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Fever Dream on the Eve of Illness

Dreamed by Joyce Carol Oates, Christmas Eve, 1978 or 79?

A tower of flesh how tall it was
a honeycomb of light how tremulous it was
sheltering centipedes and basilisks
dragonflies bagworms skeletal cranes
creatures too small to be digested

"Without your blood's heat and the moist
caverns of your soul they would die:
they are your Self's selves, your illness"
what a terror it is

what a Christmas Eve

COMMENTARY

Before coming down with a prolonged illness, a form of flu, I was instructed in a dream that my body had the function of a kind of tall, warm building, a tower of flesh, that protected innumerable tiny creatures from the killing cold of the universe. My "sickness" was in fact their survival and nourishment. Though the dream did not alleviate the symptoms of the illness, it put me in a curiously tranquil, philosophical state of mind which is sometimes still available to me if I summon it back.

SOURCE: Dreamworks: an Interdisciplinary Quarterly, v.1 #2 (summer 1980), p.123.


LISTS AND LINKS: illness - body image - size matters - towers - house & home - bugs, worms & creepy-crawlies - monsters - dream poems - a second Christmas nightmare poem: Hijack! The Christmas Special - dreams provoked by Oates books: Third-Party Defense & On the Night of Change - more from Dreamworks

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