The Amazing Dr. Funkenstein and the Mind-altering burrito

I am truly excited about being in this class; I'm having t-shirts printed up. Freud and Jung have always been people I've been interested in, (those crazy cats), but have only got bits of their theory in other classes. (Jung moreso than Freud because I took Myth And Archetype with Proffesor Schechter.) I'm hoping to find out that Freud is more than the pervert psychologists make him out to be.

Dreams have always facinated me, not just because I don't remember all of mine, but because of the kind of omniscient status they are typically mandated in popular culture, particularely in TV and the movies. That's why I'm glad to be getting all the facts, all the different theories on dreams. And not just from psychologists either, but from writers, and musicians, and movies too.

As to our first class, (I suppose I have to say something particular about that too)... Proffesor Tougaw has set up a very interactive class, so high-tech with the computers, and the different forms of media, and the conference table. And he gives the students his full attention when they need his help. He seems very knowledgable and I have a lot of confidence in him.

Sometimes, when my body prepares itself for sleep, and I feel that glaze come over my mind, I hallucinate in the dark. A see-through panther will get up on the dresser and perch himself there. Eyes shine with reflected light from the streetlamp. A small creature dashes across a dark corner causing me to sit up and look for the imposing danger through that glazey feeling, but I see nothing. I turn to the wall and try to put these things out of my mind.

But when I do I feel something looming over my bed, right behind my back. Something dark that scares the crap out of me, like Carl Jung's collective shadow. I do not turn to look, usually, but I can imagine it's form in my head-- I have to picture it because it's pervaded it's way in there. Once I pictured it as a snarling, drooling-fanged, biped hog's head; a large boar's head connected to two little legs with no arms, and, mostly, it has to drag the head along the ground when it walks, until it gets ready to fight. Recently I saw something a lot more clear (because before everything was, to some degree, see-through so in some minescule way I could write it off as being my imagination). It projected itself to me in my mind's eye: a tall shadow, a man. It lifted it's head and I could see his face rendered out of the smokey blackness. He had straight brown hair parted down the middle. Underneath that I could see a blackness that gathered around his eyes. He had no nose on his flat face, a seam ran down the center. He reminded me of a marrionette. His smile twisted at the ends and projected volumes of evil to me. Evils that could not quite be put into words but were timeless.

When I get this terrfied feeling of the shadow standing behind me I cannot sleep. I feel I must defend myself. I flip myself over one-hundred-and-eighty degrees to surprise this denzien and grab that pig in a headlock but I find there is nothing there. I lay on my back cautiously and force myself to close my eyes and turn my brain off.

Am I suffering from an overactive imagination or have I entered a limbo between wake and sleep where the dreamworld spills out onto reality? I'd love to hear your comments on the subject.

(This brings me to my scholarly reason for bringing this up.) Is there more than just sleep and wake? My father has described to me falling asleep, briefly, and being able to see the room around him just as if he was awake. (I must admit, I have also experienced this, but after he told me about it.) Also, he's mentioned to me about nodding off and seeing himself writing in a book, and being able to see the writing on the page clearly, and then waking up because of the absurdity of it.

Please feel free to drop a line about any of this stuff I just mentioned. (Or, ladies, who wants some beads?) Let's start a long discussion.

I fell asleep and found myself going to the painting class I took in Queens College, but upon going to the studio in Klapper I found it was my attic bedroom. Students in smocks and berets were spread out in my larger-than-normal room painting on huge canvases. Everyone was painting only in pink. The kind of pink you'd see in a mexican sunset on a bottle of salsa. The room was rendered in brick red with a dominating goldenrod light coming in from my window (obviously not the normal color of my room). I was the last one there so I shared a place on the bannister under the slanted roof. We were getting paint from disposable turkey pans you could buy at Wauldbaums' for cheap. I was working next to Natalie Tursi, a girl I had a huge crush on in high school but she hated me for some reason, and she was actually nice to me here. She shared her pan of paint with me. (She'd mixed some of the paint with water to get a pink wash.) Her voice didn't sound like her own, it sounded like her friend Christina, (a nice little blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl Natalie was friends with in highschool.) I could see Christina's vivid blue eyes when she offered to share her paint with me.
Then Proffessor Priestly (who in real life didn't teach my painting class but a drawing class I took) came over to me and was acting really bitchy. She didn't look like herself but i recognized it was her. She complained that i should be using the "Priestly method", or something like that, when I painted. We were all painting in an abstract expressionist style (which was how the class was taught to me when I took it).
Out of nowhere, I see a black glob of paint on my arm. It looks like oreo-flavored jello pudding but I knew it was paint. For some reason, however, I licked the paint off my arm. It was disgusting. I could actually taste the paint in my mouth, (which I knew tasted like paint from experience). I hold the glob, perfectly formed, on my tongue and walk downstairs to the kitchen to wash it out in the sink.

If I could throw back to the first class, I thought the interpretation of Bob Dylan's "115th Dream," but I thought that it was important to mention to those of you not familiar with Bob Dylan's work that this dream-stuff was not a one time thing. Dylan is noted for his surreal lyrics that dominate most of his career. Take, for instance, this track from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, (one of my favorites of his earlier stuff), "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall."

