such were the images which paraded before my eyes

the realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, - not the material of my every-day existence - but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.

edgar allan poe - berenice - a tale - 1835


here began for me what i shall call the overflow of dream into real life. from this point on, everything at times took on a double aspect - without, however, my reasoning powers thereby ever lacking in logic and without my memory loosing the least detail of what was happening to me.

gérard de nerval - aurélia - 1855


balzac much admired this sublime leap of imagination which soared across intervening reality and arrived directly at the object of fantasy, regardless of all difficulties of time or place..... it was simply the intensity with which he (nerval) projected the dream, the power he had to create something beyond the limits of time or actuality; it was, so to speak, an almost tangible vision, and it was eventually to find its conclusion in his pathological hallucinations.

théophile gautier - the poet (on gérard de nerval) - 1867

(gérard de nerval - image, title)

the walls are excellent & high & upon an horizontal line

in 1795, when shirley, massachusettes, was a community of 200 shakers living on three thousand acres, an outside observer recorded, "the walls are excellent & high & upon an horizontal line, & as straight as they can be laid."

inspired by visionary experiences, the gift drawings bridge the heavenly and the earthly spheres.
...imaging heaven as a perfectly balanced array of circles, squares, and rectangles that signified walls, architectural structures, and roads (cat. 38). others depicted delicately rendered trees, fruits, flowers, and other natural forms, as well as shaker meeting houses, chairs, tables, clocks, chains, necklaces, and other human-made structures and objects, rendered more decorative than those common in daily life on earth. other gift drawings are replete with esoteric symbols, including masonic symbols such as the all-seeing eye and checkerboard patterns. gift drawings are also typically distinguished by their precise graphic quality, which links words elegantly written in upright, noble scripts with their delicately rendered visual counterparts as unified elements of thoroughly structured designs. portraying heaven as an idealized image of the earth, the gift drawings exemplified the shakers' view of their community...

images & text from shaker gift drawings and gift songs, the drawing center, ucla hammer, & university of minnesota press, 2001

view titles of images here ***

another fine book to consider:
shaker design, whitney norton - whitney museum of american art, 1986

we live, as we dream - alone...

victor hugo, the vision ship 1864-65

we penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. it was very quiet there. at night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day.

the offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky - seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

jósef teodor konrad korzeniowski (1857-1924)

victor hugo, ruined aqueduct ca. 1850

and then i see a darkness

did you know how much i love you
there's a hope that somehow you
can save me from this darkness

will oldham (1970-)

dreaming out of windows

joseph cornell's dreams

december 18, 1965:

dreaming out of windows


march 8, 1968:

surprise span of the night - going on 5 am
vs. earlier awakenings in halluc. experience...

eggs + nest converted into children


november 15, 1969:

field mouse
dream of mouse
live coals walking right into them unscathed

new book of catherine corman's anthology of dream entries from cornell's diaries, published by exact change of cambridge mass.

(forgive my multiple entries)