Screaming For Help In Dreams

athaira9   posted the following quotation:

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.-Elias Canetti

I replied,

Like escalators, blue-shirted future husbands, the Ob' river, horses, German essays, train stations, fuchsia-garbed impatient men, Hayden Panettiere and editing Wikipedia entries (whom I, strangely, dreamed of last night), Reach for the Top students wielding tanks, and vanadium?

Come to think of it, I've dreamed of both train and Metro stations within the last month -- is something moving? While searching for Mayakovsky quotations yesterday, I encountered the line,

"If a song does not thunder down train stations, what then is alternating current for?"

I've got songs, I've apparently got train stations, I haven't yet got thunder (the verb has the metaphorical meaning "raze" but I wanted to keep the morphological as much as I could) and I am sure somewhere in my computer there's alternating current doing something.

I expected someone to point out that posting what my subconscious declares to be a prophecy may affect the future course of events simply by people knowing this. It made me think, though, of Alexander Grin's most famous romance, Scarlet Sails (there's an English translation here, actually) where the plot, as I was told it, was exactly that of the girl Assol who gets foretold that her love will come to her on a ship with scarlet sails. The sea-captain Grey falls in love with her, hears of this, and buys up a lot of scarlet dye... To confirm whether that plot was actually an accurate retelling, I went to the text, started reading, and the following lines struck me:

Now at last did he see what it was in her face that had struck him so. "An unwitting expectation of the beautiful, of a blissful fate," he decided. "Ah, why wasn't I born a writer? What a wonderful theme for a story."

I wondered whether that was what I had in that face when I could tell I was happy but could not tell how*. An unwitting optimism. True, I suppose in this, so very generally, I am a romantic as I am not in specifics; there is a quiet conviction that life will be beautiful! Added to a quiet conviction in myself, that if it is not beautiful, I will not stand for it long, and will do something about that.

*I went back to look at it, and I think I see that my mysterious expression in the last photograph had that, yes, but also, now, what I was saying is completely clear to me: "I wish you joy!" I expect the beautiful...and I want it for everyone else as well; it doesn't lessen by this.