Featured Post

BFRC

I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Monday, October 22, 2018

Dream of Cymbals and Drums

Three small white girls have lost their parents. A Chinese family finds them and takes them in. It is too dangerous to call the police. They eventually take the girls back to China, where the girls learn how to be expert merchants in the Chinese style.

There is a cymbal with four Chinese characters written on it. They represent a rhythmic displacement of some kind, a syncopation that makes things more interesting. One of the girls, grown up now, has a music store. I walk in looking for a drum on which to play flamenco rhythms, and I see various devices. One turns out to be just a metronome, the shape and size of one of those old floppy disks. I see another one, though, that is both a metronome and an electronic drum, that you can play on on one side.

Still within the dream, I am impressed with this story and sit down to write it at a desk. There is a pad of paper there and I can write it with a fountain pen, I decide.

5 comments:

Jonathan said...

I was more impressed when I was having the dream than I am now. It was very powerful emotionally and had the lucidity of a well-crafted short-story. My summary was not able to capture that.

Leslie B. said...

It is an amazing dream. Why are you less impressed now?

OT I am about to hatch a seminar, global Lorca, sort of on the idea of global Shakespeare but more modest -- just trying to look at him in the context of world modernisms, and look at his world impact, instead of locating him only as a "Peninsular" author.

Jonathan said...

Great Lorca idea. He has a considerable presence in the Arab world, for example.

Jonathan said...

And maybe I should be impressed by my own dream! I just felt I couldn't write it up adequately.

Leslie B. said...

Arab world, yes, good point. The dream seems like a masterpiece.