The Trumpeter
Dreamed Dec. 1971? Jan. 1972? by John Hollander
At the mountainous border of our two countries there is a village; it stands just below a pass, but some of the older houses lie higher up along the road, overlooking more of the valley than one might think. The border has never been heavily guarded, and our countries are peaceful. Theirs lies beyond the pass; in the other valley a large village look up toward the mountains and toward us. The border itself is marked only by an occasional sign; but then there is the Trumpeter. His clear, triadic melodies break out through the frosty air, or through the swirling mists. From below, from above, the sound is commandingly clear, and it seems to divide the air as the border divides the land. It can be heard at no fixed intervals. and yet with a regularity which we accept, but cannot calculate. No one knows whether the Trumpeter is theirs or ours.This is a text. The dream which it embodies (or: surrounds? misremembers? embroiders upon with the kind of fierce fancy-work that becomes the fabric itself? interprets? reports?--even to fix on a verb here would be to enmesh a whole poetic theory), the dream related to it, is now barely accessible to me, the text having replaced it. I now cannot help but feel that it was originally dreamed for its textual role; although that feeling is itself a fiction which replaces buried, but probably useless, psychic history, it was a feeling that dawned on the occasion of incorporating the text in an earlier poem called "The Head of the Bed."
The dream as I remember it was a broad prospect--out at which I looked--all in the grays of etching and aquatint, of the mountain scene; I heard the trumpet, and knew in the dream that there was a Trumpeter, just as I had the sense (not from that kind of inner fiat, of axiom or identification revealed to the dreamer but from the landscape itself) that this was border territory. This was the kind of dream that arises in the fringes of sleep, and I awoke at the sounds of the trumpeting--at rather than to them, as to an alarm clock or some other noise in the eternally awakened world which the trumpet call absorbed and transformed. It was as I awoke--just after it--that the question came to me in the light of my bedroom, and with a sense not of immediate urgency but of profound importance: Was that trumpeter theirs or ours?
...When I added the text as an epigraph to Head of the Bed, I had already decided that the two countries in it were the realms of sleep and waking...
SOURCE: Head of the Bed, incorporating The Trumpeter, is in Tales Told of the Fathers (1975); commentary from Dreamworks: an Interdisciplinary Quarterly, v.1 #2 (summer 1980), pages 101-2
EDITOR'S NOTE
An enduring cliché about dreams is that in dreams we're unaware we're dreaming. Lucid dreams prove this isn't always true of the ego in the dream; but this dream interests me because it hints that even in "the kind of dream that arises in the fringes of sleep" (hypnogogic dreams, generally less organized than the REM state in deep sleep), the dreaming mind--the scriptwriter, not the ego--can be self-aware enough to paint (for itself? for that ego?) the border-landscape between waking and dreaming--with a guardian.
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