Night Dreamer

The Meteor of 1860, by Frederic Church

It’s late, and I have some miscellaneous thoughts kicking around in my head.

Here it is, my detritus, as free-association:

—–

Quotation #1: Tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, as quoted in a recent interview on National Public Radio:

“For me, the word jazz means ‘I dare you.'”

—–

Quotation #2: Coleman Andrews, founding editor of Saveur Magazine, as quoted in the September/October 1995 article, “Secrets of Vieux Nice”:

“Cuisine, like language, changes as long as its alive.”

I thought: just like jazz.

—–

My favorite Wayne Shorter album is the 1964 quintet recording, “Night Dreamer”. The centerpiece of the album is a lovely, premonitory minor-key blues entitled, “Armageddon”.

—–

For years now, I have been dreaming about tornados. In my “tornado dreams”, I am on a rooftop, or somewhere high on a lookout, when a series of churning, black storm clouds approaches, followed by funnel clouds which sweep across the landscape, eating everything in their path. The dreams are scary, and thrilling. I frequently tell Becky about these dreams. She is scared of tornados. I have never seen one in person.

A few weeks ago, I lamented to Becky that I never had any dreams about meteor impacts. Meteors fascinate me, although I have never seen a real shooting star, either. It seems to me that it would be very exciting to see a bolide streak across the sky, at least once. If I never see one, I said at the time, I would at least like to dream about seeing one, now and again.

About a week later, I experienced a “meteor dream”, in which I was walking on a bridge, and saw two meteors blaze across the sky overhead. There was a series of bright flashes, then a thunderclap which cause the bridge to sway underneath my feet. It was pretty scary stuff.

—–

Yesterday, a massive meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, exploding with the force of twenty Hiroshima bombs. It was the largest celestial impact in over a hundred years. I read that some of the live witnesses thought that the world was coming to an end.

The bolide, as captured on video, looked very much like it did in my dream. I swear it did.

—–

Quotation #3: Helen Keller, discussing her dreams:

“My dreams have strangely changed during the past twelve years. Before and after my teacher first came to me, they were devoid of sound, of thought or emotion of any kind, except fear, and only came in the form of sensations. I would often dream that I ran into a still, dark room, and that while I stood there, I felt something fall heavily without any noise, causing the floor to shake up and down violently; and each time I woke up with a jump. As I learned more about the objects around me, this strange dream ceased to haunt me … I began to dream of objects outside of myself.”

—–

While attempting to read about Charlie Parker’s composition, “Koko”, I somehow ended up reading instead about Koko the Gorilla, who uses sign language to communicate. Before Koko, researchers taught an orphaned Silverback Gorilla named Michael to use sign language, although Michael’s vocabulary was limited to about six hundred words.

Michael’s handlers recounted that he would often attempt to relate his memories of his mother’s death at the hands of poachers, and that he would do so most urgently after waking from a nap. His handlers therefore concluded that Michael was experiencing recurring nightmares of his mother’s death.

—–

Whether we dream of things seen or unseen, I guess we all have unsettling dreams sometimes.