Dream Passages

When I say, ‘this life is meaningless’, I mean this individual life, illusory though it is, with this narrative consciousness, collection of memories, disquieted estimations of talents, regrets, doubts, projections of hope onto a landscape naked but for the boulders of language we pretend to climb, shadows falling into the arms of other shadows, whose grip grows continually more radical, more elusive—union with the divine in the afterlife, love’s fixed caress, the long afterglow of friendship, the absorption into the baptismal waters of nature, these elusive, mid-life spirit-grooves whose depth contrasts against the felt sense that life is a dream.
Not just that it is passing, as it obviously seems to be passing; and not in the way that is sometimes intended as a passing remark, likening one day or another to a bad night’s sleep from which you inevitably will wake (and to what song?); nor the dreamy sense you felt as a child or grad student whiling away the days in dreams or philosophy; nor to call attention to the sustained desire for a rupture with time’s Sisyphusian iterations and sum this sentiment up in the sardonic conviction ‘life is a dream’.
But to have felt for long enough—and maybe it was a mere idea in the first instance, occasioned by some particularly vivid dream, one that made you question the thisness of waking life—and for this feeling to finally have breathed across your lips as a full-fledged belief, that dreams are less a departure from waking life, a.k.a. ‘real life’ and—how should we say ‘a place’, ‘a space’, ‘a situation’, ‘a realm of experience’, ‘a loom’, ‘a severed existence’, in which living occurs, the dream-reality populated by beings with real autonomy, real hopes and fears, a sovereign nation on whose ramparts a spotlight shines with each night, each dream. When Aurelius says sleeping too long is close to animal nature and therefore bad, he has it wrong.
*
All I look forward to are dreams. They are all
that bind me to this life in which they occur, though
not their medium. What will happen to the restless gaze
when they are gone?
*
I think we have to consider this real possibility: that feelings as experienced in dreams, feelings of joy, forgiveness, or hatred, have a greater purity as compared those same feelings experienced in waking life.1 The obvious explanation is that there is less a conscious subject or ‘I’ to obscure the feeling. It’s as if when a feeling is experienced there are two pulsating poles, one the subject, one the feeling experienced, and when one of the poles burns more brightly the other may be obscured by its visibility, like the light of a lamp in broad daylight. The pole of the self burning in daylight obscures the feeling; while in dreams the feeling obscures the pole of the self. But the point applies in waking life, when we say ‘He is angry’, perhaps we should take ourselves to mean ‘there is anger there, where he is, and it is blinding on both sides’.
We have to remember that feeling is shaped by expectation. When mother rewards and smiles you smile back. When in dreams, as in early childhood, expectation, a form of thinking and anticipation, is diminished, the resulting feeling is the more pure. When no one had yet wronged me, and life was led in blissful ignorance of the darker emotions, then think how it feels such hatred, how distilled the contempt toward the wrongful party. The negative feeling is not mitigated by noble thoughts or platitudes like ‘well, that happens in life’, or contemplated all the way to the Socratic driving range: ‘the perpetrator of the suffering is always the worse than the victim, i.e. suffers more’. Even the richness of aspect-seeing which comes much later and applies to the bastion of feelings, love, if it is present, represents a dilution of the purity of love, e.g. if the lover who loves the beloved tout court, I would suggest that in the moment the feeling is more intense than the alloyed lover who loves the beloved in regards to being a friend, or in regards to being a part of the family, etc. Forms of cosmic love which unite lover and beloved would admit no such felt distinctions, as would pull love’s gravity from its object.2
Or consider the feeling of joy at a new discovery, again it’s because there are no previous instances of ‘well we found that sort of thing before’ to corrupt the feeling by creating within the subject an expectation of how future experiences will unfold. So that we can see why the feelings experiences in dreams are similarly pure, because within the mind of the subject, they no more have to conform to expectations, internalized social pressures perhaps, than a child’s imagination is stifled when it gives birth to the feeling of play. The glee on the child’s face is as obvious as it can be, unrehearsed, unpracticed yet improvisational masterpiece, a reading of the score which is the corresponding feeling conducted by the composter themselves. So the mind in dreams, or if we don’t wish to reify ‘mind’, so the dream unscrolls, builds, morphs, crumbles in despair, bolsters new hopes which are not some outward signs of the body (rolling over in sleep or whatever) but the will’s coming to life by being made impersonal, when the ‘I’ is stripped away like the clothing of Gilgamesh when he rides the river of death with his tattered royal garb as a sail, and is thereby regenerated.
