A Poet's Journal: March ?, 2014

March ?, 2014

I have never been one to believe dreams hold such a power over an individual that they could change his perception of reality or even the memory of past events.  They are nonetheless fascinating symbols of the mind, but rarely give us enough matter for thought in our waking hours.  However, it was only this morning that I confused a very deep and vivid dream for the real-life memory of one held in common with another.

I found myself one pleasant day at a small tower that had been a part of a now ruined castle not far from the city where I was living.  Inside this tower, which had been completely renovated and was now situated in a finely kept park, was the public library of the district.  All of the books were neatly set-up and easily accessible considering the small circular space of the tower; but there was one part which had to be accessed by a ladder put there for that purpose; and once in this crawl space, which was only of a height for someone to lean on his elbow, the books were aligned in shelves one after the other, from which one could only pass his arm and take whatever came into his reach.  There were of course many books that one could not get to, and this was nonetheless disconcerting, causing my arms and legs much strain in trying to figure out how I could reach the last rows.  My effort did not last long however; instead I succeeded in finding a rather comfortable position, lying alongside one of the shelves with my head propped against a window-sill, from which I took whatever book came under my hand and spent the remainder of time in reading.

After a while though I returned and met the person who accompanied me outside on a bench and felt such a deep tranquility at the sight of the tower and the park that I agreed to return as much as possible to this place.  Of course once we were back home the idea slipped my mind and days and weeks passed and I forgot all about the tower.  This morning I ventured to bring it up again and asked that same person if they would accompany me.  After much doubt and many questions though I found that tower and that park to be only a delusion from my dream the night before, and even when I came to realize it, I still thought they both existed somewhere, in a place I was forgetting, in a part of the city that we had not been to in so long that our memory of it was somehow deceiving us, but of course it was of no use.  Strangely, I do not feel disillusioned even now, only older, as someone who has matured in an eternal and endless breath of time, and the fact that that place does not exist has now become a reason for me to believe that it was at one time true.

Douglas Thornton