Squidmek

This was last night.

I'm standing at the top of a flight of stairs looking down at two people sitting on an orange sofa. I know them very well, but I do not recognize them--now or in the dream. In my hand is an electric toothbrush without the brush head, imagine a screwdriver that vibrates. I pretend it is an electric shaver and mime that I am shaving with it. This makes the two on the sofa laugh hysterically. The woman says something to the effect of, 'he's doing it again," as if this is a joke of some sort that I do often. They continue laughing. Suddenly, I am standing next to them and I am ripping holes in the the sofa cushion with the electric toothbrush. This is not done aggressively. In fact, the two on the sofa continue laughing. I turn and see that I am at the top of the stairs, although I can't see my face. Then I am actually at the top of the stairs, and the whole scene begins to repeat itself.

Really enjoyed the class, especially the intimacy of the small group and the conversational style of our Professor Tougaw. And I've often wished that professors would incorporate other perspectives in class. Approaching music as a text, for me, encourages other ways of reading standard texts. For instance, it's easy for me to forget that the work doesn't fall out of the sky. I tend to think of great books, some more than others, as self-contained works, as if they were divine-born without parents. Listening to music and reading contemporary lyrics somehow recognize the author/composer immediately. The act of making the art seems more present than when reading a book. I guess what I'm saying is that it somehow reminds me of the humanity of the book. That someone sat at a desk and worked at it. This may seem silly and obvious, but for those who write it can be very comforting. Without it, the work, the task of making a story can seem very daunting--as if you are too imperfect to do so.

Side note: ...I am curious though as to why more men don't care for English. There seem to be less and less male students in my classes, and now I'm the only male student in this class. Absolutely not a complaint, I'm just curious. Last week I actually got laughed at by a grown man when I said that I was an English major.
Granted, he was wearing a torn red wife-beater that said "USA, Love it or Leave it." He really was.

I'm in a parking lot. There is a large green car in front of me, out of it steps a woman she tells me to follow her to her car. It's parked in a parking structure in front of the lot. We enter the structure and the concrete ceiling gets lower and lower as we aproach her car. Soon we are on our bellies crawling toward the car. The entire time I'm concerned with how we will drive the car out. It's very claustrophobic; the cieling is now scraping against the top of my head, and I can't go any further, completely stuck and panicking. I'm then in the house behind the lot, standing in a bedroom. The woman is lying on the bed, but I know it's not really her--that if I touch her she will crack and break like an eggshell. She then begins to crack and collapse inward, so I turn and run to the lot out front where the car is waiting. The woman gets out of the car.

--I'm not sure if this has always happened, but since the class started the majority of my dreams seem to be cyclical like this, as if they could loop over and over.

Not a particularly exciting dream, but one that I used to get almost every night for an entire summer. I was eighteen and working in a UPS shipping facility. I packed the trucks with boxes, building wall after wall, tall stacks of boxes. And every night, it seems, I went home and dreamed of building walls of boxes. It was particularly frustrating because I never felt as if a I got a break from work. It interests me because I would imagine the mind would attempt relieve the body somehow with diversions or some other type of dream, rather than reliving the very same daily action. Is the mind not completely in control of itself, as in, sufficient repetition bars the mind's ability to creatively dream? Or is it far more complex--the mind's way of convincing the body of a futile activity? In other words, did my dreams asist in convincing me to quit, which I did, earlier than I would've without them them? Was that an unconscious choice I made ? I now only use FedEx.

I'm standing in the diamond of Met's field, among a small group. Someone shouts that we should look up. There is a plane, a very old plane [like that of early twentieth century flight films], and it's circling the stadium at a very fast pace. It explodes behind a cloud into flames. We all begin to shout and point. I see another plane, a large contemporary plane, coming straight at the stadium. It crashes into the side of the stadium, exploding into flames. The sky is now practically raining planes. Two cars jump through the hole in the side of the stadium, and they head straight for us. At one point I'm in the car and I hear the driver--who is an actor, but I can't remember where I've seen him before--shouting that "we should cut them off." They run over a few of the onlookers and stop in front of us. They are sunburned badly, and begin to explain that the sun has not burned them. One is screaming that "there's vitamin D everywhere!" I realize that the drivers of the cars are not there to kill us, but will do so somehow. I begin to look for my wife. I see her running into a zoo. I chase after and see her run behind a tree that is hanging with dozens of large snakes--heads as big as dog heads. I see that my skin is turning red, as if sun burned. A particularly large snake opens its mouth, huge sharp teeth, and I demand to speak with my wife.