That in dreams there can be the same sort of cathartic giving-over of self into, or projected onto, something greater, as occurs as the watermark of a therapy session or at the feet of a Baptismal fount if in a born-again ceremony, testifies not to the divine-nature of dreams, but to the actualized experience of emotions in their raw form, uncorrupted by additional conceptual content, and sometimes transcending conceptual categories altogether, producing subtly felt blendings of emotional extremes (or what seem like contradictory emotions).3 I once awoke with tears streaming down my face because I heard in a dream a music so sonorous, so rich in texture, yet carrying such a history of suffering while at the same time a relentless optimism shone through, at times an insane determination. (That can begin to sound elitist. What about the teen who cries tears of joy when she gets the plushie, mass produced-eventually ends up in the ocean, and shares the video with everyone she knows. I was going to suggest that her tears would be all the more pure if she got the plushie on the factory assembly line, but that would destroy the illusion capitalism requires for its sway over our preferences to hold, i.e. to be so desirous of goods and made happy in their guarantee is psychologically incompatible with being reminded that others preferences matter as well, especially the peanuts-paid worker in a third world country who is the last step of the plushie assembly line. So that if it is admitted that the purity of the feelings associated with playing the consumer role is on a par with what is felt in dreams, one can at least point to moral reasons why dreams are preferable: so you can sleep at night!)
*
The fact that it is a certain time does not constitute a good reason to wake up. On the contrary, its appearing to be any given time encourages one to sleep longer so as to be again released from the temporal. In one particular dream, before being rudely awakened by the larmy clock, I was working to interpret a fragment of Diogenes which translated to: ‘I am absolved of all in the amphitheater’.4 In dreams, as in God, or the bosom of a packed stadium, or mid-rauchen in some cool watering hole—where lurk equally fan, devotee, lazy bones, there is a lack of distance, there is no critical perspective5 on what appear as one’s experiences. One in dreams is thus immersed; and from the freedom riding those coattails, one tends to infer that meaningfulness or happiness must itself require losing oneself in something greater, as the gospel lyric sings: ‘you’ve reached the end of yourself’, the way paved by the savior’s precious tears.
Of course, no one, no one can snatch us from the immediate presence of the dream, in order that we might observe directly that the lack of critical perspective is sufficient to settle the question of meaningfulness6, though there is a hint in that direction conveyed by the phenomenon of seeming to wake from within a dream. Rather, consciousness gradually comes to, gathers like Penelope the vibrant threads for its loom, unraveled nightly when meaning fails to arrive, though Penelope would dream of being free from him if it were not this nightmare. Yet the analogy only goes so far. There is no loom, no frame, on which the threads of consciousness rest. There is ‘I’ among them, harshly plucked by the Fates—You simply wake up. It is tomorrow.
How often a loved one will ask us our dreams (not our figurative hopes, but what we dreamt at night, where we really went while sleeping)—depends on the strength of love, which depends on its depth. Or maybe, its faith, and dreams detach from social relations; the beloved might appear through a glass darkly. Love squints, asking us to recollect the dream, to interpret its meaning. Yet when the activity of dreaming itself is meaningful, the question is a funny one. Why think dreams have a meaning as opposed to being one? When a botanist is asked ‘What is a rose?’ the question isn’t taken figuratively. Nor, setting aside strange portents in waking life, do we in ordinary interactions ask—and aside from fishing for intention or consequences as bear on participants—‘what did it mean?’, because the meaning it had was then taken for granted. What the special symbolic import of dreams really means: devaluation relative to waking life, that dreams need interpreting as allegorical fiction, or objects in a mannerist still life, and that they can be so interpreted only because there is time to do so, in which cool reflection surfaces, drawn away from the urgent messiness of ‘real life’, a reprieve from existential fact, notwithstanding that, if meaningful, dreams also must have correctness conditions.
