The Ethers of Slumber

I have frequently wondered,  
paused amidst the tides of mortal thought,  
if the titanic significance of dreams  
is more than shadows of waking moments,  
more than Freud’s puerile maps of the psyche,  
more than echoes of a terrestrial dance.  
 
In dreams, perhaps,  
life and matter fracture,  
time and space dissolve like mist on the abyss,  
and the mind, unfettered,  
sojourns to ethereal worlds  
where barriers fade and silence hums.  
 
I have felt the tremors of such thoughts,  
arising from the wintry slumber  
when a figure entered my life
a repellent scion of barbaric decay,  
watery eyes dim,  
a yellow beard untamed,  
lips heavy with the weight of ignorance.  
 
This life was not life,  
but a half-slumber,  
a bovine meander through Catskill fastnesses  
where morals vanished  
and law was but the whisper of wind.  
 
Yet, in nocturnal wanderings,  
this one soared to spheres unknown.  
Ululating in drunken reveries,  
raging against a shining thing,  
a mocking blaze that danced in abysses,  
that laughed and shook  
as vows were cast to leap high and burn through  
any hindrance,  
to reach the great cabin of brightness  
with queer, distant music.  
 
Oh, these visions!  
Great edifices of light,  
oceans of vast space,  
shadowed mountains rising in grandeur,  
valleys where echoes lingered like mournful ghosts—  
and always the blazing entity,  
the laughing tormentor.  
 
Bound in strait-jackets,  
raving in words as wild  
as the primeval forests of a distant home,  
the dialect coarse,  
the imagery sublime.  
 
Dreams of abysses and soaring within them,  
burning,  
always burning through the veils  
of mortal comprehension.  
Revenge sought,  
triumphant and terrible,  
against the light that mocked,  
against the unknown that devoured.  
 
What truth lay in these ravings?  
What life was glimpsed,  
what fiery cosmos  
beyond our brittle frame?  
For such words spoke not of myths,  
nor sang the songs of men.  
These visions erupted from a place  
that no mortal book or legend could name.  
 
Thus, I sit in wonder,  
speculating on these blurred fragments,  
these shadowed memories of another life.  
Perhaps, in dreams,  
we touch a truer reality
a life more vast,  
more infinite,  
than this feeble sojourn upon the earth.