Rhythms

Five twenty AM.

Last night I heard the swoosh of swallows in my chimney. They’re back again like they are every year, and they will hang around until late fall. Another thing I notice is the same little bird is up singing an hour before dawn, so she must have insomnia. Of course, I wouldn’t know about it if my own daily rhythms weren’t a bit askew. But is it odd for a person to be attuned to sunrise and sunset each day? Yes it is, if it’s normal to have the television on every waking moment. Tv is an expense I do without. To each their own. I imagine that my life at home is something like the German peasantry two centuries ago, before electric light was invented and the people told stories to the rhythm of the night. At least it’s nice to think so. It suggests to me that schizophrenia serves an evolutionary purpose. The first books I obtained when I became ill were a version of the Arabian Nights and a complete Grimm’s. I still don’t believe these are just for children…

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Dream: Money

Wee hours.

I dreamed I was driving at night up to the Campus. But as I was crossing the Ferry Street Bridge it occurred to me that I had no coins for a parking meter, so how could I stop and get out of the car? I rounded onto Franklin Blvd and pulled into a small lot for a gas station, stopped, and got out. Then I looked in my backseat and found a few quarters at first; yet tipping the seat forward, there was a ton of silver coins: quarters and even silver dollars. I muttered to myself that I had a lot more money than I’d known. And then the dream sort of dissolved or morphed into something else. Now I can ask what the dream means, and is the money literal money or a spiritual kind of currency. Either way, it’s about the resources available to me, like an unconscious treasure, as when Hansel and Gretel find the witch’s hoard of gold and precious gems in her house in the deep dark woods. It’s also like the second part of Faust, where Mephistopheles enriches the land and people can take gold like money growing on trees. I think the silver coins in my dream are an intellectual kind of wealth because my destination was the University.