*
Sleep’s surprises thrive in darkness; preferable the moonlit vale to the sunlit valley, and even better the cave whose walls with gleaming faces draw perpetual fire; then how much more complete and perfect darkness can be to suit sleep’s hypnotic advance, in your stockings or underwear, or naked as your mother bore you, enclosed from the elements and hence comforted, to the extent that the vulnerabilities and fears7 that might have lain dormant—unconscious—in waking life, now find themselves exploded in the plethora of supra-meanings, as sleep awakens dreams. And again it is a place, the center of which is always immersed, the critical ‘I’ absent, always situated with some task, what philosophers sometimes call ‘final ends’8, the impulse of emotions, and more narrowly the purity of feelings such as calm and love or excitement—so that the significance of the meanings associated with such feelings bleeds into waking life, and explains the sense we feel sometimes in waking love, life, that the conscious experiences present here are pale shadows to those relationships possible in dreams; that the reality of the shadows on the wall is more real than the wall you climb each day, shoulders bowed, heavy in the gird, simple-minded lazybones who sleeps all day.
Ah the waking scorn of those who in their heart of hearts know that the dream world is more real than this one, subrating this one (which is assigned a concerted judgment: less important), while like Tantalus from whom the memory recedes in which he would relish his own dream-inspired inner life, as he sits with his spreadsheet or waits for the school bus to deposit his runts; that which could provide the most sublime pleasure of recollection—if only he could remember, recedes. It happens in stages. The specific dream content is forgotten (put in the ‘not important’ box by a false subration) and like a gauze dabbed so many times it drains a secret wound, it eventually comes to pass that, quite apart from specific dream content or the ins and outs of your own mind spilling secrets—it is forgotten in general what it felt like to have a really good dream. What it means, to yourself, later to recollect the scrumptious nuggets of feeling-emotional complexes gleaming like diamonds of good will, and to write them down, that like friends, they come to bridge one day and the next, promising each night, Hypnos permitting, the upheaval of the day’s blindness, day’s monotonous hypocrisy, felt anonymity, and characteristic soulessness. So that, far from the ad hoc charge that incoherence distinguishes dreams from waking life, it is the firm embrace of the future offered up each time we blow the candles out, which in turn help ground ‘myself’ as a being that endures through time, and across different dodgy apartments in the City—how would you know, exactly, if what you who are beholden to the chronometer’s fixed progression of days, its incremental time, do not mean by ‘hope’ what I mean by ‘dream’—each can be dashed although oddly only one can be ‘less’, each provides some reason to wake on a given day or lifetime, each can speak vividly to you, to that part that is really you, each can be delayed by expectation, poetically deferred, although the persnickety impatience doesn’t cut smoothly over each, both can be future-directed and concern oneself or others.
But still hopes grow faint. The truth is, they grow faint because they are pale imitations of dreams, which embarrass themselves so often by loving that which even is poison to hope, namely the impossible: either on account of transcending the bivalent (sounds like a clam) canons of classical logic (expressed in the less canonical reasoning that would have benefited our ancestors), flouting it (as when you know that something cannot be the case, yet is; or rarely, as when you know something is the case, yet cannot be), since what can be is grounded in what can be done, and what can be done is grounded what can be done by me, is enlarged in dreams, the modalities of possibility are correspondingly enlarged, with the result that though lame I now walk, though wealthy I am now poor, though old I am now young, though academically credentialed now I am not, and other such pairs of felt contraries which, if they came to characterize some actual person would be sorted by reciting the commonplace: they’ve changed, are no longer the same person. The hopes and dreams are no longer those you once had. The dreams no longer those of a child, a childhood, fed by imagination’s rawest form, so that what is vivid, alchemically might approach a feeling of what is blinding. No, but you grope in the dark for a light switch, as you can’t sleep, your mind constantly turning over its regrets, lost hopes, wrong destinations and mishaps taken too late too seriously, so that hope you could say is their incandescent chattering until the early hours, when the Words the blue shadows enchained draw you up, place your fingers against the wall, feeling for the light switch and saying to yourself—it’s no use at this point, and wondering the exact time, the exact time in your life when everything went wrong, so unlike scores of other times when everything went right that could have; the one being the time it reads on the digital clock, the other being the time it reads in the soul. And while you don’t yet have an answer, you keep on.