2 nights ago:

I'm looking for a restroom. I find a small door at the top of a ladder, and climb it. Inside is a restroom the size of a football stadium. One stall after another, for what seems like miles. I soon realize that each stall is packed with people. It seems that the "restroom" is next to a drive-in movie, and there is no roof on the restroom. So people are in the restroom stalls watching the film, so as to avoid paying for the movie. I see a door, open it and enter a red room. Candles are burning, slow music is playing and all the furniture is lined in fur. However, I brush against the furniture and the fur sticks to my clothing. I think it is human hair. I run from the room and find that I'm being chased by twin men--both accusing me of stealing their football helmet. I duck into a stall, and find myself explaning to a woman that I did not steal the helmet. I then realize I'm wearing the helmet. She says she needs help looking for something. I volunteer to help. I don't remember what it is we talk about while looking, but there are definitely sexual overtones to our brief conversation. Unfortunately, I awake right then.

I am in a boat, a small boat holding me and my wife. We are in a line of boats. In front of us are hurdles. We are instructed to jump each of the hurdles with the boats. It seems impossible to us, however we begin to do just that. A very brief dream, ending with us knocking over a hurdle and apparently crashing into the camera through which I'm watching the dream.

I'm wondering if Freud's good ideas and his not so good applications are so easily separable. Prof. Tougaw, I believe, is correct. It's not so easy to dismiss his imperfections, while he seems responsible for so many interesting ideas. For one, while Sylvia and I were working on the "monograph" dream, I couldn't help but see what he was doing was fascinating while it bordered on fiction more than science/theory. I began to think that the application of his theory--his attempt at reading the dream--was deeply flawed. But the method--free association-- seemed completely valid, an entirely logical way to explore your own mind. Being that he is responsible for both the idea and a methodical way of applying the idea, it seems to be impossible to just dismiss him. Not that this is what I am prone to doing, and not that this is the impression I got in class. Rather, there is often a simple dismissal of Frued I've come across in other contempoaray reading. This seems a blind thing, missing out on a lot of good stuff. Speaking of, I particularly enjoy a particular type of close reading. Often I will pick some theme, often simply a word, and follow it throughout a large work. Almost like pulling a string on a sweater, It's not some groundbreaking method, I know, but it often takes me to some bizarre and fascinating places in the text. Maybe some unexpected interpretation. Freud does this as well with free association. At first I thought he was doing this with the dream, the dream is the text. But actually and far more interesting, Freud is doing this with his conscious mind--by verbalizing the dream-- and really making his own life, his memory. his consciousness the text. I'm not sure if that makes sense, or if it sounds like the psuedo-intellectual poo that it sounds a bit like.

A very brief dream, but one that I found to be very telling--and more, one that only in consideration of the Hartmann reading does it make any sense to me.

I'm in a restaurant waiting to be seated. I am trying to get the attention of the host, but I am being completely ignored. The waiters, even the manager are completely ignoring me intentionally. I have the overwhelming feeling that I am not being shown any respect. I approach the bartender, believing that he will help me. But I am afraid to actually ask him.

Given the Hartmann reading, this all makes sense to me. The dominant emotion of the dream is a feeling of disrespect, maybe inadequacy, though that doesn't seem quite right. In the dream I did not have to perform any particular task. I was simply looking to be accorded the same amount of respect that any customer would be shown. This very thing happened to me this weekend--not in a restaurant. Though there was food and drink present. It was at my brother's wedding, and to be completely honest, even at my age, I felt as if there was a general lack of respect for me and my brother on behalf of my parents. Maybe the inadequacy does fit in here, after all, because after returning home--and especially after this dream--I was slightly embarrased at my own response. It felt somewhat immature, but at the same time I'm sure I'm not the only adult wrestling with this very same issue. Maybe this is too much information, and now I'm reconsidering using my real name here. ALSO: My wife and I have been considering my returning to work during school, but we are apprehensive about it. I've been a bartender for the last ten years.

Great reading, a friendly and informative perspective. Though I often find his illustrations muddy the point rather than illuminate. I also realized in class that I can be a little cynical at times when it comes to the readings. I didn't like the fact that Hartmann seemed to be dumbing things down a little bit, for example, his lack of citation, BUT I have to say I was gladly corrected by the Prof. This style is actually what makes the book so approachable. Good lesson.

Hartmann talks a little bit about PTSD, and how the act of dreaming in this sense is no longer therapeutic. He calls it "psychic numbing." There are no longer "useful connections being made." They "wall off the trauma" because they can no imagine any resolution to the trauma. Yesterday, on NPR, there was a fascinating interview with Maxine Hong Kingston, the author of The Woman Warrior--a book apparently of huge influence, must check it out. She spoke of dreams, specifically PTSD. She runs fiction workshops for PTSD sufferers, and claims that approaching the recurring dream image through the lens of fiction forces the dreamer to confront the dream and the the actual traumatic event, and ultimately to resolve it. Because the rules of fiction demand just that. And it seems to be working for many. In some backward way this seems to support Hartmann's theory. If the PTSD dream can be resolved by way of creatively working out the emotion then it makes sense that the non-PTSD trauma dream peters out by perhaps the brain creatively working out the emotion by way of dreaming.

I really really really like Kafka. I am atheistic-ish, and yet I was raised on the Bible--I am the son of a preacher man--and I think it was witnessing such a strong and strange devotion to a book (really a damn good book) that instilled in me such a love of books. But i have never stopped being fascinated with the Bible. It is an entirely strange, absurd, disturbing, often disgusting, always fascinating book. And when I was first introduced to Kafka, I thought he read like the Bible. I still think so. There is this enigmatic and dreamy quality to the stories. I can easily imagine, two thousand years from now (if we haven't killed ourselves with bombs or carbon dioxide), humans finding his work and including it some new version of the Bible. Some new collection of stories that have the whiff of parable, the stink of violence and death and some attempt at making sense of both. I think there will be a Book of Beckett as well.

The Judgement: after reading this again, couldn't help but see how the story is nightmarish, especially for George Bendeman, so much so that he kills himself, there's a crazy level of anxious anticipation, and despite all that the story is not frightening at all. Instead, it's strangely funny, especially when the father stands erect in bed, holding himself steady by a hand on the ceiling, his robes, I imagine, open and still proving that his father is a "giant of a man." Maybe it's this mix of tensions that give it such a dreamy quality, as if there are two intentions running against each other.

I find Jung so much more enjoyable than Freud. Don't know if this is more due to style than subject matter, I think both. A great idea: "a dream is a theatre..." --made me think of the selections of Lady in the Dark that we listened to in class. "Propsective function of dreams" is a fascinating and, I think, credible idea. There must be some reason why dreams have acquired some "mystical" "prophetic" aura, other than their inherently mystical nature. I believe this very well might be the brain's attempt to orchestrate and illustrate some prospect on the horizion. This doesn't seem that alien to Hartmann's arguement, and though it seems Freud would agree somewhat, it does seem he would focus more on what Jung calls the "causal" perspective. Jung's "final" perspective seems to make more sense. In an odd way, I find that Freud's causal perspective points toward some "theological tendencies" more than Jung's "final" perspective--whereas, he's accued of just that. Speaking of, the idea of the "imago" kept reminding me of the well known Genesis moment in which God says "Let us make man in our image." It's ironic, if you read the text as the work of man (likely not even Moses), rather than the work of God himself--which, to me, makes the text no less sacred--one can't help but think of the imago. It's a moment when Man does just what Jung is talking about, creating an object, an image based solely on self-projection. Maybe the original imago: let us make God in our image. And talk about taking on a life of its own. PLUS: the idea of the imago seems so relevant in our contemporary world. The media seems to be creating an entirely evil imago of an entire country and religion, despite the fact that both are comprised of millions of different personalities.