A dream: It’s Saturday night in America. The grinning and euphoric American Night sings and turns with the real machine action. This is naturally contrasted by the northern Michigan night filling with 18 inches of snow. Spring is coming through somewhere out there. It must be warming up way out west with desert cactus blossoms and close stars in a blue night sky. I stand at the edge of the land where white pines line the drive. Then I imagine the inter-urban night while holding my palms up; my left toward Detroit and the right palm for Chicago. Musical atmospherics and soul influences stream my way at half the speed of sound.
After a few counts I can feel the impressions pouring in. When I see my hands I know that I am dreaming. This intent between dream and life blends music with light from I-94, high-speed train headlights and the glow of false dawn. Emotions, music, art, people I’ve met and people I never will meet are talking, dreaming, looking and loving. My palms are sending and receiving a thousand impressions and messages in a dreaming moment. My awareness extends from the Fox Theater and the abandoned Michigan Central Depot in Detroit to the Congress Theater and Union Station in Chicago.
Then I jump back and return to the end of winter. Get back to where I’m at; the northwoods and their woniya waken wind through the needles of sheltering white pines. I gather fuel from nature; a boost from the thawing earth to gather impulse for my next trip to the cities and their possibilities.
Its Saturday night. The great rolling American night is back! It’s gathering momentum, allure, velocity like a night train leaning into a hyper-elevated curve to the JB’s rhythm section. I bet its warming up somewhere way out West. Desert cactus blossoms breeze across an empty highway.
I feel these resonances pouring in, bringing me golden light, melon-red variations of sunset and loads of violet stillness from the music and faces.
It’s a dream awareness spanning like a bridge from the Michigan Central Depot and the Fox Theater in Detroit on the left hand to the Congress Theater and Union Station on Chicago right. From the Ambassador bridge to the bridge at North Avenue. Bridges are a path from one life to another.
Then I jump back to myself. Get back to where I’m at; the northwoods with a night breeze moving through pine needles. Back with the woniya waken – the holy air. Back to a place in nature where renewal is unstoppable and where new adventures are dreamt and boldly begun. Adventures which sometimes end with fatigue and a hunger for that natural silence.
Up in the snowy northwoods, dangling eagerly at the end of winter, standing at the edge of the driveway and at the edge of the night: I want to go again.
Closing my eyes and feeling a spray of energy. Seeing words, names, faces, the mystery of man and woman, a black Cadillac passing, reflecting music and city lights. Dreaming again later; hearing music from the past become the music of the future. I know I’ll be hearing that music in my dreams tonight. I’ll seek it out; the sounds that wake me to the realization that I’m dreaming. A deja vu of notes and tunnels, so many tunnels to the false dawn and the human wilderness of the city.
tornadogreen 