*
Dreaming in the city and dreaming in the country differ like tempura ingredients extolled by an alchemical manual—a city egg vs. a country egg—for while both are eggs, one has a bright, yellow yoke, uniform in color, the other, wistful for free-range, is sickly yellow verging on green when cooked, tastes stale by comparison, as though the yoke had forgotten to stop where soil met pavement, and groundedness of country dreaming abutted with this misadventure the grittiness of concrete glimmering here and there with the jaggedness of glass broken by some out-of-towner on a bender. For city and country differ in background noise, variety of disruptive acoustical trajectories, which change the contour especially of deep sleep, affecting its depth, its quality of inner luminosity which you will notice by dwelling in a vivid dream, opening your dream—an I to read the landscape, as your spiritual eye would know scripture—a given dream’s continuity (in itself and with respect to a sequence), its felt-impactfulness upon waking (in some cases waking precisely because of the dream). For in nature, in the countryside, sounds pass over you, are unconcerned with you as some fellow human (as though there were solidarity) or competitor, because you aren’t one, you are just there, in your tent all zipped up, as mosquitos fly against the netting, and cricket stridulations stream densely over your sleeping bag, and a fly berates the lantern as wind and far coyote call intertwine in the distant distance, before the crying out of some unknown thing, mating.
Nor does the wide world beneath the stars center on midnight self-affirmations of a self about to drop into dreams, but clinging to paltry hopes, as the senses are awake, alert to the differences between natural and indoor light. Or lack thereof. How cruel the flight attendant would deprive you of sleep deprivation’s consolation: natural light, since it’s ‘for your comfort’ to use the reading light. Twenty-thousand feet up in geographical no man’s land, you become the exile, the pariah subjected to false darkness, as was determined to match the circadian rhythms of the other passengers, as if everyone were in sync, that we might doze off at the same time, side by side, perfect strangers.
Is it much different with familiars, though, do you feel at home when you are at home, or are nights troubled?
*
If I were a far less dream-laden, dream-ridden mensch, I probably wouldn’t even attempt such an endeavor as this: to try and write something substantial about a type of life so familiar, too familiar since we spend roughly a third of life allotted to it. That if similarly I were to write about the abstract features of waking life I would get hardly past the word ‘I…’ before giving up or changing topics. Maybe like Hesiod I’d wax about right farming techniques, in keeping with my own work and days, if I ever felt the need to record them, as if it would matter to some hypothetical future, my own or someone else’s, whether they were expressed in this or that form, or indeed transcribed at all. But couldn’t there be patterns—we can say, for instance, what we were doing and what we were like, decade by decade without an episodic recall of each day; yet can we say what we were dreaming, who we dreamt, in e.g. our 20s, 30s, etc.? Or do dreams fail to warrant the question because ‘by definition’ dreams lack the coherence and systematicity of waking life—as though those were the qualities that made events memorable to the point of access by ‘long-term’ memory. But maybe it’s more like this: those dreams you don’t recall but must have helped form who you are, are like the acquaintances and influences on your waking life, innumerably many, so that most have to be taken for granted (though bear in mind—you’d recall instantly someone from years ago whom you no longer think about, were they suddenly to appear there before you); dream-acquaintances, then, don’t need to be recollected in order to continue to matter. Similarly for the formative acquaintances whose negative impact you’ve long since forgotten. Dream regrets are water under the bridge under the bridge.
*
I prefer my friends, who are dreams, and to retreat with them into the countryside.
