Blog — Intentions — Dantis Elementorum

Blog — Intentions Dantis Elementorum	Version	v0.1.0
Contact	dante@odyseus.ai

In the small hours of this morning, I was roused by a most peculiar dream and had to dash to the restroom. In this dream, it transpired that all art was fashioned from shit. They wrote with shit, they painted with shit, they sculpted with shit. The artists toiled in a sort of “art factory”. To commence their day’s labor, they would ingest a kind of laxative to procure material for their creations, and they donned diapers to store the shit for later use. After observing hundreds of them crafting their art, my turn came. I, too, wished to be an artist. And so, I put on my diaper, took my laxative, and awaited the result. The result, indeed, arrived, but when it manifested within me with such “realism”, all else faded away, leaving me alone with it. I awoke and ran to the bathroom.

As I lay this morning in the arms of Morpheus, I dreamed I was walking through the center of Pátzcuaro when suddenly I was overcome by an immense urge to take a shit. Such was my urge that I slipped, without asking permission, into the bathroom of a nearby business. Once seated on the toilet, I heard voices asking questions and selling things to the owner of the place, who replied laconically: “I don’t know, but you can ask the one in the bathroom”. No sooner said than done: I heard their whispers approach the door until they opened it. It was three women who had entered as if they owned the place. The matter, I thought, must be of great importance to disturb a king upon his throne.

—If you wanted to have a party, would you have it near here? —one of them asked me.

—Yes, in such cases, central locations are good —I answered, a little bewildered.

—Very well, and how many people would you invite? —she continued to question me.

—Ma’am, can’t you see I’m trying to take a shit? —I replied, annoyed by such absurd questions.

—Ladies, I can answer everything you wish outside, but for now, pray let me shit in peace —I answered for all of them.

As soon as I said that, they opened the door and began to leave. “At last, I can shit”, I thought. And as I finished saying that phrase to myself, the last of the indignant ladies slammed the door with such force that the crash woke me up. I ran to the bathroom, repeating to myself unconsciously: “At last, I can shit”.

Last night I dreamed that I was reading, with meticulous care, the questions of the Liber viginti quattuor philosophorum. They were all written in unknown languages. I remember one in particular that I guessed —within the dream itself— was a combination of German and Latin. Now I can truly say —with Xul Solar— that it has been a rather unproductive night. I have only had time to invent twelve languages.

I spend whole days reading, and my dreams are a confusion of the pages I read and of sentences constructed without order or meaning, sentences that I repeat endlessly.

Last night I dreamed I was with Ilaria Bazzea and some friends in a garden. Suddenly, we began to see on the horizon a crowd of people running towards us. Immediately after, my friends started shouting for us to get out of there, that they were coming for us. We got on a bus; Ilaria and I were left alone in the back. The bus began to accelerate and the people chasing us were banging on the windows as if they wanted us to let them in. A few seconds later I began to notice that frightening torrents of stones were floating in the air; from one moment to the next, the stones began to fly towards us, breaking windows, exploding things, and splitting skulls in their path. We managed to take refuge in a tower. The stones kept flying, destroying and killing around us. I asked if this was some known natural phenomenon and someone answered with a certain irony if it looked like it was. I noticed that the stones, after falling to the ground, would rise again and head relentlessly in different directions. If I held a stone, it would stop; but if I let it go, it would rise and go off to kill and destroy.

I fell asleep while listening to a book review. In my dream, I dedicated my life to searching for the book, guided by the description I heard in the review.

I dreamed that all my cousins had wives with extraordinary pregnancies. One had a gigantic belly, another was pregnant with old women, another had been pregnant for many years, and two others shared the same womb.

Last night I had the most worrying and desolate dream: someone was more intelligent than me.

I dreamed that Guso Macedo was boasting of having discovered a prime number larger than the Mersenne primes. He had devised the number for a fictional story and called it “lambda-2”. A mathematician read the story and verified that it was indeed the largest known prime number.

Last night I dreamed that a heavy storm caught me by surprise as I walked down Romero street. As I passed by Don Pancho’s store, I heard him shout for me to stand on top of a kind of manhole. I thought he was going to make it fly —with me on it— to get me out of the storm. Since we couldn’t see each other and the noise of the rain was intense, Don Pancho shouted, asking if I was ready. I shouted back that I was, but he couldn’t hear me. After a couple of failed attempts, I prepared to shout with all my might, but the scream came out for real and woke up my girlfriend, who then woke me up because she was frightened.

