to day
a fragment of a dream
It's early morning. I sit at a desk, in front of a huge screen. The screen is filled with hundreds of icons. Some I can read, some I can only guess, some look like Chinese signs. The icons come in the six spectral colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Like a memory game, or a visual horoscope. The screen isn't for play, though. It doesn't refer to stars and planets, either. It is a tableau of the immediate future.
The key to it waits in a hologram, patient. A six-word question.
"What day to you want today?"
I turn my head. Time starts running.
I look at the screen full of icons.
I still try to find it.
The one to click, to day.
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Author's Note
this dream probably was induced by the general feeling of endings / beginnings / resolutions that frame this time of year. i just wish the dream had continued, so that i now knew my choice.
I love the images here of colorful choices that determine the future.
I love "I turn my head. Time starts running." That is what worry and missing out or making the wrong decisions feels like. The screen here is a calendar of living and yet like real life, still all guesswork even when a thing, an icon, is recognized.
Really nice, Dorothee.
ooh what a great piece, doro. i like how you keep coming back to the magical number six and how you narrow your path down from so many choices to one without giving your game away entirely. classic.
thanks Susan, thanks Finn!
i really woke up bright awake from that dream. it's still moving in my thoughts: so many choices.
and now i just noticed a fancy typo, to instead of do, here: "What day *to* you want today?"
maybe i leave it. it somehow fits the 'to day'.
i actually had not noticed that typo. perhaps you should leave it as it is, also to keep away from microsoft slogans. ('Where do you want to go today?')
You know me with typos; I don't catch 'em all but I'm pretty darned good at it and this didn't shout out as one. Particularly since it's the focus of the poem, and pointed out as such. I like it as the meaning of "to" is much more open than "do" which tends to require work.
Interesting as a dream and as a literary work. It also has so much potential for story development if you decide to go further.
That the future is determined by what the author selects on a computer like screen is both compelling and disturbing, at least for me.
you should work this in to 2028, as a future thing.
that's a parallel i hadn't thought of: the microsoft slogan. maybe that is one of the roots of the dream?
and yes, it's kind of a disturbing dream. altogether, though, i think the dream is not directly about technology - it's more about all the choices we have today, so many that we aren't able to understand them all.
:) Mike. and we did it again, commenting at the same time, without future screen.
Mmmmm! Love this.
Colin, thanks. and so interesting, this line in your profile: "Somedays I wake up but I don't stop dreaming."
it almost connects to this story.
This is a great poem, Dorothee. The form is really nice. Good one.
Love this, Dorothee. What a great way to capture a dilemma.
Marks the importance of choice in creating the future. Strange and beautiful.
Dorothee,
I think of one day at a time. The cornerstone of spirituality. And as Robt. Frost said, the poet is entitled to anything a reader finds in the poem!
Didn't somehow find this until today or have I, as I believe Gottfried Benn once said, "simply not noticed." Can't remember whether I read that in translation; probably, because I can't come up with the German equivalent. And then again, maybe it was all but a dream....