I won’t explore here the fact we don’t say night stallions or night horses, but say night mares to describe those dread filled dreams that come visiting from the depths of our own inner world. Part of word usage passed along across the ages.

What I do write down here for further reference? The fact our own inner world produces the dread. The fact we can wake from a nightmare (which in itself is good news since, for some people, the waking state is nightmarish and there’s no waking up from it). But mostly, I’m struck by the similarity between nightmares and the planet Stanislaw Lem calls Solaris in the science-fiction novel bearing the same name as a title.* Throughout the entire novel the explorers of that planet experience brain-disrupting hallucinations of such intensity their sanity is shattered by them. What they fail to understand until the very end is that the planet is trying to communicate with them. To do so, it is tuning into their own store of images and recollections, and modeling aspects of itself to reproduce entities that appear to be resurrected presences of lost ones. Of course, not understanding this, the scientists exploring Solaris experience a reality nightmarish to the Nth degree.

I find this interesting because, in my personal experiences, I’ve often found nightmares turned out to be attempts from portions of my inner world to grab and hold my attention long enough to make some point or other I wasn’t getting at all. As in: Hey, there’s energy here, bottled up. Stuff that could be useful – such as butane used to make tea instead of car bombs. Deciphering the messages: not always an obvious and simple process.

So. Very cold day here by local standards. On my way home from the farmer’s market, I picked up an English-language copy of a book called life is so good.** I open at random, as I often do with books, and read the following: Chapter 16 ) In a boxcar doorway a Texas-bound hobo called Slim waits out a delay caused by brake trouble on a freight train in California. “Knights of the road” quickly took to the rails behind the new iron horse in the 19th century – Caption to a photograph of a man sitting in the door of a freight train, Railroads, the Great American Adventure, by Charlton Ogburn.

The new iron horse. Hm. Not the new iron stallion. Not the new iron mare. Hm.

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Oh, and because the following excerpts from Donald Trump’s current Cabinet choices belong to the world of stupendous believe-it-or-not reality, a peek at the selection process going on over in Washington.  If you don’t feel up to reading the whole thing, here’s a choice tidbit from billionaire Betsy Devos, Trump’s pick as Education Secretary: “When Christopher Murphy asked whether she would agree that schools are no place for guns, she did not give the obvious right answer to a Democratic senator whose state suffered the horrendous Sandy Hook massacre (“Senator, there is no place for guns in schools”). Instead she said that localities should decide, and — in a transcendently odd moment — suggested that schools in places like Wyoming might need a gun “to protect from potential grizzlies.”

Yes boys and girls. Potential grizzlies are the worse possible kind. Not to mention runaway night horses, night stallions and day mares.

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Nightmares. But why are they not called nightstallions or nighthorses?

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*my copy is in French but the novel is available in English: Stanislas Lem, Solaris,  traduit du polonais par Jean-Michel Jasienko, Folio SF, Denoël 1966

** George Dawson and Richard Glaubman life is so good – One man’s extraordinary  journey through the twentieth century and how he learned to read at age 98, Random House Trade Paperbacks 2013

Illustrating this post: one of the photos done by Marielle Duffet in Sri Lanka and part of her exhibition until February 22 at Restaurant L’Échaugette in the small town of Giroussens in southwestern France.