The Dreams of the Lady of Mount Hira

I am in one of my classes sitting in my usual spot next to my friend. All of a sudden, my friend gets up and goes to the front of the room. I am in a different seat now and I am sitting at a desk in a group with other people. (The desks look like the ones I sat at in junior high school.) I cannot see any of the other desks around the classroom, except for the grouping of desks where I am sitting. I have a bowl of fruit on my desk, and there is a bowl next to me filled with dates. I eat the fruit with my hands, and the professor at the side of the room stretches out his arm to take a piece of my fruit, but instead he changes his mind and takes a date. There are also all sorts of food on the desks near me, and my classmates are eating profusely.

Hablik, Wenzel (1881-1934) © Copyright
The path of genius. Oil on canvas.
Location :Private Collection, Vienna, Austria
Photo Credit : Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY

This picture looked interesting and very colorful. The movement in which this canvas was produced in is an area that I am considering working on for my thesis paper. This picture is an example of surrealist art. It's too bad that most of the information I found online about the artist is written in what looks like German. But I'm sure if I do some more research, I will find English texts. I wonder what the art is suggesting. What does it mean? Does anyone have any ideas or interpretations?

This is part of one of several dreams that I had last night... I pick up my cell phone to call my friend who I want to ask for something, and to invite her somewhere. Having the feeling that I had already called her (because I had done so in the waking world), I call her again and wait for her to answer. However, she does not pick up the phone. I then call her again, and her mother answers the phone. Her mother sounds very angry and she starts to curse me out. She asks me "why do you keep calling my daughter? What do you want from her? She doesn't want to talk to you. She doesn't like you...". I am, of course, upset and speechless. I tell her "I apologize if I did anything wrong". I wasn't sure why I was apologizing though. I don't think that I did anything wrong. Yet, this extremely protective mother continued to scream at me. She said "don't ever call here again! And do not ever speak to my daughter!" What had I done wrong? Who knows. But all I remember is waking up to my alarm, turning the alarm off, and wondering if this had actually happened. (I am almost too sure now that it didn't actually happen).

I'm lying on my bed, and then the next thing I know, I am in a small dark room with my older brother and some of his friends who have the stereotypical "geeky" look. There is a big flat screen television on the wall in this small room. We are watching a movie involving scary aliens. My eyes are glued to the television, while the "geeky" guys are profusely taking notes about what is happening. While I am watching the movie, an alien is sliced in half, and it has a lot of red blood spray out of the bottom half with its legs, that look like human legs. You would think that the bottom portion would be on the ground, but they are still standing up and walking around, stepping on the feet of the other aliens. My brother looks shocked, and the "geeky" guys have stopped writing profusely. They are all staring at the screen, as if in a trance. I am looking at the screen in the same way.

This is a dream that I had when I was fourteen. I used to record my dreams in a dream journal a lot when I was younger, but I had given it up. This dream blog has been a good way for me to start up recording my dreams again. Well, anyway, here goes my dream from the past...

I am in my sister's room, and it is dark. An instructor I had in the past and still keep in contact with is lecturing. Some of my friends from college are sitting around the room. The lights are off, and the television is on, although we are not watching it. We are paying more attention to the instructor. The instructor then asks a question. She asks "Do you feel that you are always the one who has to initiate contact with guys?" I raise my hand and say "Well, I don't know if this counts, but I always feel that I am the one who has to call my brothers and initiate contact with them. They never call; I am the one who always has to. It makes me feel as if they don't care." My instructor says that she will be right back, and goes down the stairs. I am left wanting to know what someone thinks of what I said. My friend on my sister's bed tells me something that I cannot hear. She then repeats what she said louder. She says "I agree with you" as if to make me feel better. Yet, I am still somewhat upset by having to initiate contact with my own kin. I cannot remember anything else from this dream, but I think that I wake up after this part.

Ernest Hartmann, in his book Dreams and Nightmares: The Origin and Meaning of Dreams, discusses the nature of dreams and nightmares, as well as emotions and feelings associated with dreaming. He also looks at trauma associated with dreams, in addition to dreams that engage with metaphors. Hartmann suggests that dreams make a lot of “connections between traumatic or other new material and older material-guided by the emotion of the dreamer”. These connections are physically made in the chapter on “Nets of the Mind” as Hartmann discusses the physical and biological functioning of the mind/brain and the vast number of neural connections made within it.

Robert Macnish’s “The Prophetic Character of Dreams, and Nightmare” was interesting, and I learned a lot from this article. He suggests that with visions or visionary phenomena, there is an unequal distribution of sensorial energy. He believes that when a person has visions, the imagination is at work, and the judgment is asleep. Also, in dreams, things can be remembered which may not be remembered in the conscious world. Further, sometimes apparitions or ghosts appear in one’s dream and reveal facts to whatever is unsolvable in the conscious world.

I found Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte to be two very interesting books. I had read Jane Eyre quite a while ago for my own pleasure, but I had never looked at Jane Eyre as a novel that involves dreams. I don’t even remember there being any important dreams in this book, until I read the book again for this course and searched for any particular dreams. As for Wide Sargasso Sea vs. Jane Eyre, I’m going to have to side with Jane Eyre because it’s one of my favorite novels. Also, the ending of the book is a conventional happy one, which I like.

I thought Waking Life was a very interesting and intelligent film. I saw a correlation between this film and the chapters on lucid dreaming by Stephen La Berge in his book Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. It seems as if there is no distinction between dreaming and waking life in lucid dreams. In a lucid dream, the dreamer is able to “create and transform objects, people, situations, worlds, even themselves”. There is a consciousness in lucid dreams, which differentiates this type of dream from a regular dream. (It seems that Freud’s “secondary revision” is also imposed in lucid dreaming). This is seen in Waking Life as the main character looks as if he is in real life and is conscious. He constantly wakes up, goes to work, attends lectures, talks to different people, watches television, drinks, eats, and performs other conscious daily rituals. However, this character is not awake, and he realizes this, as do the viewers, if they didn’t already know, when he confesses that he thinks he is dreaming in the subway, while talking to a stranger.

I feel that I have had this dream before, but that it was somewhat different. I am not sure, but here is the dream…