June 9, 2012, Saturday - Northern Spark: Captured Dreams at The Loft

Tme:  9:00pm

Location: The Loft, Performance Hall, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Performance Hall

Northern Spark: Captured Dreams 
 
Captured Dreams will take place from 9:00pm to 5:30am (Jun 9–10) on the second floor of Open Book.

Paper Darts and the Loft invite you to forget what makes dreams unreal for one playful night. Ignore your friends who complain when you talk about your dreams, and instead revel in the notion that the world at large wants to read about what fantastic things go on deep inside that mysterious head of yours. The overnight activities will broken down into four parts: Voices of the Dream, Scribe of the Dream, Story of the Dream, and Record of the Dream (see below for descriptions).

Voice of the Dream
“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
—T.S. Elliot, “Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Over the course of the night, a hand-selected group of poets, storytellers, and performers will recite works from the field of dreams—both private and practical, both their own and the creations of others—to help attendees get their minds prepped for a trip to the astral plane. Readers will follow some of the common thematic threads that weave together our universal dreamscape: recurring, fantasy, nightmares, and the surreal.

Scribe of the Dream
“... this world gives no room
to be what we dreamt of being.”
—Adrienne Rich, “Pieces”

The reading and dreaming space of The Loft at Open Book’s transformed Target Performance Hall will be filled with blank tablets to fill with your Kafkaesque experiences and anecdotal advice for navigating the nonphysical realms visited during sleep. Loft staff will provide writing prompts, ideas, and dream interpretation stations to help decode your subconscious. Take a micro-nap and use the dream interpretation stations to decode your subconscious and help divine where your dreams will take you. Write it all down as a poem, story, lyrics, or essay and submit it to Paper Darts before you leave.

Story of the Dream
“...no one wants to hear what you dreamt about/ unless you dreamt about them/ don’t let that stop you / tell them anyway / and you can make it up as you go.”
—Built to Spill, “Made Up Dreams”

One of the Loft’s classrooms will be converted into a darkened viewing room where a film comprised of recorded dream stories, submitted by participants before the event, will be combined into one joyous, fearful, and exquisite loop of odd storytelling, and played for the entirety of the event. Make of them what you wish: clues to the collective unconscious? Prophetic revelations? Souls’ portals into another realm?

Record of the Dream
“Dreams are featherweights,
And memory can shake them off with ease.”
—Wistawa Szymborska, “The Real World”

Paper Darts will have a workstation set up in the commons at the Loft. This area will be committed to translating your dream writing into one cohesive magazine capturing the events of the evening in its pages. Once your dream-themed compositions are complete and you are ready to re-enter the mundane physical world, your stories, poems, essays, and tidbits may be submitted for copyediting and inclusion in this one-of-a-kind publication, which will be available via a print-on-demand model at the conclusion of Northern Spark.