Dreams and Imagination

A damsel with a dulcimer

It was a miracle of rare device,

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

I do not know whether it was Chou dreaming that he was a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming that it was Chou.

But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,

Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

So I awoke, and behold it was a dream.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.

But who can live for long

Come, dear children, let us away;

Come to me in my dreams, and then

Champions are made from something they have deep inside them: a desire, a dream, a vision.

High diddle diddle The cat and the fiddle, The cow jumped over the moon; The little dog laughed To see such craft And the dish ran away with the spoon.

Take me for a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship, My senses have been stripped, My hands can’t feel to grip, My toes too numb to step Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin’.

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to.

And if my thought-dreams could be seen They’d probably put my head in a guillotine But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life and life only

Of all the questions you might want to ask about angels, the only one you ever hear is how many can dance on the head of a pin. No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth or guiding a boy and a girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Saturday mornings we listened to Red Lantern & his undersea folk. At 11, Let’s Pretend / & we did / & I, the poet, still do, Thank God!

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. The beak that grips her, she becomes.

Something like living occurs, a movement Out of the dream into its codification.