6:26 a.m. - 2024-02-11
another rambling dream post: act one
I dreamt I was critiquing another dream. Watching it play out like a film flickering on another screen in another theater in the multiplex of my mind. The memory lingered but the details were hazy when I awoke. (Or at least when I thought I awoke...who knows how many mental Matryoshka dolls lay unpacked then, in that still and pregnant hour?)
But that memory, however faint, did remind me to sit down and recall what I can of my last “articulate” dream. One that occurred during the second week of last October.1
~ ~ ~
Even within the indulgent framework of our little platform, I feel like posting these nocturnal bits and traces is a selfish exercise. So I'll apologize again before documenting: this is for my own edification2. Not from an analytical perspective (although it does get a bit Psych 101 at the end), but because the nuts and bolts of “narrative” dream construction can feel like scattered puzzle pieces; and because the contents of my imagination-cache beg explanation. So I'll return to the well and drop another line into the Stygian deep, hoping to land something eyeless and translucent. A glistening specimen to lay on the table, gasping and strange under the fluorescent light of consciousness as I open my sketchbook.~ ~ ~
It was a nondescript but familiar street in Lower Manhattan, SoHo I believe, and I was walking north with a sense of urgency. I had a Greyhound bus to catch, but for some reason every subway entrance was boarded-up and (as I knew from waking life) the terminal at Port Authority lay an hour's walk away. I was traveling light, not only w/regard to my luggage (I had none) but money-wise (I had little). So hailing a cab was out of the question. I put my head down then, and soldiered forth under winter skies. But just as my anxiety and pace began to peak, I heard my name shouted from behind me. A shout punctuated by the blare of a car horn. It seems a vehicle was heading my way, its driver waving an arm in my direction. Was this my dream-Deus arriving ex machina?Do my parents, in a 1980 VW Rabbit convertible, count?3
They were headed to the airport, departing on vacation; and judging from their luggage an extended one. Steamer trunks, valises and roll-aboards...hatboxes and garment-bags, all stacked high in the tiny backseat. So high in fact that, had the roof been closed, I would have cleared it by the time I found a seat atop the pile. But I made do, propped my legs out over the roll-bar, and continued my journey; perched like a parade queen, or a Beverly Hillbilly.
According to my dad, a winter storm was bearing down on the city. The radio corroborated this w/a Weather Service advisory, and local newscasters chimed in w/reports of snarled traffic on major arteries and bridges. All of this would be confirmed as we turned onto Houston St, into bumper-to-bumper traffic under heavy snowfall...
The afternoon had descended abruptly into night.
~ ~ ~
They were huge snowflakes. The fluffy ones that stick to your eyelashes and lace your beard like tiny cobwebs. The ones that rock gently down like falling leaves, as if they were drifting in slow motion. Only in this instance they were...Because that bumper-to-bumper traffic on Houston Street? It wasn't stop-and-go; it crawled. Opposing formations of red and white, of taillights and headlights inching inexorably onward, steady as winter sap...and the world around us slowed in-kind. The neighborhood scrolled by now like a Disney-ride on queludes, and the familiar became strange and beautiful at half-speed. Everything was exquisitely rendered.
~ ~ ~
At this point an inner voice piped up from elsewhere in the multiplex--so impressed with the level of dream-detail and photo-replication of street scenes from 35 years ago that it felt compelled to comment: How extensive must my memory vaults be? What kind of fantastic thought-engine could conjure up something so intricate on (seemingly) zero notice?This sort of critical self-congratulation is, of course, bullshit. Your subconscious can't just step back and appreciate its own work, because there's no temporal metric to differentiate the observed from the observer...
Have you ever had a conversation in a dream? If so, did the other party's lips move? Do you clearly remember “seeing” that? I personally can't recall such an instance. And why would dream-lips need to move anyway? Why waste brain-speed rendering a detail like that, when the text is already in your head?
Consider further then the example of my “beautiful cityscape”. Both words pre-exist as concepts in my head, so who's to determine their hierarchical relationship w/regard to dream structure? In the material world a “cityscape” is a reality to be perceived and qualified as “beautiful”. But our subconscious isn't bound by this sort of causality...and I'd posit that our “experience” of the qualifier could well exist independent-of (and hence proceed) the subject w/which our waking minds associate it. Clinical dream studies yield only groupings of electric impulses; unpredictable patterns whose purpose remains unclear. A bit of mental housekeeping perhaps, or some oblique subconscious problem solving...maybe this is how we upload data to our alien overlords; whatever their function, our documentation of these impulse sequences has yet to map anything correlative to the dreamer's recalled experience. So it's possible that the raw material of dream-construction isn't “narrative” per-se, but rather a signal-string of emotions. Anxiety, love, surprise; wonder, disgust and embarrassment...maybe the deep-brain is an abstract expressionist, working with a flat brush and a palette straight out of the tube. This could prove a challenging framework for the linear/logical part of our mind to build an expository narrative around. And if this furious papering of story elements over an otherwise-unrelated sequence of abstract feelings happens in “real time”, if it's happening on the fly, then the continuity errors should come as no surprise. Nor the narrative non-sequiturs: bees on planes, crystal clocks, and the like.
This isn't “Ernst's definitive theory of dreams” or anything; I've neither the expertise nor an opinion on the subject. I just expounded to illustrate the absurdity of my brain taking a bow for its own production, and interrupting our second act to do so. I feel like it owes all of us an apology, really.
Which I guess we just got?
~ ~ ~
Considering that the point of this exercise was to recall a dream in story form, that was an awkward tangent...kind of a buzzkill really. But skeptical italics be damned, the memory of this “episode” endures and the imagery, wheresoever-within lies its hazy provenance, remains close-at-hand. So let's get back to Houston Street...
1 Significant, perhaps re: act 3.
2 It's also an interesting writing exercise; a way for those of us who lack the imagination and discipline to author actual fiction to play at fantastic storytelling.
3 As is often the case in dreams, this one was riddled w/continuity errors. Given that my character was too-broke to hail a cab in what looked like mid-90's NYC, I'd presumed he was portraying me in my 20's, but this was a car we had when I was in High School...while my parents were played by their present-day, septuagenarian selves.
As for that VW Rabbit, I think they were unfairly maligned...part of a general backlash against boxy economy cars from an American public who viewed them as ugly reminders of compromises made in the wake of the 70's oil crisis. But it was dirt cheap and hella fun to tool around Hawaii in, a perfect beach car. And when I googled pics to refresh my memory, it struck me as kinda Mod and Euro-chic in its humble way. I'd totally buy one now.
