Where I'm From, Where I'm At and Where I'm Going
Spilling the tea on the origin of Dream Weaver, as well as what you can expect as regular guests of this site, with a brief note on creative avenues I might wish to explore down the line.
The Full Monty
The Why
The name "Dream Weaver" comes from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who, in a 1986 New York Times interview, described his profession thus: "I am a man of letters. I am not sure I have thought anything in my life. I am a weaver of dreams." In one simple metaphor, Borges eschews reason and affirms the sublime, the inexplicable, and the magical as the ultimate impetus behind his art.
A thematically similar moment of quiet literary power occurs in the pages of Neil Gaiman's magnum opus, The Sandman. Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, asks a young 'Will Shaxberd', "Would you write great plays? Create new dreams to spur the minds of men? Is that your will?" to which the bard unequivocally replies, "It is." Morpheus then takes him aside, away from the reader's prying eyes. "Then let us talk", he declares. Once this conversation concludes, 'Shaxberd' becomes the Shakespeare now beloved the world over.
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In my mind, Gaiman furnished the space that Borges opened up with his elliptical remarks, sparking the conception of what would eventually become Dream Weaver, a way to connect my identity as a storyteller with a higher imaginative force that binds us as human beings to the world we inhabit. Art as collective spirituality, if you will. The dreams being woven in this case might be my own, but I want to intimately connect them with those of my readers and contemporaries. This is a site for those who believe in the primal power of creativity to move the mountains of the soul, shatter and rebuild perspective, challenge orthodoxy, transcend the senses and expand our own individual universe. If my earnest, unabashed celebration of culture in all its forms leads you to find the poetry nestled within your own life, then I will have done my job. Like Penelope in the Odyssey, as long as there are interested suitors, I shall keep weaving my tapestry.
P.S. Yes, I know she wove a funeral shroud in the original text, but that doesn't sound nearly as cool lmao
The What
Dream Weaver is essentially a continuous, mutable meditation on the cultural landscape, as seen through the eyes of the artist as a young man. I make no apologies for idiosyncrasies of style, or capricious selection of topics to discuss, and the form in which I desire to discuss them. From Sartre to Superman, Chess to Chilli con carne, Hendrix to the Higgs Boson, the territory that I plunder matters not, and I'm more than open to suggestions.
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One could call this a reaction against the hyper-specialisation present in today's Post-Fordian, de-industrialised gig economy; workers atomised into disparate niches, alienated from the purpose and value of their labour as well as their fellow man by the merciless competition and robotic, utilitarian thinking cultivated by neoliberal ideology and cultural hegemony, prevented from truly expressing the rich multiplicity of self in the hearts and minds of each and every one of us without a thought as to marketability, or one's "personal brand". Or you could just call it lazy and unfocused. Your call. Who on the internet doesn't love a good civil debate?
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One thing I will concede is that I'm an artist, not a professional scholar or critic. There's a reason I left uni, after all. I speak from the heart, to use the cliché, so I feel much more at home writing an Orwellian essay than an academic, journalistic one with a bibliography as long as my arm. Sometimes my thoughts might not be that serious, best articulated in a silly drawing or ironical podcast with a friend. This site is an expression of who I am, and who we are as people can never be pigeon-holed into easily definable genres. Think of Dream Weaver like the journal of a stranger you see out of the corner of your eye on the street, without a second thought as to the infinitesimal chance of your two lives crossing paths in the first place.