I dreamed that I met a distant relative while visiting my aunt and uncle’s house. He was from up north, friendly and extremely kind, physically similar to Ritchie Valens. I never brought myself to strike up a conversation with him beyond certain courtesies and greetings, although I once told him I liked the guitar and he just responded with a smile. After a few days, while walking down the street, I heard on the news that Jeff Beck had passed away, that legendary guitarist who had disappeared from public life decades ago, disgusted by fame and money. Taken aback, I approached one of the televisions announcing the news. Suddenly, they showed a photograph of that distant uncle who had aroused so much curiosity in me. He was precisely Jeff Beck, an already unrecognizable Jeff Beck. The next day I mentioned it to everyone in the family, and they all affirmed —without batting an eye— that they already knew this prodigious secret, this family secret. While we were having dinner, I told my dad everything, adding: “This is the strangest thing that has happened to me”¹.

I dreamed of a melody so beautiful that it brought tears to my eyes. In my dream, someone attributed it to Beethoven. I think the urge to cry woke me up slightly in the middle of the night. I made a mental note to remember it upon waking in the morning, but I forgot it completely.

As Elizabeth was telling me what she dreamed last night, we realized that always, whatever the dream, a bunch of animals —lions, crocodiles, and even dinosaurs— appear out of nowhere in her dreams.

My girlfriend often makes fun of how frequently, when I wash my hands, I cut my thumb on the faucet’s aerator (right above the nail, on the interphalangeal joint). I am rough when I wash my hands and for some reason I find sinks incredibly uncomfortable and narrow. Last night I dreamed that I got such a wound. When I tried to wash it to prevent infection, the tap water gradually eroded my finger. I could see the mutilated, bloody part that was left. With each stream of water, more of my finger fell away. My bewilderment prevented me from reacting, so I continued washing it until all my fingers were eroded. When I finally pulled my hand away, my fingers began to regenerate little by little.

I dreamed I was at my grandmother Ofelia’s house with her and my aunts. I was cleaning the patio, but I felt tired. I remember a small, iridescent puddle of water on the ground. Suddenly, someone asked me, “Why do you try so hard, if nothing matters and you’re tired on top of it?”. I replied: “For the touch of water, for the feel of stones in my hands, for the love of life, nothing more”.

I dreamed I was recording with a digital camera three extremely thin figures (with Dalí-esque limbs) dancing in the street. Then, we entered a hallway and my cousin David appeared out of nowhere, placing a microphone around my neck. He told me I was broadcasting for a radio channel. We left the hallway and arrived at the bleachers of a soccer field besieged by daylight; in the distance, a red moon could be seen, and on the bleachers, some people were watching what seemed to be a lunar eclipse. My cousin asked me to comment on the circumstances for our audience. I wondered if there was really any audience at all, and he just added, “on Sundays we have 5x our usual audience”. Suddenly, the red color of the moon began to melt into a black liquid. We watched in bewilderment as it began to evaporate like smoke. A few seconds later, a part of the moon exploded and the rest “fell”, disappearing from our sight, and everyone panicked. The fear woke me up slightly, but I still managed to see the curtain we had in front of us fall. It was a visual trick used by a Brazilian entrepreneur; the news began to repudiate him; the moon was still there, unscathed, fixed, larger than usual. I woke up completely, but I couldn’t get the image out of my head and continued to imagine a gigantic moon collapsing with the earth for a few minutes².

Last weekend I watched The Shining with Elizabeth. In it, there’s a recurring scene where a sea of blood floods a room. I think that’s why I dreamed that same night that a giant wave of black water was flooding the city. Seeing it cover the sky in front of me, I knew I couldn’t escape it, but I didn’t understand the indifferent attitude of the people around me who just seemed to be waiting patiently to die. We were at the “Catrina” gas station in Pátzcuaro when the monstrous, wine-dark sea arrived. At first, I could only see people laughing cheerfully as they were swept away by the water through the streets, but there came a point where, in the water, I could only see darkness, and the cheerful laughter of the others distorted into a frightful, unisonous guffaw.

My strange obsession with El Estepario Siberiano’s videos has led me to dream that I was playing drums for an improvised band. My additional obsession with Miles Bonham has led me to dream that I was also singing in tune. In my dreams, I tried to memorize a simple melody I was able to play, but, as always, I forgot it upon waking.

Lately, it has been recurrent for me to “program” during the hypnagogic stage of my dreams, the one Dalí so often alluded to as a catalyst for his work. Last night, for example, I did some “debugging” in my sleep, but I barely remember how I reasoned about the code I was writing. Also in my sleep, on November 11, I visualized the exact place in my codebase where I should insert the lines that would minimize the perceived latency produced by the phone bot when responding. Upon waking, I added the code, ran the program, and it worked (although it required some additional refinement, naturally). Before that, there were days when I had nightmares where I was encoding and decoding audio bytes. It’s a bit like when I spent months reading Borges, and I would dream of fragments of his texts, pages of books, and nonsensical oneiric literature.