(PS- pump the volume up for this one kiddies)

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Happy listening!

Freud writes in this exploritory style which reminds me of when I read Kant's theories on consciousness. The work is philosophical in that sense but also very dogmatic. In this rhetoric it's either Freud's way or the highway, which leads to a lot of disbelief amongst his current readers. But even with the class' overwhelming doubts as to Freud's conclusions when interpreting dreams, it's interesting to note that no one has doubted the method. Gotta give Ziggy a lot of credit for the method (he's really onto some good stuff with that free-association idea).

Here's where the hard part of this entry comes: defending Freud's conclusions. Now, I've thought long and hard about this and what I have to say next seems logical. Freud, because of his position as being the first of his kind, sometimes has to approach the dream content as a stand-alone text, just like a poem or a short story, because he does not know everything about the dreamer's psyche, (just like a reader of a poem is not privy to the author's thoughts). Afterall, the point of interpreting a dream is to find out about the subject's psyche, and how can you accomplish the conclusion if you already know the psyche. Therefore, Freud has to apply his own logic to the dream to make sense of it (like interpreting a poem). Take for example "a plesant dream" on page 217 of our book. To interpret the dream, Freud must free-associate the strenous walk up the rise made by X street to the walk up the staircase in Alphonse Daudet's Sappho. It may seem farfetched to interpret a dream on an association not made by the dreamer but really it is the only way that makes sense. The dreamer is not an analist, and therefore not really qualified to analyse his own dreams. He is relying on Dr. Freud for logic. (Besides, I didn't hear anyone say what the dream really meant).

Something felt wrong. The room I was in had a strange glow. I was in a modern looking office building. The colors were realistic but everything had a halo around it, like it was being viewed through a soft filter. I feel like my head's being tumbled in a clothes dryer. I was sitting at a table. Two literary agents were flanking me. Apparently they work for me.

They hand me a manuscript that they say is a play the other half of my brain wrote.

- This is ridiculous, I protest. This is absolute absurdity!

I looked across the table and I saw my self, my shadow (archetype). I didn't get a great look at him. He looked sloppy, almost deranged, but younger that my current self because his hair was shorter.

- This is the play, they say as they open the manuscript for me.

I looked directly at the script as it opened-- and then I woke up, probably from the absurdity I felt, and I had a violent urge to go to the bathroom.

This is a first fall to a finish one on one matchup-- a fight to the death. Let's keep it clean, shall we? Stay on topic and, Ziggy, none of that below the belt jazz. When ya hear the bell come out swingin'.

For two guys with similiar results they take awfully different approaches. As Jung himself puts it, "Freud discovered the hidden meaning of dreams empirically and not deductively" (25). Jung is the deductive approach. Freud marches his opinion slowly and methodically 'till he stops. Jung is a saunter in the park. It's a slow pace, with plenty of time to stop and smell the roses. Jung may meander around a bit in his investigative style of writing but what he does is logical. He explores different points and angles more, and he's willing to stop and explain a concept to you. His conclusions seem make a lot more sense than Freud's because they are completely based on "heterogeneous" free-association (Jung, 26) and situation-defined interpretation, whereas Freud tries to prove his own theories no matter what material you give him.

(Here it goes.) In real life, during the summer, my Dad, my brother, and I worked stocking libraries for a book company. In my dream we were walking together in a large picturesque football field behind a school, neither of which I have ever seen before. We were going to work but taking a scenic route to get there. We run into our boss at the book company, Bob, but he looks like my boss from when I worked for the New York Mets (who's name was Josh). I see my boss like it was straight from my imago- it's this closeup shot where I can see those red circles under his eyes. We ask him about the job we're doing that day and he tells us it's a big one, might take a few days.
Then, for some reason, we all sit down in metal bleachers that slide under us. We are seated in the top row. We are there to see a show. Then my sister brings in her choir to watch as well, but they all look like my mother's special-ed class. I recognize one that turns around to look at me from a photograph where she smiles so hard her face wrinkles up like a wet dish towel. She is still, like the photograph, then I am not looking at her. The bleachers fill up before my sister can sit down. My brother and I laugh at her jokingly and she hangs her head in shame (like in that episode of The Simpsons). She leans against the bleachers as we prepare to watch the show.

For some reason I dreamt I was going to a concert with my family. My father, mother, brother, and I, (for some reason not my sister), drove our navy blue minivan to the docks and parked it right next to the water. It looked like nice docks, like the Fells' Point section of Baltimore, MA. The event was widely popular, and it seemed like everyone was going to it. It seemed strange to me that I was going with my parents.

The event was on the water. We were expected to travel on top of the water to get there. We put on these weird overshoes, they looked like surfboards for the feet, that floated and had a strange glow coming from the underside. And, indeed, they did float on water, but they took some getting used to; I lost my balance and fell into the water.

