online: 28 april 2003

14 april 2003 a dream of someone falling


12:45 I am awake from a frightening dream of a person (eventually a boy) who was cast (by a kind of crane?) from a cliff before an audience in 1702 AD*. The last part of his flight or fall was braked by 'a small feathered parachute'. He was said, after landing, to be so frightened that his shirt was soaked in sweat 'from set to rent'** (which I supposed, in the dream, to be an eighteenth century term meaning 'head to tail' - I took it to be a phrase used in the local language of shirt makers, 'set' being I supposed the tail of a shirt and 'rent' being the hole for the head or collar - or was it vice versa?)

*or was it 1802? I think I dreamt that Coleridge was alive.

**When I got up I looked for 'set to rent' in reference books and on the web but found no such phrase.

At the start of the dream the falling person was flying, not falling, with some kind of wing (I'd picked up the wings and tail of a dead bird last evening), or an eighteenth century hang glider?.

Yes, dreams are as baffling now as ever (now that Sigmund Freud's interpretations have been somewhat discredited) - particularly in the way they give one the feeling of not being one's waking self but a different being altogether - more various, less predictable, and less 'good'... But perhaps with same fears, enthusiasms, emotions - and perhaps the same experience and memories?

I can sometimes return to a dream if, on waking, I do not change the posture of my legs and arms. I like the physicality of that.



what's new

homepage

digital diary archive

© 2003 john chris jones

You may transmit this text to anyone for any non-commercial purpose if you include the copyright line and this notice and if you respect the copyright of quotations.

If you wish to reproduce any of this text commercially please send a copyright permission request to jcj at publicwriting.net