I dreamed that I went to a cartoon-themed park set in the 1800s. Inside the place, there were cobblestone streets, small castles, and peculiar little houses. The park was so crowded that lonely, wealthy people had begun to buy houses inside the park to live in them. When visitors strolled near their houses, or stood and stared at them, the lonely inhabitants would come out and try to forcibly strike up conversations with the visitors. When one of those ladies wanted to talk to me, I tried to walk away, but she followed me, so I quickened my pace until I could lose her and the lady had to settle for chasing someone else who was walking by.

Last night and the night before, I dreamed of fascinating melodies. I could remember both upon waking and tried to look them up on the Internet, but I don’t think they belong to real songs. Nor do I know how to communicate them precisely or what to do with them. Inexorable time will deliver them to oblivion.

I don’t quite know what I was dreaming about before I woke up, but it was some premise similar to what I thought as soon as I came to my senses: there exist in the world subtle artifacts that humans have devised for the purpose of socializing. For example, home grills, whose ultimate goal is to bring people together and not really to prepare exquisite dishes.

I dreamed I was in my room at my parents’ house. I could hear my dad’s music coming from the living room: In Church by M83.

It has been a week marked by the following pattern: night sweats, talking in my sleep, and waking up with a song in my head. The songs I remember are Let Me Down Easy by Harriot, (I think) Love Proceeding by BADBADNOTGOOD, and New Woman by Rosalía (thanks, Elizabeth).

I dreamed of another of those unknown melodies that wake me up melancholic. It was similar to Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt.

I dreamed I was having a conversation. Upon waking, I firmly believed the dream was a continuation of a real conversation I had had. Later I was able to verify that it was never real.

I also dreamed that a giant rat was approaching me. The disgust made me jump in bed and I woke up in mid-air. I couldn’t go back to sleep.

I dreamed I was witnessing events that had never occurred. By casually mentioning one of those false anecdotes to another person, however innocent, I caused severe harm in the lives of those involved.

On the night of December 30, I went to bed thinking of Sweet Thing by Chaka Khan. I woke up with Distant Love by nginafayola in my head. In the evening, What Goes Around Comes Around by Timberlake came to mind while I was thinking about I don’t remember what. In the morning I heard That’s All for Everyone by Fleetwood Mac. I thought I remembered that Bradford Cox, in one of his bands, had sampled it, so I dedicated an unworthy amount of time to trying to find out where. I haven’t been successful, and I suspect this is all a mental muddle caused by the strange similarity between that Fleetwood Mac song and Deerhunter’s style.

I dreamed I was trying to solve a polynomial equation where the coefficients were chess pieces. So, for example, instead of factoring, I had to make mathematical “moves”: simplifying the equation involved taking the game to its endgame, eliminating pieces so that only those essential to deciding the match remained on the “board” (i.e., in the equation).

Before that, in the evening —already tired— I read “Calderón” for “Glaucón” in Aristotle, and for a moment I daydreamed that, in his all-encompassing intellect, Aristotle had come to deliberate on Spanish Golden Age literature.

Last night I slept, dreamed, and woke up listening to Danny Carey’s drumming in my head⁵.

This morning, Noé reminded me of Borges’ The Circular Ruins and I had to reread it because I had forgotten it completely. On the story’s Wikipedia page, besides misinterpreting Evelyn Fishburn’s brilliant article (by ignoring its most important findings, namely the precise nights and editions that Borges read, proving they were not “imaginary”) on the “circular” night of The Thousand and One Nights, reference is made to the “gray man” of the story. I didn’t remember that frequency of grayish characters in Borges either. A short time later, I took a nap.

During the nap, I dreamed I was in my parents’ kitchen, explaining to them a dream I had a long time ago. In that dream, I had heard the word “secturnial” for the first time. I spoke of Gogol as the father of modern Russian literature, and recounted how I had consulted writer friends and dictionaries to verify if that word was real or not. Then, I hesitated and failed to remember exactly in what context I had used the expression “the secturnial men of Gogol” to refer to the characters in his literature. After offering them two or three different interpretations of the term, I concluded that I had definitely used it to describe the anonymous characters, the “gray” characters of Gogolian literature.

Upon waking, I wanted to verify that interpretation. On my Facebook, I read the only record I have of that dream, dated December 9, 2020:

“Last night I dreamed that Bruno Kaz⁶ wrote a story where he referred to ‘the secturnial men of Gogol’. What could that oneiric word ‘secturnial’ mean?”

In short: I never knew what “secturnial” meant, so I decided to simply associate the word with the oneiric. But my dreams, which perhaps have a more legitimate competence —“competence” understood in a legal sense— over that term, have wanted it to mean something else. In any case, I do not intend to change the title under which I write these dreams, as it seems to me that, in any case, it fits both interpretations: dreams about other dreams, dreams about fleeting, fictitious, unknown, gray people. Dreams of life and death. Dreams where, as in our world, things are made of dreams, and where life is completed with other dreams. Circular dreams. Secturnial tales.

