Dreamancipation: What To Do With Our Nightmares
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From One-Way Street
a popular tradition warns against recounting dreams on an empty stomach. in this state, though awake, one remains under the sway of the dream. for washing brings only the surface of the body and the visible motor functions into the light, well in the deeper strata, even during the morning ablution, the gray penumbra of dream persists and, indeed, in the solitude of the first waking hour, consolidates itself. he who shuns contact with the day, whether for fear of his fellow man over the sake of inward composure, is unwilling to eat and disdains his breakfast. he thus avoids a rupture between the nocturnal and the daytime worlds — a precaution justified only by the combustion of dream in a concentrated morning's work, if not in prayer, but otherwise a source of confusion between vital rhythms. the narration of a dream brings calamity, because a person still half in league with the dream world betrays it in his words and must incur it's revenge. expressed in more modern terms: he betrays himself. he has outgrown the protection of dreaming naïveté, and in laying clumsy hands on his dream visions he surrenders himself. for only from the far bank, from broad daylight, may dream be recalled with impunity. this further side of dream is only attainable through a cleansing analogous to washing yet totally different. by way of the stomach. the fasting man tells his dream as if he were talking in his sleep.
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The images in dreams, wrote Coleridge, figure forth the impressions that our intellect would call causes; we do not feel horror because we are haunted by a sphinx, we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel. If that is true, how might a mere chronicling of its forms transmit the stupor, the exultation, the alarms, the dread, and the joy that wove together that night’s dream? I shall attempt that chronicle, nonetheless; perhaps the fact that the dream consisted of but a single scene may erase or soften the essential difficulty.
The place was the College of Philosophy and Letters; the hour, nightfall. Everything (as is often the case in dreams) was slightly different; a slight magnification altered things. We chose authorities; I would speak with Pedro Henríquez Ureña, who in waking life had died many years before. Suddenly, we were dumbfounded by a great noise of demonstrators or street musicians From the Underworld, we heard the cries of humans and animals. A voice cried: Here they come! and then: The gods! the gods! Four or five individuals emerged from out of the mob and occupied the dais of the auditorium. Everyone applauded, weeping; it was the gods, returning after a banishment of many centuries. Looming larger than life they stood upon the dais, their heads thrown back and their chests thrust forward, they haughtily received our homage. One of them was holding a branch (which belonged, no doubt, to the simple botany of dreams); another, with a sweeping gesture, held out a hand that was a claw’ one of Janus’ faces looked mistrusfully at Thoth’s curved beak. Perhaps excited by our applause, one of them, I no longer remember which, burst out in a triumphant, incredibly bitter clucking that was half gargle and half wistle. From that point on, things changed.
It all began with the susicion (perhaps exagerated) that the gods were unable to talk. Centuries of a feral life of flight had atrophied that part of them that was human; the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome hadd been implacable with these fugitives. Beetling brows, yellowed teeth, the sparse beard of a mulatto or a Chinaman, and beastlike dewlaps were testaments to the degeneration of the Olympian line. The clothes they wore were not those of a decorus and honest poverty, but rather the criminal luxury of the Underworld’s gambling dens and houses of ill repubte. A carnation bled from a buttonhole; under a tight suitcoat one could discernt he outline of a knife. Suddenly, we felt they were playing their last trump, that they were cunning, ignorant, and cruel, like agèd predators, and that if we allowed ourselves to be swayed by fear or pity, they would wind up destroying us.
We drew our heavy revolvers (suddenly in the dream there were revolvers) and exultantly killed the gods.
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in my telling of the myth, Persephone escaped Hades clutches, exploring the underworld for a way out and subsisting on the fruit of the dead. Hades found her climbing the pomegranate tree and tried to grab her and pull her down. this caused the forked branch she was hanging by to snap and pass through the deathgod's helm, putting out his eyes. the feast of Persephone is a celebration of my own escape from an abusive childhood home and with youth liberation generally.
i also associate this day with Eve, who also ate forbidden fruit and found wisdom.
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They tell me that my bed is a temple (from Latin templum, an open or consecrated space) which i must keep sanctified unto the gods of sleep. They tell me that i should not there use my phone, that i should not eat, that i should not work, that i should not read, that i should not do drugs.
Wait until i tell them about my dreams: they will tell me not to sleep in my bed either.
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Lately before bed and less often upon waking i have taken to burning a scented candle, holding it to my chest and inhaling deeply, trying to latch onto the present moment. In recent months i have found time to be traveling faster than the proscribed limit, days pass in the course of a breath, and i a wonder if a nightmare is a kind of check engine light.
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Anti Questions seek to unsettle the presumed to the point of unrecognizability. Between my boyfriend and i, they generally take the form of an exaggerated squawking recitation of the formula “what would that even mean??”
What would it even mean to be an individual? sometimes the answer is so self-evident that i cannot put it into words, but merely gesture all around my looming mental palace overflowing with empty space and crowded ghosts. More often, i do not think i am able to imagine the possibility of individuality.
If from day to day i am two different selves, unable to hold fast to a steady burning continuum, perhaps it is because the rotating chair has fallen to a different personality, itself a composite of internally contradictory dynamics and Hegelian posturing to its fellow committee members. Perhaps fresh elections have altered the make-up of my constituent assembly. My lung, my hand, my itching brain and my jumping knee are rarely content to leave the affairs of being to the experts, but instead are all the time putting forward fresh manifestos, electing themselves into psychosomatic office, insisting on delivering speech after speech on the tired rostras of my conscious and unconscious minds.
If i write a note to my future morning self, i find it easier to give up the fasces of consciously directed thought and set down my phone, my journals, my books, my pipe. In those minutes and hours before sleep takes me into its custody i feel the solipsistic loneliness i once dispelled with abrahamic prayer. if my dreams are dispatches from this or that segment of my commitas written in the wake of such uneasy closing ceremonies, then no wonder the ink runs like a spring flood overfull with meaning and the characters morph into alien continents populated by beasts and trains and unwearying prison wardens who compel me to move unceasingly through dark forests high desserts and unfixable marshlands.
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