The World Dream Bank: Off Dover

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Off Dover

Dreamed 2010/9/30 by Wayan

I'm crossing the English Channel on my bike
over a calm and busy-boated sea
like a fat-tire Jesus, haloless. My wake
cleaves a long V--gullwings of green and white.
Not new to me, this Levitation Lite, but ice
upbore me then, in Greenland's vicious wind:

I skimmed on floes and sailed on gale-force wind,
blown like a tern. Or a sleet. My red bike
the lone hot spark on that relentless ice.
This outing on the warm and purring sea
is a meadowlark after that stark plain of white.
Race pelicans and laugh; leave them in my wake.

Wind through fishers. Wave. Plovers circle thrice.
Bike on toward Calais; Dover's chalk recedes, white
grin between green sea and cerulean sky. Until I wake.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

English Channel, summer: saw Doc Martin, a BBC drama set in warm Cornwall. Not your typical cold rainy England!
Biking: independent, efficient, but solitary. Can't easily cram friends on.
Greenland, ice: it's been a hard year; my mom died in April. But this dream shows a thaw.

Deer Abstract or Anorexic?
Bike on water: recurrent dream motif (example: Lucid Living). Not quite as impressive as Jesus walking on water! Water-biking...
1. Implies pipsqueak miracles, like predictive or telepathic dreams
2. Hints I'm skittering around in the oneirosphere, possibly visiting others, not just dealing with internal issues
3. Prompts me not to over-psychologize the night's other dreams:
  1. She's Jerking Their Cable
  2. The Hot Tub Heist
  3. Nude Cello Recital
  4. Deer Abstract or Anorexic?
  5. Hamster Horror! (so much worse than Hammer Horror)
  6. The Stegosaur Mountains
All these did seem to be less about me than distant friends, lovers, exes. Groundhog Chris finally crawled out of grief's winter burrow (my mom's death) and looked around.
The poem is a truncated sestina--an unrhymed verseform whose lines each end in one of six words, in a precise order, for six verses; then a three-line tornada crams in all six keywords. As the dream was short, I wrote just two verses not six. And my tornada's loose--I ignored the traditional keyword order, and 'wind' with long i and 'thrice' for the requisite ice are stretches (and a tip o' the hat to Coleridge: 'weave a circle round him thrice'. Search THAT in your DuckDuckGo.)

LISTS AND LINKS: by the sea - biking - walking on water - snow & ice - hot & cold - boats - death - grief - joy - dream poems & art experiments - digital painting - Dover - Donald Justice's full, true Dream Sestina - more experimental poems from Catshall's literary salons: Ode to Not Writing Odes, Six and a Half Experts View the Beast, Reshape my Face, Dill

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