Tag: Dreams

The Dead Don’t Dream

by Ebb Then Flood

‘The Dead Don’t Dream’

This post is inspired by the title of the latest album by Finnish jazz trumpeter Verneri Pohjola,‘The Dead Don’t Dream’.

I have come across Pohjola’s amazing modern music quite recently and have been mightily impressed by what I have heard.

The musician was talking about the making of the album (dreaming it into existence as he termed it) and remarked that “it’s about embracing life in all of its complex emotions, while we still have it … after all, the dead don’t dream”.

He nailed it for me with that statement.

To live is to truly engage, and to dream. You may as well be dead otherwise.

You can listen to the tune behind the thoughts below (via YouTube):

Now To Spread Yer Wings

by Ebb Then Flood

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‘Now To Spread Yer Wings’                                                                    April 2020

 

If, right now, you more time than usual to contemplate your lockdown self, consider this:

“You were born with potential. You were born with goodness and trust. You were born with ideals and dreams. You were born with greatness. You were born with wings. You are not meant for crawling. So don’t. You have wings. Learn to use them and fly”.

– Rumi

(and try not to shit on others from great heights when you get there)

   .

 

I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night

by Ebb Then Flood

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It has been a week of vivid and bizarre dreams for me, some nightmarish.

Perhaps coming off antidepressant medication has something to do with it , as that is an apparent side effect.

At any rate, the surreal shit of my dreamland continues apace.

You couldn’t make it up and you certainly can’t control it.

I’ll wake up from one weird episode and then plunge straight into another one, and so it continues till the dawn.

Deep REM sleep is supposed to be beneficial; maybe, but it is bemusing also.

I don’t even try to analyse the nocturnal art house cinema I am being served up involuntarily on a nightly basis.

What would be the point, really?

But I do have the ideal soundtrack to it all:

The Electric Prunes’s “I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night”. A thoroughly groovy 1960’s garage/psychedelic rock classic.

YouTube link below. Stick this in your pipe dream and smoke it, good people!

    “I’m not ready to face the light…I had too much to dream last night”

 

 

Castle On The Cheap Side

by Ebb Then Flood

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Faded grandeur on Auckland’s Dominion Road.

Faux castle battlements above the proud name,’Cheapside’.

Peeling grey paint.

A bit down at the heel maybe.

Probably not the future imagined at the laying of its foundations.

But still standing,useful and with purpose after the best part of a century.

Some of us are like this battling building, battered but not broken(alliteration alert!).

And still dreaming of being castles…

 

The Boat House

by Ebb Then Flood

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A shot of a boat house sitting serenely over water near my Auckland home.

I am not a boatie or sailor by any stretch of the imagination ,but I admire those who cast off from shore,voyaging ,for adventure on the sea.

So this place appeals to me.

It is by appearance a simple,linear design,with utilitarian function.Boats are stored inside and launched from it.

But it is also the departing place for courage and dreams and happiness, and that makes it magical.

 

Entangled

by Ebb Then Flood

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“Sentenced to drift far away now

nothing is quite what it seems

sometimes entangled

in your own dreams “

– ‘Entangled’,Genesis (1976)

I listened to this old prog rock song for the first time in years in the last week, and took the photograph about the same time.

I am not sure whether the song and its lyrics influenced the shot, but certainly not consciously.Maybe though at some weird unconscious level in the way that music does,evoking a mood or place.

The album the number comes from was one of the first I ever purchased .I drift back in time and see myself as a geeky 14 year old reading the lyrics intently from the beautiful cardboard gatefold  cover, while the vinyl record spun on the rudimentary turntable in my bedroom. I played that disc countless times(entranced with ‘Entangled’!)

I was a bit of a dreamer as a teenager and the music took me back in an instant to my younger self.

So too the tangled tree branches in their veined pattern,to some more recent troubled and nightmarish times.

All is dream.