Bagatelle 2 min
The Dream Archive
How does it feel if I press here, the masseuse asked, bringing her little fingers together against the back of my head in a needle-like grip. It does not feel like anything in…
Bagatelle
A Change of Air
I dreamt that I stepped off an airport coach and was met by a wall of high summer heat. The air was hard to breathe, as if it lodged in my lungs and did not come back out. My hair sticky, the strands clumped together like dreads. Then I woke on a January night, in dense darkness. The newspaper delivery boy slammed the front door shut after completing his round. By then I would usually try to fall back asleep for a few hours, only to realise in the end that it would not work. I got up, wrapped the quilt around my body like a mummy, went into the kitchen and opened the freezer, closed my eyes and thought: Svalbard.
The study of dreams is particularly difficult, for we cannot examine dreams directly, we can only speak of the memory of dreams. And it is possible that the memory of dreams does not correspond exactly to the dreams themselves. . . . If we think of the dream as a work of fiction—and I think it is—it may be that we continue to spin tales when we wake and later when we recount them.
— Jorge Luis Borges, lecture at the Teatro Coliseo, Buenos Aires, 1977
Let chance choose the next story
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Bagatelle 1 min
The Solution
When the dream was sketched out on the screen, it turned out to be in black and white. I was a little surprised, as I thought I dreamed in colour, but the lecturer explained that…
Bagatelle 4 min
The Voice
So, how did these symptoms begin? You mean from the beginning, as in the beginning beginning? Answer however you like. There is no right or wrong here. Maybe we can start there.…