I dreamed I was a child and fell off a trampoline. When I got up, I noticed that none of the other children in the park could hear me. A group of men —whom I later guessed were ghosts— walked past me and, when I asked them if I was dead, they replied: “They —the children jumping in the park— will let you know”. Since none of them responded to my calls, I assumed I had indeed died. Afterward, I accompanied the ghosts to a cabin near the sea. We watched the children play in the garden.

One afternoon, I fell asleep while listening to a talk by Ernesto Castro on praxeology. I dreamed I was walking down a desolate street where the surrounding buildings had loudspeakers through which Ernesto’s voice could be heard, speaking of catallactics.

I dreamed I traveled to the past and got stuck in a single day: I lived it over and over again.

I dreamed I had just woken up and saw through the window a gigantic wave approaching. I asked what it was and a stranger casually replied: “A tsunami, isn’t it obvious?”.

I dreamed I woke up after having slept for a long time. I had slept so long that I couldn’t remember who I was. I was in a small room in a building, and next to the bed was a nightstand with a small white cloth on it. On top of the nightstand was a phone book: I saw a couple of names in it, I reviewed them carefully, going through them one by one and thinking “I’m not this one, not this one, not this one… well, let’s see…”. Having said that, I got out of bed to look out the window. I saw other people passing by, watching them, trying to figure out if any of those people passing by was me.

I woke up listening to Red Ink by Deerhunter, then I started researching the band and came across Bradford Cox’s strange and now-defunct blog. His description of Twilight at Carbon Lake, my favorite Deerhunter song: “I wanted this song to evoke the melancholy of childhood”.

I dreamed I woke up startled from a dream. A woman beside me asked if I was okay and I, confused, answered that I was. Then I went back to sleep and the same thing happened, but each time I woke up at a different age, next to a different woman, and in a different room. This happened three or four times, until I decided to get up and go to the bathroom to wash my face⁷.

I don’t know if I dreamed anything, but the other day I got up to go to the bathroom at night and fell asleep sitting on the toilet. I woke up as my head nodded off.

In my childhood, for a long time I had a recurring dream of a “swordsman” (a warrior with a helmet) entering my room and pointing his sword at my neck. I always woke up startled.

Stevenson: “This is the strangest thing that befell between two seas”.↩︎
Yesterday I saw the movie Melancholia and it reminded me of this dream. A horrendous planet stalking the earth and finally collapsing into it are scenes very similar to those in my dream (in the Mubi reviews there are continuous references to the film’s “aesthetics”. It is the aesthetics of the horrendous, the dreadful, the effroyable); likewise, the Las Vegas sphere that is in vogue today is similar to the “curtain” in my dream. I had my “Déjà vu” dream before seeing the movie Groundhog Day, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold before seeing Beetlejuice. Sometimes it’s disappointing that the entropy of human ideas is so low or, in more Borgesian terms, that the number of possible intonations for our metaphors is minuscule. Similarly, it’s disappointing how difficult it is to get an LLM to generate content outside of the distribution, or at least in the tails of the distribution; but my dreams are a testament that the same happens with humans, and social media is the most patent and lamentable evidence of this.↩︎
The reference, of course, is to Buddy Guy. I also thought of Mid Air by Paul Buchanan, but the feeling of that song is certainly far from that of this dream. At least Buddy Guy —albeit for other reasons— also gives me a start.↩︎
I initially thought of Geto Boys, but I’ll add a well-deserved mention of the good Flow Breezy.↩︎
Danny was in a band (The Wild Blue Yonder) with Jeff Buckley (!). John Humphrey published some tracks from when Buckley was no longer part of the band, but he has video recordings of this band that he has refused to make public. Danny recounts that he used to play Led Zeppelin songs with Jeff at his house and attributes to him a “photographic musical memory”. He has also mentioned that he has recordings of when he played with Buckley and some drum programming that Jeff prepared for Grace, but he has not yet made them public either.↩︎
A Colombian friend and writer, he has published some of his stories on his blog Esjatológico and on this other page. I seem to recall that Bruno liked the play on the double etymology of esjatológico (eschatological/scatological). I have in my possession a draft of Basado en desechos reales (“Based on actual wastes”), an unpublished collection of his stories. I haven’t been in touch with Bruno for years, but I’m making a mental note to ask him to publish it.↩︎
As far as this experience is concerned, the distinction between dream and reality is blurred due to the effect of a certain psychotropic plant ingested in the form of a brownie. On that same occasion, I remembered things from my childhood that I had decided to forget (from mental patterns I followed to fall asleep, to the appearance of shadows on the ceiling of my room, to traumatic experiences). I have not consumed any psychotropics since then, nor do I have any desire to do so.↩︎