than America made of wood Byzantium in splintered gray cracks, so old, like the barges at Communipaw waters---I sneak around on dangerous boards looking for the altar, I can see all big glittering New York across the river---it ends up I'm inside naked with little Philip and someone else presumably my young sister and we're all naked, I'm trying to take my choice but at same time I'm concerned (because pale and infantile) with other things, like airplanes and meaning of Temples---lt was an Arabic Pseudomorphic overlay on the rusts of Jersey that no historian'd yet noticed and it was so strange, it has to do with those knives and Burma caves of horror, something's deep inside, rituals of Snake and Old Sanskrit Secrets---Who was That He Man who wanted to fight me? I sure was ready for im

--Jack Kerouac

EDITOR'S NOTES

This one's just weird; and as with many of Kerouac's dreams, it's hard to tell how much of the weirdness is dream experience versus literary experiment.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Book of Dreams by Jack Kerouac, expanded (2001) edition, City Lights Books, p.172. Date estimated from sequence.



LISTS AND LINKS: planes - crashes - fire - big-city dreams - New York - holy sites - I'm Just Not Myself Today! - age-bent dreams - kids - nudity - incest? - artistic & literary experiments - dream poems - Kerouac dreams again of Airplane Disasters - more Kerouac - 8 years earlier, another dream of fiery disaster in Bayonne - 48 years later, two planes over New York: dreams of 9/11

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