To dream of drowning: that’s old hat.

I woke with a sense of having been warned, the flesh of my wife piled beside me, curtains glassy, light stale, a single shoe in the middle of the room like a ship at sea. I went downstairs, distracted, like a king in Israel, as if in search of a soothsayer. Often when I’ve dreamed, though I dream rarely, I’ve dreamed I leaped from dream to dream as fancy lets me skip sometimes through books: as goats do crags, they say, boots leagues, clouds peaks. They’ve been dreams in which a sleeper who is dreaming dreams still further dreams (and that’s old stuff, old stuff indeed), like doors receding down a corridor, until he reaches one in which the sleeper is awake stiff, staring, hair on end—awake in a room full of fleshy mist and ships like lonely shoes; dream rooms opening through translucent doors to terraces where one might view along the lineless edge of a crystal cliff the eternally fresh rise of Reality—a plenum circulous with shit—just as, with his customary metaphysical clarity, Parmenides did (old hat upon old hat): each dream in the shape a stone that’s pelted into water takes, multiplying always from the inside so that the first sleeper reached is the last one dreamed—another Eleatic irony—because even after the original knot of night-thought has obdurately passed beyond the bottom by penetrating silt, its farewells persist in fainter and fainter prints, in wider and wider widening rings.

it was like falling into the sea

to pass that open door

a wind like cold water

space a cold glass

flights of fish

surprise

my nose

my ah!

breath

goes

f

a

s

s

s

t

and all this has happened before

The relentless regress: just how old-hat is that?