© NY Times/Art by Jonathon Rosen
Ask people to recall how many nightmares they had in the last year, said one dream researcher, and they might say one or two. Ask them to keep a dream diary, and they will report nightmares once or twice a month. By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: October 23, 2007
Bad Dreams Are Good
by Joni Mitchell
As published in the New Yorker
September 17, 2007
The cats are in the flower beds
A red hawk rides the sky
I guess I should be happy
Just to be alive
But
We have poisoned everything
And oblivious to it all
The cell-phone zombies babble
Through the shopping malls
While condors fall from Indian skies
Whales beach and die in sand
Bad Dreams are good
In the Great Plan
And you cannot be trusted
Do you even know you are lying?
It’s dangerous to kid yourself
You go deaf, dumb, and blind
You take with such entitlement
You give bad attitude
You have No grace
No empathy
No gratitude
You have no sense of consequence
Oh, my head is in my hands
Bad Dreams are good
In the Great Plan
Before that altering apple
We were one with everything
No sense of self and other
No self-consciousness
But now we have to grapple
With this man-made world backfiring
Keeping one eye on our brother’s deadly selfishness
Everyone’s a victim here
Nobody’s hands are clean
There’s so very little left of wild Eden Earth
So near the jaws of our machines
We live in these electric scabs
These lesions once were lakes
We don’t know how to shoulder blame
Or learn from past mistakes
So who will come to save the day?
Mighty Mouse. . . ? Superman. . . ?
Bad Dreams are good
In the Great Plan
In the dark
A shining ray
I heard a three-year-old boy say
Bad Dreams are good
In the Great Plan
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