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Suffering and the End of Suffering
Spring 2001   Vol. 17 #2
Spring 2001   Vol. 17 #2

Poems/Not Poems

The Dream

By Gary Turchin

 
 

 

I dreamt that I was dreaming

That I was being dreamed,

I woke to find myself asleep,

At least that’s how it seemed.

 

I couldn’t tell the day from night,

Up from down, or more,

I could not tell if I was real,

Or just some meta-phor.

Was I what I thought I was?

Was I what I Thought?

Or was my thought a web

In which my dreaming mind was caught?

 

Back and forth, back and forth,

This argument persisted:

Mirror mirror on the wall,

Of what is “Real” consisted?

 

Is it always spatial?

Does time function as a force?

And is outside of both

Inside some Mystic kind of source?

 

This puzzling and perplexing

Left me pouting and perturbed;

My subjects were now objects,

My nouns were being verbed!

 

I’ll pinch myself! That’s what I’ll do!

Prick myself to see,

If what I am perceiving

Is illusion or is me!

 

So I pinched, and pinched again,

With naught but truth to gain,

And there through my deluded state

I felt the piercing pain . . .

 

OW! I’m real, I must be “stuff,”

That pain is here to tell!

Unless, of course, it’s possible

To dream the pain as well!

 

I’m mad, I must be mad,

I cannot pierce this veil!

And all my pharmaceuticals

Have gone to no avail!

 

But one more pinch, I promise,

Once more, hard and true,

I gathered, crimped, then screamed: “Enough!”

And woke up black and blue!

 

I dreamt that I was dreaming

That I was being dreamed,

I woke and found myself AWAKE!

Least that’s how it seemed.

 

∞

 

From the Spring 2001 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 17, No. 2)
Text © Gary Turchin
Art © Marianne Kolb. Between Her and Me. Used by permission.
Artist-image

Author

Gary Turchin is a Berkeley poet who uses simple language and imagery to ponder complex, often unanswerable questions. 

Artist

Marianne Kolb is a Swiss artist living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. What she looks for in her work is "that edge, the place that really brings us to what we are all about."

Author

Gary Turchin is a Berkeley poet who uses simple language and imagery to ponder complex, often unanswerable questions. 

Artist-image

Artist

Marianne Kolb is a Swiss artist living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. What she looks for in her work is "that edge, the place that really brings us to what we are all about."

 
 
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