Squidmek

Last week I visited family in Atlanta. One of the gifts I was given: A Cheshire Cat coffee mug. As it heats up, the cat in the tree disappears, just like in the cartoon version. I share one of the stories behind the origin of the Cheshire Cat--that Cheshire England was home to the happiest cats becuase of all the Cheshire cheese that drew so many happy mice. This turns into a conversation about the correct pronunciation of my name-- Cheshire, the end ryhming with "wire" (how my family pronounces it), OR Cheshire, the end rhyming with "fur" (apparently the appropriately English way).

Last night, some days after the above took place, I dreamed I was in a concert hall delivering a lecture to a packed audience on the many ways to pronounce the name "Cheshire." The subtle differences, what each implies, and so forth ( I remember none of these). The climax of my discussion--using a laser pointer and pointing toward the cardboard cut-out tree beside me on the stage. I mention the "cat in the tree", to everyone's confusion--and then, the Cheshire Cat appears, smiling. Everyone applauds.

I believe the cable companies deliver free pay channels during much of December in hopes of making you subscribe. The odds are you will be found, much like myself, nappy and comfortable after too much food and spiked eggnog at 3PM many times within the week. And nothing, then, seems better than free movie channels. On Friday I sat on the couch, also very tired from travel, and watched no less than 5 movies in a row. Unfortunately for HBO, on Saturday I was disgusted with myself and turned the TV off for 3 days. My point--on Friday I watched Dreamscape, a 1984 film starring Dennis Quaid about dreaming. Interesting side note: this was the first PG 13 film.

The basic premise--psychics (like Quaid) have the ability, with the help of "advanced techonology" (computers the size of VW's, cellphones the size of microwaves), to enter people's dreams. What was so fascinating was that even in a popular film like this dreams and dream-lore make their way into public consciousness and form how we think of dreams. What I mean is since we don't really "know" what dreaming is it's great to witness being told what "it is" by a fiction (the movie) and it simply being taken for granted that we will believe it. And, odds are, that I did when I first saw it 23 years ago (wow). Max Von Sydow, the head of the research project, explains that with an objective witness to the dream we can "know" exactly what's bothering the patient. He has complete and scientific faith in the meaning of manifest content.

The whole concept was similar to lucid dreaming, by more like aided lucidity. You are told by the pyschic who enters your dream that you are dreaming. It's funny how the entrance of the psychic into the dream--physically, fully and bodily Quaid is in the dream--is not bizarre at all to the dreamer. After all, it's a dream. The catch is--another bit of dream-lore just taken for granted--that if you die in your dream, you die in reality. SO, of course, the President of the US becomes a patient (he's suffering from apocalyptic holocaust dreams that one could call symptomatic of the cold war era. maybe a dream of the collective unconscious making and viewing the film? ) and one of the other psychics decides to assasinate him in the dream. Quaid saves the day. Funny: Quaid at one point decides to enter the dream (he no longer needs technology, he has become very powerful) of the female doctor who has been avoiding and rebuffing his advances toward her. In the dream he seduces her, as she helplessly sleeps, and I couldn't help but think that it was very much like rape. Of course, she's upset when she wakes and finds him sitting beside her, but soon enough they fall in love...

I often can't sleep a full night, so I'll get up and work on something, read or watch a movie, and wind up taking a nap sometime later in the day. Last night I watched The Proposition, fantastic western set in the 18th century Australian outback. I'm a big western fan, but I particularly wanted to see this because the screenplay was written by Nick Cave--a great songwriter and a pretty good novelist. The movie was very violent, which I guess an authentic western should be. Lots of stabbing.

I napped an hour ago (at 9 AM) for about 45 minutes, and a had a horrific nightmare. I was at a church gathering, with many faces I knew from the church I went to as a child. They had fractured into two factions. I was enlisted on one side, headed by a guy that I happen to know turned out really badly in reality (much jail). Butcher knives were handed out, while my father and other older members of the group were barbecuing and getting the lunch together. I was told that I needed to kill a young lady who was pregnant. I refused to do it. Myself and the leader get into an arguement. All the while I'm seeing poeple get cut around me. Casually, in passing, people will walk by and slice an arm, a neck. The leader screams at me, I still refuse. He calls me a "woman," and I'm immediately in a white dress, much like the ones I see the women wearing in the above mentioned western. The girl I'm supposed to kill comes in the room with a plate of snacks, and the leader stabs her in the stomach. She falls and is crying, he keeps stabbing her. I start yelling and crying, and I have never felt so sick before. I still feel a little sick. And then, miraculously, I realize I'm dreaming. I am disgusted with everyone, and I decide to wake up and go get some water. In my dream I can see my kitchen, even my cats walking from room to room. I wake up and go for water.

I'm reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road right now. It's a very spare telling--very unlike his usual style--of a father and son walking the roads of a barren wasted US, after some apocalyptic end. I'm not sure what exactly happened yet, but the book is already powerful enough to have entered my dreams. My dream last night was simply of my wife, myself, and some unknown young boy that we seemed to have found walking the same roads of a dead landscape . Really not a lot to guess about here, but the dream was very frightening and simple. I do know that I was more aware of space, in the dream, then I ever have been before. Meaning, I could look well beyond our location in the dream; I could see down the road, into valleys, rivers. The world seemed so big, so real. Whereas, usually in my dreams I seem to only be aware of the surrounding space I'm in.

The book uses dreams quite a bit. The protagonist, the father, often dreams of beautiful things: a woman that might have been his wife, birds singing, forests, etc. And he does not like it at all. He feels that he should be dreaming of horrible things, to reflect his actual life, rather than pleasurable things that, he believes, bring him closer to death. It's an interesting take on dreams as some kind of personal therapy. Even though one might resist, the brain might do for the dreamer what the dreamer needs, not what the dreamer wants.