Dream, baby, dream

10 things worth sharing this week

A newspaper popup, 2015

Hey y’all,

I could sense the veil thinning this week. My oldest turns 13 tomorrow. (!!!) I’m ready for cake, baseball, and pumpkin carving. Entering into the spirit.

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing:

1. Your responses to Tuesday’s question, “What do you do with your dreams?” led me down all sorts of rabbit holes, from artists playing with the hypnagogic state, to the brain’s nightly cleanse, to this video of a Windows 95 screen defragging a hard drive.
   
   

2. “When we wrong the dream, we wrong the soul.” Mandy Brown on James Hillman’s The Dream and the Underworld.

   
   

3. A dreamy, autumnal pizza night blockbuster: We loved Over The Garden Wall, a 2014 animated series about two brothers who get lost in the woods. I passed on it for years because I thought it’d be too spooky for the kiddos and we don’t really watch TV shows for pizza night. Mistake! Great for all ages (7+) and you can watch the 10 episodes in under 2 hours, like chapters in a feature-length movie. I know now why people watch it every fall, like It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. (Last year Aardman Animation released a stop-motion short to celebrate the 10th anniversary.)
   
   

4. “Fairy tales… are useful for everyone, and not just for the dreamer.” I’m reading a gorgeous reissued edition of Gianni Rodari’s The Grammar of Fantasy: An Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories with illustrations by Matthew Forsythe. (I’m a long-time fan — I actually own the original painting of the hippo in the book!) I first heard about it from Mac Barnett’s review in the NYTimes. Read more about Rodari and his idea of “the fantastic binomial” — or, the creatively fruitful combination of two seemingly unrelated words — in The Marginalian.
   
   

5. Ever since I learned about the Kuleshov effect, I’ve loved thinking about the art of juxtaposition and the special connection between films and dreams. “The dream and the film are the juxtaposition of images in order to answer a question,” says David Mamet in On Directing Film. Films are “images that dance the same way every time the film is projected, but which kindle different dreams in the mind of each beholder,” says Walter Murch in In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing.
   
   

6. “I think he came out of the womb an editor.” That’s the delightful film editor Thelma Schoonmaker on her long-time collaborator, Mr. Scorsese. The 5-episode “story behind the storyteller” miniseries got me wanting to fill in the gaps in my Scorsese viewing, like The Age of Innocence and A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. The needle drops also got me listening to a bunch of the Stones — especially the perfect side 3 of Hot Rocks. (My personal favorite Scorsese movies, btw, are Goodfellas, The Last Waltz, and Italianamerican.)
   
   

7. To escape the nightmare of the news, I’ve been making a bunch of collages while listening to Ian McKellen read The Odyssey. I think of collage as a kind of daydreaming with your hands: like a film editor or a dreaming brain, you’re pushing one image up against another to make a third thing.
   
   

8. “The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality.” Ann Friedman reminds us: “Frankenstein is a perfect spooky-season book, and it’s thin enough to read over the course of a mostly-indoor weekend. Bonus: It’s in the public domain and therefore free.”
   
   

9. A poem to read out loud: James Tate’s “Dream On.”

   
   

10. Your assignment this week: “Keep them dreams burning, baby.” Don’t give up on your dreams, and don’t let your dreams give up on you.
    
    Here’s Werner Herzog in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams:

    “If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams. And I don’t want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project. It’s not only my dreams. My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. And the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about. It’s as simple as that. And I make films because I have not learned anything else and I know I can do it to a certain degree. And it is my duty, because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. And we have to articulate ourselves otherwise we would be cows in a field.”

    Or: “Hold fast to dreams / For when dreams go / Life is a barren field / Frozen with snow.”

Thanks for reading. My condolences to the Mariners. Beware, Dodgers: If there’s one thing I know from watching the owls in my back yard, it’s that Blue Jays will annoy you to no end. 🦉⚾️

One more thing: I’m doing a Substack live with Priya Parker (author of The Art of Gathering) this coming Monday, October 27 at 11 AM central. We’re going to talk about the creative potency of jokes, silly rituals, pranks, and goofing around. Should be a good warm-up for trick-or-treating. (No need to do anything: just put it on your calendar, and you’ll get an email when we go live.)

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xoxo,

Austin

P.S. It was like a dream come true to make this ad for the back page of my next book: