Mr. Thompson

I am in the restaraunt I work at as a waiter. A sense of loneliness. A large group comes in and sits down. I am the only waiter working. They sit at a large table in an alcove that is actually not in the real-life restaraunt. I don't know any of them. The actions are mundane: I set the table and it seems to take me an hour. I fold every napkin, place every utensil down as I would in real life. I'ts tedious and boring. The customers become belligerent with me for not moving more quickly. My legs feel heavy. The customers laugh at me. I am sent on an errand. A sort of post-apocalyptic city surrounds me now. Odd structures that resemble Aztec pyramids. There are fires in the street. I drive some type of dune buggy around and cannot find where I am going. I want to go home but all the roads are blocked due to some accident.

This is a Renaissance oil painting by an Italian artist named Tiziano Vecellio. He completed the work sometime around 1524. It seemed, in general, very dream-like to me, with its myriad characters and complete use of shadow. Also, the forest imagery is very Midsummer Night's Dream-esque. I hope you can see the image. If not, I'll try uploading it again.

I had this dream (more like a semi-dream) as I was dozing the other day. I was in some type of odd casino, lots of lights and noises. A fly kept buzzing around me. I swatted at the fly but I couldn't get him. A man in a suit approached me and told me to "go ahead to number eleven." I woke up. Weird.

Another dream where I am running away from authorities. This is strange since I've never been in trouble with "the law" in my entire life. Anyway:

I'm in the town where I grew up. There is a manhunt out for me. I don't know what I have done (it's not pictured in the dream) but somehow I just know the cops are looking for me. I get away by performing short bursts of flight through my town, flying high and then setting down slowly and gently in people's yards. Day turns to night and night to day seemingly arbitrarily and frequently. I run through and endless succession of yards, hopping fences and dodging things such as swimming pools. I don't see any people in the dream. There is, however, the constant sense of looming fear and captors around the corner. I hide in bushes. Dogs bark. I keep running through yards. I fly again. Each time I fly I'm so scared the cops will see me in the air but they never do.

In short, I liked Hartmann better.
Hobson: too technical. Hartmann: more emotional, which I like
I love Hartmann's focus on dreaming as a medium through which we contextualize emotions. To me, it was convincing and substantial. When I read Hobson, however, I found myself skimming because of certain jargon. I don't have patience for science.
Hobson reminded me of those writers who, despite any good sense, use a word equivocally a hundred times before they actually tell you what the word means (that is, in the sense they themselves are using it). Annoying.

I was surprised reading the Victorian dream theories, especially Robert Macnish's. They were more cogent than I had expected; I admit that I expected them to be "Victorian": baroque and contrived. No way. Macnish especially had some great ideas, and you could really see the influence in certain respects on future writers such as Freud. At least I did.

Scarry was, well, scary.

I'm not sure what Professor Tougaw means by using "a critical article as a lens," so I'm just going to give my own two cents about these books,

I liked Jane Eyre. It seemed full. The characters were well-developed. The language, relative to other Victorian fiction I've read, was not difficult to read. I love novels set in England. I love the restrained "Britishness" exhibited by all Victorian characters. I loved the odd mix of fantasy, gothic, and romance.

Wide Sargasso Sea, for me, was detached and thin. Jean Rhys tried to be Faulkner with her whole look-at-me-I'm-changing-point-of-view-without-telling-you thing, but it didn't work for me. It made the writing too transparent. Certain parts had some nice metaphors and descriptions, but, overall, I walked away from reading it with a sense of incompleteness.

I'll mention Richardson, too, while I'm at it. He's a good writer. He had some good ideas and, despite his more "artistic" style of writing (read: disorganized), he satisfied me more than Scarry did. He knew what he was talking about when it came to poetic rhythm. In the future I'd love to analyze poetic language further, and study its relationship with how linguistic beauty is perceived by readers.

I want to mention something.
I was at work last Sunday. I have a few jobs but one of them is a waiter/counterperson in an Italian restaraunt/pizzeria. All through work, I had this strange sense that things were not right. It felt very dreamlike. Has anyone ever been somewhere and it just felt so different from how it normally feels? Like it's the bizarro version of that particular place? It was as if I were observing my routine in a dream. The air seemed thicker. The lights had more of a reddish glow. It was surreal and I didn't like it. Everyone seemed on edge. The atmosphere was--forgive the odd use of this word--feverish.
Ever have a day when you feel out of place???

I'm in pizzeria/restaraunt where I work. It is very different. I am not informed of this in the dream but my dream-intuition tells me that the owner (my boss) has decided to redecorate. He has also, apparently, decided to re-staff, since I recognize none of the workers; this disturbs me and makes me feel scared since I miss my friends who work there. I feel alone and confused. The place is much bigger in the dream. There are many ovens. The designs are ornate and dark and arabesque. My family comes in to see me. They sit down to eat but when I go to serve them they are no longer there. Instead, other people sit there. I spend the rest of the dream trying to find out where my family is and whether the other co-workers are going to be back.

My family and I are all gathered at my grandmother's house. It is not explicitly stated, but I know it is Christmas. My brother enters the house in his police uniform, crying. He lets us know that he has been fired. He does not give reasons. I feel a horrible sense of guilt and sadness for him. I feel responsible in the dream. I want to help him get his job back but I can't.

The house becomes old suddenly. The furniture seems ancient, moth-eaten. I ask myself "is this a dream? I hope it's a dream." It is real though, at least in the dream it is. Nothing in these moments convinces me that it's not a dream. I pinch myself: it hurts. It is the most real dream I have ever experienced. The sense of guilt stays with me through the day after I wake up. (Perhaps coincidentally, the day following the dream was one of the worst days of my life)

Nebuchadnezzar by William Blake. Weird but good.