The Golden Pot

"How the hell did I wind up here?" he exclaimed. It was a moderately large hall, lit by bright florescent light, and he was walking along close to the walls. But the instant those words left his mouth, he was rocked by an even greater epiphany: He realized he was dreaming, and knew that he knew this. In the blink of an eye, his awareness shot up in an exponential transcendence of levels, like facing mirrors, causing him to swoon inwardly. All he knew clearly was that he had suddenly been empowered, and that he had been placed, in a lucid state, within precisely this dream in order to use this new-found power to work something out, some cosmic purpose upon which everything-i.e., the cosmos-depended. So he immediately dismissed the temptation to use his power to escape the dream entirely by waking up, which he certainly could have chosen to do, that being one of the perquisites of lucid dreaming, as he well knew. No, he was to remain right within the dream and solve the problem it was presenting him, which was that he was trapped inside this plain, ordinary room with no obvious way out. How to get out?He resumed his preliminary survey of the room, noting that it was entirely bare except for the tubes of florescent light on the ceiling, which, though sharply illuminating the space, had in consequence of their intense whiteness a tiring effect on his eyes, and by extension, all of him. Except for his own body, there were no objects in the room to break up the light's tedious uniformity. It seemed, then, that he would have to carry on with a slight headache. He noted four doors, one in the middle of each of the walls. Three of them opened onto a dark, entombing rockface no more than a hand's breadth away. No way out there, for sure. Only one door was not an obvious dead-end, leading as it did to an adjoining room rich in the colors of royalty, red and gold, and decorated with several ceiling-high mirrors and a large glass chandelier. He felt in his gut the importance of

Dennis McCort hat sich als langjähriger Professor für Deutsch an der Syracuse University auf die deutsche Romantik, die deutsche Belletristik des 19. Jahrhunderts, Religion und Literatur sowie Franz Kafka spezialisiert. Viele seiner Forschungsarbeiten konzentrieren sich auf die Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen diesen Bereichen: z.B., sein Buch ¿Going beyond the Pairs¿, eine Studie über Romantik, Zen-Buddhismus und Dekonstruktion, ist nicht nur eine Studie über Ost-West-Vergleiche von Literatur und Religion, sondern befasst sich auch mit dem Werk von Franz Kafka. Seine Artikel befassen sich unter anderem mit dem Einfluss von Rilke und Zen auf J. D. Salinger, dem Zen-Stil und -Geist in Kafkas Parabeln und der Darstellung des Wahnsinns in den Erzählungen von E.T.A. Hoffmann. 2017 veröffentlichte er ¿A Kafkaesque Memoir¿ bei PalmArtPress, eine persönliche Erzählung, in der er den prägenden Einfluss des Geistes und der Persönlichkeit von Franz Kafka auf eine neunjährige jungianische Analyse nachzeichnet, der er sich unterzogen hatte.