We approached the concert hall. It was dusk and the sky was a dark shade of slate blue. The place looked like the Sydney Opera House, only floating on water with a strange neon pink glow coming from underneath it. The place was packed. I could see that from far away because of all the smaller neon lights of the other patrons' hovercraft.

I don't remember much of the concert itself. I remember there being a lot of neon lights involved in the performance, like it was some kind of cheesy 80's pop band with tight pants and crazy hair.

Then came a break in the music for "gum time" at the concessions. I was very excited by this and was first in line at the concession stand. My dream then cut to a closeup shot of my hand and a box of gum. It seemed very much like a child's computer game; it was animated in a flat color way, different than the rest of the dream. The sticks of gum were like Wrigley's Juicyfruit sticks but they had no wrapper. The sticks were held together in a bundle of six, maybe eight, somehow and had a cartoon head on the top. I picked them up one pack at a time, and each time I did, the head ontop of the pack spoke. There were four colors, each color was a theme of a different Hanna Barbera cartoon character. Yellow was the burro from Quick-draw McGraw. Green was Booboo from Yogi Bear. White was that effeminate crocidile guy, who i don't remember where he was from. Pink I definately picked up last because I remember it being Snagglepuss, who robbed a line from Jackie Gleason as I picked him up,

- hum-in-a, hum-in-a, hum-in-a.
- Alright! I shouted in a child's voice, like a catchphrase spoken at the end of completing a level in a computer game.

Next thing I knew the concert was over. We were back on the dock by the van. The rest of my family was going home to sleep and I was to sleep in the van and watch the cats. This was a great responsibility for me; it was like when my parents first left me home alone on vacation. Then, for some reason, my father opens the passenger side door and lets the cats out. They go running down the docks and out of sight.

- Thanks a lot, I yell at him. Now I have to catch them.

They leave and I run down the docks. One cat, Bo Jangles, is waiting for me not too far away. (She's kind of fat and not incredibly adventurous in real life.) She has a small fish she is eating. I grab her and bring her back to the van. Simultaneously, I give up on finding my other cat, Milkdud, because I know she's a tough cat who can take care of herself until morning.

It's the next morning and I am still there. I think it is like Woodstock, in that it is a multiday event I was allowed to stay at by myself. Milkdud has returned to the van and I am standing outside the driver's side door, fixing my hair in the side-view mirror like I was living in it. Then Zack and Slater from Saved By The Bell coming walking up to me. I know that they are my friends Brendon and (I think) Carmine (respectively) from high school because they talk like them. We start talking about Driver ID pictures and how awful they are. I presume this came up because we were going to get loaded later. Zack dissagrees with us on this topic and holds up his ID. The picture is a great shot of Zack Morris flashing his characteristic smile, but as I look at it more the picture frame widens to a group shot of the Saved By The Bell class except I am in Screech's place. I look nerdy and unhappy. I agree that it is a great picture of him. Then Zack says to Slater, in a voice and manner exactly like my friend Brendon

- Hey, how long do you think it's been since Snowboy's got laid?

(Snowboy was their nickname for me in highschool.) I was filled with embarassment.

Then my mom woke me up. I feel it would have gone on longer, (like I would have tried to have sex with someone), but it was cut short.

I said it in class and I'll say it again, the worlds of Kafka's stories are the worlds of Freudian dreams. They're just too strange to be taken literally. Let's bring up the example that seemed very popular in our class, "The Judgement." There's a very obvious Oedipal conflict going on between Georg and his father which I find very funny because of the bizarreness of the scene. Because it's a dream-like state, the conflict can be followed out to its absurd conclusions.

It's weird, you know. I read The Metamorphosis before and watched The Trial before and never thought about them like this (probably because I didn't know as much about this when I was a teenager). I did always think they were cool. I wonder if I go back and revisit those two will my reading of them be radically different.

Oh, PS: anyone who likes the Kafka stories should go seek out the movie The Trial. It was based on an unfinished book Kafka wrote. Orson Wells, who directed the film, also put an ending on it-- Wells is a student of whatever he does so don't feel like he's butchering anything.

I was wondering- what is sleepwalking? I've never sleptwalked, to my knowledge, but my sister has done so, a lot in the past. She describes it as being in a dream but still able to navigate herself around, and downstairs, etc. What does this mean for questions of consciousness?

Like I said, I don't sleepwalk, but my brother tells me that I do talk in my sleep. He actually does too, but he mostly makes sounds that aren't quite understandable, while he tells me I speak coherently and occassionally sit up and interact with things that aren't present in the real world. One time, for instance, I was sitting on the edge of my bed with my hands fumbling around on the floor.

- What are you doing? he asks.
- I'm picking up the pieces, I reply.

Weird, right? But he's done this too, (and I think his story is funnier). A little background information first: there's a beanbag chair between our beds and my brother, who's kind of a slob, had quite a few water bottles on the floor in various states of having water in them. Anyway, he pops up out bed one night, asleep.

- Wait, he demands.

He reaches down to the floor and picks up each water bottle and places them on the beanbag chair (there were five, I think). Then he squares them with both his arms so that they're in a perfect row, height-wise. He smiles and looks satisfied. Then he colapses back into bed.