Spirit Dreams is a branch of riverdream through us, wherein the masks which
function as guides for that River Sounding ceremony (and other masks) tell their
individual dream stories as a further way to enter the mind(s) of the non-human
realm. This work is for recited texts (live and/or recorded), sampled sounds of the
Delaware River environs initiated by a real-time complex-dynamic (fractal)
computer interface program, and the singing masks, set in a context of ceremonial
dream time participation by all present.

Each of my masks has a voice and it is through that voice that they tell their
stories. But the language that each speaks is different. They have dictated their
dreams to me during ceremonial-time experiences and these form the basis for
Spirit Dreams’ recited texts. The texts are mostly in English, but occasionally the
actual language of a mask, as it is expressed in verbal form, emerges. During the
ceremony of Spirit Dreams, the masks sound their dream stories “in the moment”
as the texts are recited and the river sounds occur. There are 13 stories, plus brief
introduction.

In Spirit Dreams you are invited to join the masks in their dreamings, to sleep
even, and to otherwise enter your own and our collective Dream Time. You may
not find all the texts to be intelligible all the time. There is no need to feel
frustration on this account. You are encouraged to suspend any preconditioned
attempt to understand the words and to listen to them as sounds, the
transliterations into speech of the masks’ imaginings having only the meaning of
music and nature’s inner soundings. If you should drift toward any discomfort,
your are invited to repeat this simple mantra to yourself: “This is a dream..., this is
a dream..., this is a dream...”

Spirit Dreams includes references from the following sources:
      3.  Bear - Ars Poetica by Jorge Luis Borges
      5.  Harvey Lackawanna - The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet by John Blofield,
     Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma and Heart Sutra
     (traditional Buddhist texts), Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, A Book
     of Tarot by Rachel Pollack
      6.  Anima - Breaking Open by Muriel Rukeyser, The Far Field by Theodore
     Roethke, Roots and Branches by Robert Duncan
      7.  Raven - “The Sefer Yetzira,” The Book of Creation, a Hebrew book of
     the mystic tradition, c. third-sixth centuries A.D.
      10. Spirit of Voice in the River - Medicine Cards: The Discovery of Power
     Through the Ways of Animals by Jamie Sams & David Carson
      11. Loon Spirit - The Wild Swans at Coole by W.B. Yeats
      12. Blue Oracle - Wherever by Muriel Rukeyser, A Death in the Family by
     James Agee