Afterlives of Dreams by Sharon E. Svendsen

Art: Untitled from series Surrealutions

Afterlives of Dreams

You wake and slowly pull away
from the gauze-like
silken cocoon of your dreams.
You yawn, stretch, arise,
but the dreams live on without you—
bubbles of anti-matter
in the plasma of outer dream space.

You drove off that cliff after all
but the car floated down to land
on a barnacled beach without you,
got a flat tire and sat abandoned by the sea.

You are still running, still late
to get to your brother’s wedding
but your feet are sucked into the mud
which clings and squelches,
keeping you desperately slow.

Your dead mother—
inexplicably alive—
is still climbing into your bed.

The young man—your first love—
whom you haven’t seen for 47 years—
rides beside you on the train.
He looks out the window.

Room after room
at the convention center and
building after building
you are eternally unable
to find a toilet.

The ballerina with the black eye
is still kicking her leg out
time after time
into endless pirouettes.

Echoes in the passageway—
unfamiliar
still haunt you.

Now you press your foot down
again and again
but the brake won’t halt
the automobile.

The dark, high-walled mansion?
You know it belongs to your grandmother,
but it is nothing like her
two-story, three-bedroom house
with only one bathroom
(which you can’t find).

Now look: paralyzed with fear,
you cling to the spire at the top
of the Empire State Building.
Soon you will learn you can fly
above the city
above the heads
of family, friends, enemies,
your red-brick grade school,
your doghouse,
your very first home
with its rusty swing set,
fly above mountains, valleys,
plains, seashores, oceans, seas,
Ferris wheels
Yugoslavia
above the glittering sunlit
moonlit starlit tide-bound world.

About the author:

Sharon E. Svendsen has published fiction, articles, and over 200 poems in literary magazines and many other periodicals and anthologies. Her work has most recently been published in Defenestration, Plainsongs, Rat’s Ass Review, Feathertale #15 and #16, Spank the Carp, Decasp, Poetry Corners, and Ars Poetica. She has a BA in English with a Creative Writing Emphasis from the University of Washington.

In the artist’s words:

I am Nikolas Karathanasis, living in Athens, Greece.
My implication with photography began several years ago. I associate my work with black and white film through experiment and research; the smell of chemicals, the joy & excitement of composition. Within the past years, I work with digital photography. I have participated in several exhibitions in Greece and abroad.

Facts, pictures of everyday life, ideas, people and their passions, whatever moves in the space of exaggeration.
All this is inspirational to me. Photography, as i see it, means communication with the world and this is my motivation. I use many photographic techniques and skills to frame daily scenes and to manipulate the light so to build a bridge of communication with people, in a subtle way. This becomes a vessel for sharing ideas, thoughts and feelings. In so, we are extracted from loneliness, and create a humane environment. New perspectives for the mind to walk on, think, wonder.

The photos i send you hereby are from a project i am working since late of 2016 under the name: “Surrealism Fragments in daily life.” Captured scenes of daily life in the realm of surrealism as a result of the contrasts we face everyday at home, at work, in relationships. These are the moments when the subconscious combines the fields of reality & imaginary and visualizes images of positive emotions, anxiety, fear, hope.