the gates of sleep

by Peter Donnelley

There are two gates of Sleep,

one made of horn, the other of gleaming ivory.

The dreams that pass through the gates of horn are true,

sent by the shades to rise up to the open air.

The ivory shining, perfect, brilliant,

sends false dreams up to the sky above.

With these words, Anchises follows his son and the Sibyl

and sends them out through the ivory gate.

(Aeneid VI, 893–897)

Part I: A Short Quantum Dream

The dreamworld:

to hack or crack in

to the dancing

pandemonium

of quantum.

Synchronicity

takes its forms  –

spooky

occurrences

at a distance;

equally the minor leitmotifs

that chime in daily life.

The data of reality contains neural links,

and our lives are vulnerable

to the encroachment

of spectral inflection.

Patterns are observed –

the deep learning

of dreaming

is imagistic.

The language of image:

the AI in deep-learning

drinks in deep

the image-language of data.

Like the dream-mind, it metabolises

the parlance of the visual.

Autonomous generation

from inside the black box.

II

The haunted houses.

The bad dreams retained

in the body and brick of a building –

the absorbative property of stone.

Computational data held

in a carved rune

– a single code point.

The imprints of memory.

The retentions of silicon and stone.

But passing shadows of the multiverse

move quickly in a vanishing

from the current world.

Once detected

they have already moved

into the past.

Interference occurs

in quick

flits

and flickers:

an implication

of friction

at the film

between

one distinct

reality

and the next.

The dream space remains like a reliquary.

Dream

condensation

assumes and absorbs image 

in the language

of Lacan.

The spirits can send up false dreams

from below.

Confabulations proceed from beneath

as the LLM hallucinates.

There are also

latent hauntings,

expressed in

cryptic whisperings.

In the dream space,

shifting narratives

overlap and inter-blur.

These quick-moving

flicks burdened

by the sheer weight

of the connotative:

dreams are like the fast-

moving freight

passing at a distance from the dreamer

through the night. On the train tracks, the containers

were articulated together,

as in a sentence structure.

The migraines of meaning,

the extrusion outwards of meaning.

There is an unknown power

and potentiality within a Pandora's jar,

as with an AI

under lock and key.

It sits silent and tightly

shut. The dark silence of the black box

permeates. A power untested and untapped:

a universe of connotation trapped

inside it, as if by magic,

as if sealed by the might of

an ancient deity,

or by a curse.

It is as though the dreams

dream us, and not the inverse.

There is that sudden slipping shift

of narrative --

the slide and volta of a dream’s

statement and sentence of events.

Its lexicon – 

the inherent textual constitution

of the dream material –

shape-shifts in a displacement

of its facts or characters,

images and places.

The point where one dream

quicksilvers

and blurs

to the next.

Part II: A Camera Obliterates Skiers into Memory

I

Mounds of heaped snow

like banks of crushed sea salt

in the true blank of sunlight.

Light-bodied, it is

mineral

and nearly ethereal.

Momentarily this all

like an Instagram reel

in terms of look and feel.

Social media a false god.

On the still slopes,

from the camera’s vantage point

(positioned outside of time),

the vista is in the past.

It is devoid of wind

and almost of sound:

this iteration of the outdoors,

to its lens,

but a display of inactivity.

The snow remembers the past.

And in a sense is part of the past.

The environment

is absorbent,

somewhat like a mind.

The sound of wind pervades

like white noise

(in the sound a kind of dryness).

The lens

is motionless

in this scene

of frost and pine.

A thawing would be a sort of end;

death is a thawing of a sort – 

a releasing of entrapment

and a discharge.

Sort of like a god deciding to pass away.

Experiential

and faintly spectral,

the snow is superficial.

Religion is superficial.

A quicksilver lick of violet hue

over the blank-white

of a slope

steals across this camera lens –

The rose hue seen momentarily in its lens is that

of Himalayan sea salt.

In the snow-laden scene

a blanking of embanked memory –

a pristine blanking of self.

A memory speaks of childhood and death;

the memory is white and bleak

and rich in the detail

of the environmental.

And yet an undercurrent of the unreal

engenders itself subtly into nature,

and ordinary

weather

in turn feels slightly hyperreal.

The air-pressure

thins.

II

The quantum-observer effect

self-effects.

The sense if of material reality

itself shifting through perception.

The self-generating and -generalising properties of the natural

world become analogous

with the dream-space –

the underworld into which

Aeneas made his descent,

delving through the jungle

of the mental.

The real trauma was felt

in the return to the firmament.

sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,

hoc opus, hic labor est.

The camera persists in observing the long descents

of snow. The plateaus and pistes of snow.

Light suddenly flows across the plateau

like water flooding across

a space.

Clouds dissipate

to allow the light

to expand

as a brilliant white

down the gradient

of the piste.

The piste is a text;

the lambent effect

constitutes as an element

of the text.

Visuals are realized –

that is to say reworked and figured –

into the dream-language.

the texture and terrain

of the lexicon

self-reflects.

A text within silicon memory

or camera-film is a

memory of death on the slope.

It harbours in itself the data of reality.

III

Suddenly on the landscape

a forgetful somnolence –

a kind of lapse

and opening up of reverie-space

into which the unconscious

enters:

it awakens

and activates.

It ambulates like a ghost of the stage

effecting its autonomous intent.

We have then in the subconscious inner

a kind of theatre:

a play’s staging occurs 

independently of its dreamer.

The dreamer is but the vehicle of theatre.

The fragmentations of sleep

self-assimilate.

A ski slope or a tract of land

is like a poem;

the slope

is a text that manifests

within and through

the view

of the camera lens, integrating.

The dream is a text

that assimilates in retrospect.

Ski goggles (insectile) were the visors of the skiers,

from the lens’s vantage point;

it is a witness to the past.

Skis in the distance were like twigged

legs of insects as well.  

But that was in the past.

The slopes are now empty.

Photo of Peter Donnelley

BIO: Peter Donnelly’s first collection, Photons, was published by Appello Press in 2014. Following its publication, playwright Frank McGuinness commented that "Peter Donnelly already shows he has a strong imagination; indeed, a savage one presents itself on occasion when the beautiful and brutal confront and confound each other." His second collection, Money Is a Kind of Poetry, was published by Smokestack Books in 2019; it has been described as “a meditation on contemporary alienation and the processes by which every new technological advance seems to increase our isolation from each other, and the more connected we are the less we appear to know ourselves.” He is currently working on a third collection, and is furthermore the author of legal text Consolidated Ontario Estates Statutes and Regulations 2023 (Thomson Reuters, Carswell, 2022).