Word: dreaming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hole in the sky." Glennis Yeager (Barbara Hershey) tells husband Chuck (Sam Shepard) before he lowers himself into his cockpit. Yeager sets off and does break a record, and immediately afterwards he allows his plane to veer from its rigid course and weave through the sky, passing unusually dream-like cloud formations. The scene lacks only the requisite cigarette. It's a solo experience, without doubt, and each pilot displays a not unattractive narcissism. "Who's the best pilot you ever saw?" one asks his wife again and only to answer himself with a simple...
Some authors inescapably suggest animals: Hemingway is a lion, Tolstoy a bear, Colette a cat. Anthologist Stephen Brook is a crow. For The Oxford Book of Dreams he has ranged over four millenniums and most of the dry surfaces of the globe in search of recorded visions. The result is a nest of glittering curiosities, some of rare value, others plucked from the dustbin of history, where they belonged. Moreover, although the collection offers hundreds of entries, it also has inexcusable gaps. The dreams of Pharaoh's servants are here, interpreted by Joseph, but they represent one-half...
Despite this disproportion, The Oxford Book of Dreams is an irresistible sampler. Reading Artemidorus (circa A.D. 150) is like eavesdropping in the imperial marketplace: "Someone dreamt that he had an iron penis. He fathered a son who killed him. For iron is consumed by the rust that it produces from itself." Freud's claim that the ancient Greeks had sensed what he had systematized is borne out by eerie resonances. In Aeschylus' drama, Orestes describes a snake "as though human ... its gaping mouth clutching the breast that once fed me ... it then mingled the sweet milk with curds...
What the anthology lacks in depth it more than makes up in breadth. The collected figments venture from Homer: "Two gates for ghostly dreams there are: one ... of honest horn, and one of ivory" to John Updike: She repeated her dream "at breakfast. He was moved, beholding his daughter launched into another dimension of life, like school. He was touched by her tiny stock of imagery." Throughout, Brook is keenly aware of the terror and distress that reside in dreams: his categories include Nightmare, Violence, the Absurd and Frustrations. Together they should engender enough insomnia for a lifetime. Instead, precisely...
...become in effect a second librettist. These show doctors have made some startling alterations: Jonathan Miller updated Rigoletto as a '50s Mafia love story; Patrice Chereau set the Ring during the turbulence of the industrial revolution; Jean-Pierre Ponnelle WIDE WORLD played The Flying Dutchman as the phantasmagorical dream of one of its minor characters. Most radical of all is Peter Brook's La Tragédie de Carmen, first seen in Paris in 1981 and due to open in New York City this month. Brook's version is a rewriting of Bizet, the music cut, rescored...