The countryside, by being beneath the visible stars (the stars unoccluded by city light pollution), is thereby closer to silence in the sense of ‘lack of variation of noises’ that aids sleep and is required for deep slumber. Even the appearance of a headlight, while so distal it is mute to the perceiver, is by habit mentally conjoined to the sound of the car whose headlight it is, the noises of the road as it drives, aimlessly in the middle of the night. Star-sounds if they make them are unimaginable to us (and this, even after we hear them, the rotating rings or whatever, processed so it is audible). Silence is the atmosphere of the enclosure necessary to the sleep at issue here, which unveils worlds. The jittering sirens, horns, that Doppler effect of ambulances whose blue-red flashing lights drags stillborn infants to the netherworld, are inaudible if enfolded in the threnody of dream-silence, which salts and bathes them in its braided waters called Styx. The never-neverland I remember from childhood, where at my grandmother’s house we’d sit on a rubber mat in the kitchen that became a flying carpet and Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, myself and brother, would with our thoughts called out illustrate to the preceding generations new worlds and ways of being, though it would always seem, once Grandma was tired, a story had ended and the magic carpet rolled up shop, went back to being a rug, and the far-place of never-never land receded from the focus of imagination, as a young-being’s-future-consciousness took over, asking what shall we do now, do we have to go, what is there to eat? Rhythms that were, by comparison, less authentic, less natural, than the rhythms of dream-life, although they had not yet segmented into anticipated months and years.
It was as if time were taught by waking life, so that waking life would know by heart its compressibility, while space were taught by dreams, so that the dreamland grew vaster and vaster until seeming to lack dimension entirely. Time-space then, or space-time, appears to us as confusedly, a hybrid figure one part worldly metronome and one part stargazer, the calculating self who appears in the dream or the not-quite awake self who muddles through real life as it is seen from a distance.9



The point about purification may in rare cases extend to more complex attitudes. To give an example, I dreamt that A. gave me a bicycle to look after, knowing full well that I couldn’t have eyes on it at all times (I was bringing something into a building and had to leave it unattended) and that in the city it could easily be stolen. And so it was. I later sat down at a kind of reconciliation table with the thief and A. Gesturing at the thief I said vehemently, ‘I don’t like thievery’, and then looking at A. I said just as forcefully, ‘And I don’t like foolishness’. If one wanted to analyze it in terms of purification, you could suppose that purification involves two components: intensification and simplification. In this case simplification results from the attitude in question being abstracted from the context in which it occurs and the person it is directed at (so the dislike of A. for doing x on the basis of y, etc. becomes ‘dislike at foolishness’); the attitudes are intensified in that their conative component is brought forward by the fact of their object having been reified into an abstraction, ‘foolishness’ and ‘thievery’ each of which are deftly targeted in the dream, abstraction may make such targeting possible, and the detached perspective of a dream may make such abstractions from personal relations and our attitudes typically embedded in them possible. The reader is encouraged to identify further alchemical processes that might relate dream-contents as its substances.↩︎
A devoted guitarist I once knew understood this from experience. After stiffness from his joints meant that he had to stop playing, he admitted that, in a low-key revelation, pizza was music, for in holding upright the slice he sensed its doughy sound, punctuated by slices of pepperoni. Kidding but not.↩︎
It is telling that sometimes children concatenate words for differing emotions. I once had a conversation with someone whose child described the late Beethoven quartets as ‘happy-sad’, which seems apt enough. Now is it on account of the child’s purity of emotion when listening to those works that they seem aptly characterized, or is it on account of Beethoven’s mastery, or a little of both? When later the child grows up and learns what is ‘good’ music and how to articulate the appropriate feelings to it, should we even say it is learning, or has something ineffable perhaps been lost? The question is difficult partly because it straddles so many fields. I have heard art critics criticized by artists because instead of using the term ‘titanium white’ they drone on about the blankness of the sky. But the connotative significance of descriptive terms is something the critic can call upon precisely because his is less an understanding of the artist’s medium and more a grasp of the blendings of emotions the terms register, which is why the language of aesthetic criticism is at its finest a kind of ekphrasis.↩︎
