come_to_think

Dozing this morning, I recalled something I believed as a child: that if, in a dream, the thought that it was a dream occurred to me, or even the very notion of dreaming, I would immediately wake up.  That turned out to be wrong: Later in life, I sometimes deliberately remained in a dream, and a couple of times I even fell asleep in a dream, dreamed a second-order dream, awoke from it, and continued the first-order dream.  Indeed, In George E. Starbuck's "Elegy", there is a line "So in our dreams we sleep to dream a greater".

That is one of Starbuck's juvenilia, printed in a college anthology, and he has not seen fit to include it in any of his later books, so I suppose he is ashamed of it.  Nevertheless, it is my favorite poem of his.  It is a charming depiction of the nuisance of getting laid in the 1950s:

But lovers wake, the spotlight swings,
The crunch is on the gravel:
Start it, gun it, give it wings,
Put in your ears and travel:
The world is wide God knows, but sex
    is deep:
Pull your dashboards tight about your necks
    and sleep.

This zeroth-order dream has gone on rather long.