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Spirit Dreams is a branch of riverdream through us, wherein the masks which
function as guides for that River Sounding ceremony (and other masks) tell their
individual dream stories as a further way to enter the mind(s) of the non-human realm. This work is for recited texts (live and/or recorded), sampled sounds of the Delaware River environs initiated by a real-time complex-dynamic (fractal) computer interface program, and the singing masks, set in a context of ceremonial dream time participation by all present.
Each of my masks has a voice and it is through that voice that they tell theircstories. But the language that each speaks is different. They have dictated theircdreams to me during ceremonial-time experiences and these form the basis for Spirit Dreams' recited texts. The texts are mostly in English, but occasionally thecactual language of a mask, as it is expressed in verbal form, emerges. During the ceremony of Spirit Dreams, the masks sound their dream stories "in the moment" as the texts are recited and the river sounds occur. There are 13 stories, plus
brief introduction.
In Spirit Dreams you are invited to join the masks in their dreamings, to sleep even, and to otherwise enter your own and our collective Dream Time. You may not find all the texts to be intelligible all the time. There is no need to
feel frustration on this account. You are encouraged to suspend any preconditioned attempt to understand the words and to listen to them as sounds, the transliterations into speech of the masks' imaginings having only the meaning of music and nature's inner soundings. If you should drift toward any discomfort, your are invited to repeat this simple mantra to yourself: "This is a dream..., this is a dream..., this is a dream..."
Spirit Dreams includes references from the following sources:
- 3. Bear - Ars Poetica by Jorge Luis Borges
- 5. Harvey Lackawanna - The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet by John Blofield; Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma and Heart Sutra (traditional Buddhist texts); Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, A Book of Tarot by Rachel Pollack
- 6. Anima - Breaking Open by Muriel Rukeyser; The Far Field by Theodore Roethke; Roots and Branches by Robert Duncan
- 7. Raven - The Sefer Yetzira, The Book
of Creation, a Hebrew book of the mystic tradition, c. third-sixth centuries A.D.
- 10. Spirit of Voice in the River - Medicine Cards: The Discovery of Power Through the Ways of Animals by Jamie Sams & David Carson
- 11. Loon Spirit - The Wild Swans at Coole by W.B. Yeats
- 12. Blue Oracle - Wherever by Muriel Rukeyser; A Death in the Family by James Agee
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