Does it mean he, the cynic, can finally hear himself? Or act irresponsibly if theatrically? Or does absolution here mean a kind of silence, if the words of he who is at the center echo outwards yet cannot be audibly returned, so that no confirmation is possible and the cynic at the center of the amphitheater could not be himself on pain of undermining his confidence to proceed?↩︎
The circularity that the critical perspective belongs to waking life by definition, so it could not be imported into dreams, must note that the lack of the critical perspective occurs in waking life (and most of the time, in most people), and besides it is the impression of the dream-subject which lacks the critical perspective which is the point of persuasion.↩︎
In the dream I am analyzing a sense of ‘despair’ which held that it was not only necessary but constitutive of the concept that someone in its grips underwent a kind of zooming in and zooming out, regarding themselves from a cosmic point of view as insignificant, at times, while in a schizoid way unable to settle on this larger perspective as opposed to the sort of felt meaningfulness comprised of one’s actual lived relationships, loves, friendships described at the social level, and when so described seems entirely real. I then consciously disambiguated this sense of despair from the notion of lives involving structured activities vs. being more or less unstructured. Now, in dreams, because you are released from the critical perspective, you are released from the sense of despair that entangles it.↩︎
The purest form of fear, terror, is directionless, or seems to come from everywhere at once, since the body recognizes the logical extent of its own dissolution (and with it all its claims to selfhood). To be everywhere and everywhere afraid of attack. As a city expands into an empire into a world and fearing destruction at the hands of another world, grows itself into an unconquerable universe, until God vanishes it in the blink of an eye; so the self in service of its technologies extends into its devices, its largeness measured in terms of the extent of its control, the extent of its control circumscribed by its knowledge understood in terms of a surveilled environment which creates the conditions for its own continued generation and provenance. It fears the open eye being shut, while what besides itself could pluck it out? That is one common nightmare, anyway.↩︎
To flesh the contrast out a bit, retroactively in waking life a person might easily ascribe the purpose of X as facilitating that of Y, where (suppose) Y is the final end; for instance procreating in order to have a closely knit family. But we forget sometimes the ‘retrospective’ part; that is, it is only after one becomes the old sage sitting with grandson on the porch that it all begins to make sense, to form the coherent narrative arc that broadly describes a life. Details get filled in, ‘oh, we were poor, we had to do this, do that, but we then did this when the opportunity arose, and that allowed little Johnny to spring into existence, but it was hard in the beginning and we wanted to throw in the towel, but we didn’t, and see, it was all worth it…’. But what is felt in the attributions of meaningfulness is undeserving of the term ‘final end’ unless some conditions are met, no matter how important something might be in one’s life. One of the conditions is that the final end can be regarded as important or valuable in and of itself, apart from its effects. Who knows what to say of this condition being met in waking life when what is of value is constantly plagued by one’s conscious reflections on downstream effects of the item in question, as well as its relationships to other priorities. No such concerns are present in dreams, by contrast, leaving it open for any given experience to be more easily attributed value as a final end (and it is really the possibility of attribution of value that matters if value is not ‘out there’ in the world); I would suggest that this is due to the lack of critical perspective in dreams, whose absence implies that in the dreamlife retroactive assessments are impossible, since the narrative structure required for a critical perspective to assert itself is absent. This is why the final ends are confusingly immediate sometimes in dreams, and you wake and think: ‘Why was I dreaming that? That wasn’t important.’ (Of course we could relativize notions like importance to dreams, and say in effect that such and such was important-in-the-dream). The question is a meeting at the confluence between self and atemporal dream consciousness, expressive of ways in which one could be, but isn’t. The other condition is that a final end, if present in life, makes things automatically go better, all other things being equal. The same can be said for a solid night’s rest, even recurring nightmares are preferable to the waking realities they obscure.↩︎
I set my prayers on Phosphorus rising in the eastern sky. The constellations I know are there, whose constant rhythms and bright pulsations are a lullaby, useless unless—unless this piece is less about sleep and the heart of dreams, and more about how they console during a bout of insomnia.↩︎