poesie – i dream myself alive

Awake I know I dream not

As the sense still alive

Tells what is seen is not

A fancy but a reality alive

Of the wonder of the mind

Working wonders of creation

Of a fiction of the mind

In a mind’s reservoir. 

Awake I think when I dream

As the pulses of sense weaken

And the images seen past seem

All but phantasmal panorama seen

In a mind’s theater of illusion – 

Fantastic beasts, wailing ghosts

Enveloped in the cloud of dreams

Lurking in the stupor of the sense. 

Awake, awake, awake I become

When the sense divorces fancies

As the mind calls dreams hokum

And claims a seat of imaginations

Till it clears the clouds of ignorance

Darkening the light of the mind wondrous

Of creating the reality of its sovereign own

With no assistance of chants and spells. 

P.S.: Thomas Hobble (1588-1679), an English scientist and philosopher, excoriates in his essay “You and Your Dreams” the knavery of sham magicians and magical folk claiming to deal with supernatural beings to induce naive people to believe in superstitions and the power of magic for the promotion of their trades. Hobble enlightens readers that superstitions arise out of the ignorance of distinguishing imaginations, a second-hand reality, from dreams, a detritus of agitated part of the mind. The gist of his argument is that ghosts and haunted places ensue from an intractable combination of the images of the seen and the second-hand images that become distorted imaginations made look real.  In sum, Hobble’s theory of dream interpretation corresponds to the postmortem dream theories of Carl Jung. Hence this poem is my understanding of Hobble’s essay on the aforesaid subject.