Three years ago, I began a strange experiment—strange even for a poet. For nine months, I seeded my dreams with recorded poetry from Harvard University’s audio archive, then tried to capture the resulting dreams on the page. I called the project Dreamfall.
I relied on Dormio, a targeted dream incubation device from the MIT Media Lab. Worn like a glove, the device’s sensors tracked my descent into hypnagogia, the borderland between waking and sleep, where thoughts give way to hallucinatory imagery. As I crossed that threshold, Dormio played a prerecorded prompt (in this case, the crackling voice of a poet).
Minutes later, it would sound a gong and begin recording, and I would groggily recount my dream before it could fade from memory. Read more: “Faulty Memory Is A Feature, Not A Bug” So why spend nine months falling asleep to the voices of dead poets? About twenty years ago, I developed a binocular vision disorder that makes it difficult to coordinate my eyes as they travel across a printed page.
I was exiled from the immersive pleasure of reading. But dreaming seemed to offer a remarkably close analogue: imaginative flight while the body remains motionless, save for the eyes flicking from left to right. If I programmed my dreams with literature, could I find a back door into the lost world of books?
When I spoke with Nautilus in 2023, I had no idea what my experiment would yield. The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires, a collection of stories drawn from those dreams, is now out from Etruscan Press. One story, “A Sunset-Touch,” excerpted below, was seeded by a recording of Jorge Luis Borges lecturing at Harvard in 1967.
Borges became director of Argentina’s National Library just as his eyesight failed. Yet he continued to lecture extemporaneously around the world, drawing on the library he carried in his memory. He once described writing as “a guided dream.” More than a half century after his Harvard lectures, I fed his voice into Dormio and tested his claim.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
