{"id":8644,"date":"2024-08-20T15:23:12","date_gmt":"2024-08-20T15:23:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/?p=8644"},"modified":"2024-08-20T15:24:13","modified_gmt":"2024-08-20T15:24:13","slug":"excerpt-from-the-dreamspa-lucid-dreams-a-long-poem-by-em-schorb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/excerpt-from-the-dreamspa-lucid-dreams-a-long-poem-by-em-schorb\/","title":{"rendered":"Excerpt from The Dream Spa (Lucid Dreams) a long poem by EM Schorb"},"content":{"rendered":"
\r\n\r\n                                                           THE DREAM SPA<\/strong><\/em>\r\n\r\nLucid Dreams\r\n\r\nI\r\n\r\nThe Association for the Study of Lucid Dreams \r\nsummoned me to the Hotel Paradiso\r\nto participate in a study in which I was to sleep \r\nand be awakened while I was dreaming\r\nand was to maintain my dream \r\nand then to convert it\r\ninto whatever dream I wished it to become.\r\n\r\nLucid dreams are more vivid than common dreams. \r\nInscape is energized, so that the world of the dream\r\nis like that of Hopkins or Van Gogh,\r\npulsating, dynamic, vital.\r\nSuch imagery is said to be\r\nthe manifestation of cosmic holograms, \r\nand if I can convert them,\r\nI can convert my life, like a wizard, \r\nturn it into what I want it to be,\r\nor wished it were or had become, \r\nbring time back\r\nwith what and whom I loved, set a new \r\ncourse for myself, and embark.\r\n\r\nII\r\n\r\nI saw white gulls arise, upon arrival,\r\nfrom the emerald maze in the huge garden \r\nsurrounding the Hotel Paradiso. White gulls. \r\nDon\u2019t they always arrive with a ship, \r\nfollowing for her flotsam and jetsam?\r\nAnd that night I dreamed I saw an instant, \r\nwhich was a dewdrop in my dream,\r\nyes, a dewdrop and a stellar instant,\r\nlike that of the wild gulls, pulling \r\nthe air with their wide wings,\r\nan image, a vision of heavenly flight\u2014 \r\nan ascent, a transcendence\u2014\r\na nano-second and a shimmering drop, \r\nor, shifting, a shimmering shield, \r\nhovering in space, and what looked like \r\na moonbeam crossed the dark,\r\nthe silver dark of a swirling dust mote, \r\na hazed, illumined, impossible dark,\r\nfingered, like a laser, touched the instant, \r\nthe drop, the Lilliputian planet,\r\nwith the most tender touch imaginable, \r\nangling this way and that, so that\r\nwith each angle an entire eternal history was \r\ndisplayed,\r\n                 with all of the mass and multiplicity of life.\r\n\r\nIt seemed in my dream that there was no death, \r\nbut a cottage-coziness everywhere, and of us \r\nand of the mountains and the waters, seemed \r\nthat all these are projections of personality, \r\n(what I see I see because I am I)\r\nspiritual manifestations, tilts at the dewdrop, \r\nincarnations and aspects of the All-in-all,\r\nthe anomalon itself, yes, and even that sheen,\r\nthat spark, on the oriflamme of time; seemed \r\nthat we are the one hologram of life,\r\nand that the family portrait\r\nis the portrait of all who ever lived,\r\nwith mountains and waters and creatures \r\nwild and domesticated; seemed that\r\nthe holographic plate is angled\r\nfor this simulacrum, this three-dimensional portrait \r\nof a universe-apparent, which portrait\r\nis not a memento mori but a glory\r\nin a turning in time, a journey around a star.\r\n\r\nMy dream suggested that behind my waking back \r\na deeper reality existed;\r\nnot the reality I saw before me, \r\namazing pattern that it is,\r\na life-long complicated quilt, \r\ntangible, deep in its seams,\r\nfull in its bosomy pads; but another,\r\nfiner, more heavenly, fabric, a cloth-of-gold, \r\nglorious, gorgeous, radiant beyond imagination \r\nwith a light unknown here, waves\r\nin an intensity beyond experience, \r\nyet that do no damage to the eye, \r\nlight that seems to love the eye\u2014 \r\nand that is the Word, I thought, \r\nwith new insight: Love\u2014which is \r\nexpressed in its star-stuff, its human\r\npotential, but never for good and all,\r\nfor there is more, we feel certain, we who \r\nare the stars singing, the vibratory expression \r\nof matter, tuning fork to tuning fork,\r\nthe template of interference-patterns making \r\nconcentric intersecting rings until\r\nwith perfect pitch achieved\r\nthe magical-appearing universe\r\nleaps into view\u2014until the great music \r\nis made tangible and a table and chairs \r\nand a world and a universe, full of stars \r\nto look at, from a cottage\r\nin an enchanted wood, \r\nwhere I sit, appear.\r\n\r\nWhen, like a man with warlock vision, \r\nI watch the wilted wonders of my past \r\nparade in phalanx, I dream\r\nthat I can change my present state \r\nby intervening there,\r\nwhere those wonders are and now parade, \r\nmultiplicities of self, time-separated,\r\nrude and naked strutting fools, \r\nbut now, with a maturing vision, \r\nrefreshed with vivid hope,\r\ntheir formation ordered, \r\ntheir banners held high,\r\nbecoming what they might have been,\r\nmyself in time where time must be to make a memory, \r\nand invested with new direction,\r\ncan have them at command fall out \r\nor turn about or right or left,\r\nknow they are free in paradox,\r\nnot locked forever there, in constant error\u2014 \r\nyet go on, the same, as if my will\r\nrequired my life\u2014perhaps\r\nsome missing faith, perhaps some expiation.\r\nAgain perhaps the wonders are mirage \r\nand I was born this very instant,\r\ntilted to a history and told a fate.