Link Rodeo

Brad Zellar

March 21, 2005

Gogol’s last words: ‘A ladder, quick, a ladder!’

—Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies

I’ve never been able to sleep like a normal person, and I literally could count the number of dreams I remember in my lifetime on one hand. This last week, however, I’ve been trying a new medication, and experiencing the sort of sleep I like to call crocodile-skimming –I feel like I’m almost completely submerged, but there’s a small part of my mind that just keeps bobbing right at the surface between consciousness and unconsciousness. I do, though, have little bursts where I actually go all the way under, and these episodes have been marked by vivid dreams, most of which I can’t remember. Last night — I’m certain influenced by something I read in the above-mentioned Canetti book– I had a dream in which I was hiding from a god who did not create humans, but rather captured them. This morning I went through the portion of the book I had read last night but could find nothing that would have obviously triggered such a dream; so maybe, in fact, it really is just a case of my unconscious mind finally –after forty years– getting a chance to strut its stuff.

Also, here’s an assortment of links that have been backing up on me. Consider it a sort of online gallery crawl: