“Reverie is an oneiric activity in which a glimmer of consciousness subsists. The dreamer of reverie is present in his reverie. Even when the reverie gives the impression of a flight out of the real, out of time and place, the dreamer of reverie knows that it is he who is absenting himself –  he, in flesh and blood, who is becoming a “spirit”, a phantom of the past or of voyage.” (Bachelard pp. 150)

The faces of the dreamer form an infinite corridor of pillars facing a ubiquitous center . A sea of eyes see all and nothing. The dream navigator knows this place, where thresholds of awareness open and close perpetually. The dream navigator explores this labyrinth – this corridor we know as night.

The unconscious night is the birthplace of myth; it has no end and no beginning, no history, no future – it is timeless. It is a place of knowing – knowing which knows no bounds. The onieronaut explores the realms of night and day. He journeys to destinations unknown, along a fan of never-ending, never-beginning roads. He travels along both sides of a  great mirror. Reverie is the dream waking within us; for if the lucid dreamer finds clarity in the hall of pillars – the unconscious night – the dream finds lucidity in the life of the waking dreamer.

“A glimmer of eternity descends upon the beauty of the world. We are standing before a great lake who’s name is familiar to geographers, high in the mountains, and suddenly we are returning to a distant past. We dream while remembering. We remember while dreaming.” (Bachelard pp. 102)

One may say, “I have lived many lives”. Who is this “I” they speak of? Is it the “me-now”? Perhaps this “I” is all the pearls of “me-now” strung together by the thread of memory. Why the separation, why differentiate between self and other? I’ve heard this called the Lucifer Experiment. What more true a place of innocence (where Adam has not yet bit the apple) than that of childhood? At the nucleus of our being is the child-poet. Child-nature is a perpetual state of wonder and of dreaming that lies at the heart of every poet. In adulthood, it seems, one is always seeking to return to child-nature. When the poet seeks childhood in their reverie, they are not seeking for the memories of childhood but for the experience of childhood. They are seeking freedom! Freedom, not from the external world, but from the confines of the auto-biographical self. Reverie, by its nature, is timeless. When lost in reverie, the poet sits at the confluence of three great rivers where past, present and future coalesce. This is where the “me-now” sees with the “I” of a child-dreamer, and “A glimmer of eternity descends upon the beauty of the world.”

“Androgeneity is not buried away in some indistinct bestiality at the obscure origins of life. It is a dialectic at the summit. Coming from one and the same being, it shows the exaltation of the animus and the animus and the anima. It prepares the associated reveries of the super-masculine and the super-feminine.” (Bachelard, pp. 79)

Gradients of light – breathing,
Open up a vast pool before me.
A warm kiss embraces my very being.
The Sun, whose gift is so bold and penetrating,
Commands reverence from every creature that dwells within my soul,
Yet, it is the Moon whose presence holds invisible sway over the tides of my ocean.
The Sun’s double – the Moon – has its own Sun.
This Divine Constellation is a Mirror of a Mirror,
As if sun were reflected in sky and pool and Moon in pool and sky;
And sky in pool and pool in sky…

How can we know the name of this Goddess, were it naught for the Sun’s kiss?
Reverie.
Reverie comes, in dripping beauty,
When I and image merge.

Separation is the birth of Thought, the birth of Sun…

“The poet’s room is full of words, words which move about in the shadows. Sometimes the words are unfaithful to the things. They try to establish oneiric synoymies between things. The phanotmalization of objects is always expressed in the language of visual hallucinations. But for a word dreamer there are phantomalizations through language. In order to go to those oneiric depths words must be given the time to dream. ” (pp. 49)

Light casts meaning in its absence. Shadow. Does one meaning exist only in opposition to another? The light from a fire, cast against a man’s flesh and onto cave walls, is not the man. What does this mean? The object lies dreaming, its own dream; floating in the space between thoughts. This space is pregnant with possibilities, like the fertile soil of the Indus River or Mesopotamia – The Cradle of Civilization. Words, like people, must be given time to dream. Dreams open parallel dimensions; rifts in space-time (whose fabric becomes permeable, like the membrane of a cell). It is said that we spend as much as a third of our lives sleeping; and whilst asleep, no doubt, dreaming. Do words sleep? Do they lead plural lives between Conception and Imagination?