\r\n\r\nThese reality fields are open for inspection, \r\nlike model homes, and, in an augenblick, \r\nwe are visiting an infinity of them.\r\nThey are where you are,\r\nyou need not go to see them:\r\nno agent is necessary. Intersecting \r\nconcentric rings are vibrating \r\neverything into view. The reality fields \r\npresent glories and horrors to behold: \r\nthey are moral reflections, purifying\r\nthe spirit, cleansing the dewdrop, \r\nkeeping it clear and clean, all \r\nthat I love borne with me \r\nthrough time and back out of it,\r\nthe lovelight never out, always tilting, \r\nbecoming a new vision!\r\n\r\nIII\r\n\r\nBut a Bodhisattva,\r\nor even a Beverly Hills guru, \r\nmight say, might well say, did say: \r\n\u201cDead flesh is mad with flies.\r\nThe world is mad with lies!\u201d\r\n\r\nMemory, or lucid dream?\r\nThis hologram-like universe\r\nseems solid, appears to have parts, can be \r\ntaken apart\u2014(I, too, am like a child and \r\nlove a stack of gears)\u2014so we take it apart, \r\nemotionally, mechanically, mathematically, \r\ntake it apart as children will a watch,\r\nbegin to conceive of it as a watch, as Voltaire\r\ndid (and generously gave it a Watchmaker),\r\nand become convinced that it is a kind of watch. \r\nWe lift out structures, sequences, relationships, \r\nand rearrange them, and they become to us \r\nwhat we have come to believe they are\u2014 \r\nballbearings unto infinity.\r\n\r\nAnswers generate questions in the mechanical sphere: \r\nthe universe expands, more complicates itself.\r\nWe are made to ask and so increase\r\ndimension, to multiply dimensions, to make the \r\npicture greater, more inclusive of the non-existent, \r\nto take back the ghosts and reinvest them,\r\nto live again in the mirage, to beat the golden soul \r\nso fine it floats and flutters like a translucent gauze.\r\nThe impulsion to think is part of the expansion itself, \r\nand we must think like messenger-angels,\r\nin a completeness of service, or we confuse ourselves \r\nand take the wrong turn, and miss the point\u2014\r\nshall we say the dewdrop\u2014at which \r\ncourage and intelligence and praise\r\n meet, and await us.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Biography<\/strong><\/p>\n
\"\"<\/a>
\nAuthor Self-Portrait<\/em><\/p>\n
E. M. Schorb <\/strong>attended New York University, where he fell in with a group of actors and became a professional actor. During this time, he attended several top-ranking drama schools, which led to industrial films and eventually into sales and business. He has remained in business on and off ever since, but started writing poetry when he was a teenager and has never stopped. His collection, Time and Fevers,<\/em> was a 2007 recipient of an Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Independent Publishing and also won the \u201cWriter\u2019s Digest\u201d Award for Self-Published Books in Poetry. An earlier collection, Murderer’s Day,<\/em> was awarded the Verna Emery Poetry Prize and published by Purdue University Press. Other collections include Reflections in a Doubtful I, The Ideologues, The Journey, Manhattan Spleen: Prose Poems, 50 Poems, and The Poor Boy and Other Poems.<\/em><\/p>\n
Schorb’s work has appeared widely in such journals as The Yale Review, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Chicago Review, The Sewanee Review, The American Scholar, and The Hudson Review.<\/p>\n
At the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2000, his novel, Paradise Square<\/em>, was the winner of the Grand Prize for fiction from the International eBook Award Foundation, and later, A Portable Chaos<\/em> won the Eric Hoffer Award for Fiction in 2004.<\/p>\n
Schorb has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the North Carolina Arts Council; grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the Carnegie Fund, Robert Rauschenberg & Change, Inc. (for drawings), and The Dramatists Guild, among others. He is a member of the Academy of American Poets, and the Poetry Society of America.<\/p>\n
PRIZE-WINNING BOOKS
\nBY E.M. SCHORB
\nBooks available at Amazon.com
\n_______________________________________<\/strong><\/p>\n
Dates and Dreams<\/em>, Writer\u2019s Digest International Self-
\nPublished Book Award for Poetry, First Prize<\/p>\n
Paradise Square<\/em>, International eBook Award
\nFoundation, Grand Prize, Fiction, Frankfurt Book Fair<\/p>\n
A Portable Chaos<\/em>, The Eric Hoffer Award for Fiction,
\nFirst Prize<\/p>\n
Murderer\u2019s Day<\/em>, Verna Emery Poetry Prize, Purdue
\nUniversity Press<\/p>\n
Time and Fevers<\/em>, The Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry
\nand Writer\u2019s Digest International Self-Published Book
\nAward for Poetry, each First Prize
\n 
\nvisit  www.emschorb.com.<\/a><\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
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THE DREAM SPA Lucid Dreams I The Association for the Study of Lucid Dreams summoned me to the Hotel Paradiso to participate in a study in which I was to sleep and be awakened while I was dreaming and was to maintain my dream and then to convert it into whatever dream I wished it … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[179,808,796,366,401,43],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8644"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8644"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8652,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8644\/revisions\/8652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}