I do not revere the wisdom of dreams.
Absurd, fragmentary, sexually 'inappropriate,"
they do not form cute little surrealist parables--
at most they are inane allegories of failure.
Writing them down, though,
with no apologies for these inadequacies,
as mere evidence of having slept in early hours
of the morning, I find they constitute,
over time, a chronicle of fruitful misunderstandings,
where error serves clear purposes if looked at
with a squint. Last night, for example, I dreamed
I had grown two inches in a week. taking pride
in my new height, until I awoke, not even disappointed
when I remembered this, my stature unaltered.
It is no hypocrisy, then, to write a book of dreams
while despising the dreams of other people, the whole damned
genre. The mistake is to look for beauty, coherence,
symmetry, the clarity of waking hours,
when their value lies in precisely the opposite.
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