Dreamlife

  I have fragmentary recollection of this dream. I manage to
retrieve at least two messages the Ice Queen left me long ago (although I think she’s aware that I receive them now). At least
one of them is in written form. The other is aural; somehow it comes on
over my car radio as I’m driving to school. The semantic content is
just some unoriginal insult but the voice is pregnant with venom, black
with malice. In waking life it never occurred to me that her hostility
toward me was more than defensive. In the dream, it’s chilling.
  Later on I’m at school (no resemblance to any school I’ve
actually been at, although, in connection with the IQ, I think it’s
supposed to be Harvard; the feel of it, though, is more like elementary
or middle school.) In a roomful of students, I’m supposed to be taking
a test, lying face down in front of me on my dark blocky desk. This
isn’t a test we’re taking in one sitting and starting from
scratch–I’ve taken a part of it before. I tell the fragile-looking
lady administering the test that I want to have that prior section with
me as I answer this new one. After some argument, she accedes to this.
However, the segment of the test I wrote earlier is elsewhere in this
school, so I have to go fetch it. I exit the room where we’re taking
the test and walk toward the room I need to get it from. The sky is
overcast when I exit. The trees are damp and I notice it’s raining
lightly but much of my path lies along covered arcades and the rain
doesn’t bother me. It isn’t visible at any one point because the way is
long but I definitely realize my path describes a semi-circle. Indeed,
I think the place I arrive at was my entry point into the school. If I
continued the same path, I would revisit all the same points.

  In this dream I’m in Zammito’s class. At some point I raise my
hand and give a basic statement of the problem of determinism. After he
endorses it, I mention that for Stevens, the imagination is a defense
against determinism. I am disappointed that he doesn’t seem to know
this well enough to confirm it. (This isn’t something I’d say in waking
life. In Stevens, the imagination resists a lot of things that could
fall under the heading of necessity, but the problem of determinism
itself isn’t something he addresses in anything I’ve read.)
  The overall feel of this dream is extremely vitalizing. I no
longer get to hear people speak with the depth and power of Zammito;
for the most part, I’m around “professionals”, a species related to him
as an orangutan is related to a human. In the dream, I re-experience
something that was part of an important awakening in my youth. It’s a
reminder of the substrate that’s there for me to tap and mine in my work.

  Fragmentary memories of tonight’s dream. First I’m on a queue to
board a bus in what seems to be an out of the way place, since what I
see around me is bleak dust, rather than concrete. There’s a rather
unusual procedure for boarding: A few steps ahead of the front of the
queue, there’s a water-filled hole in the ground, just more than
person-sized in length and width, but apparently deep. The person at
the front of the queue steps up to this hole, kneels and goes into it
face down, disappearing from view (that’s how I know it’s deep). An
attendant then reaches in and pulls the passenger out, at which point
he can board the bus. In the dream I know the purpose of this procedure
but I don’t entirely accept it; I have some reservations.

  In the dream’s next episode,  I’m in an entirely different setting, a
well-tended, grassy complex where I live and work. I decide to travel
by air from my residence to my office, using a device that is like a
hangglider but has a propellor at the bottom end, as well as what seems
to me upon waking a too simple control, a kind of switch with only two
positions. I attach myself to this vehicle and take off. However, once
I’m airborne I realize that something I’m wearing (goggles? blinkers?
pinhole eyeglasses?) is obstructing my vision. Apprehensively, I begin
a tense descent. My descent is slow but I’m moving rather quickly
horizontally, so when I eventually land, I’m far from my destination.
This cloud has a silver lining, since after walking a short bit, I
discover an unattended newsstand with many of the Fantomas comic books
I relished in my childhood. I pick out one of my favourites, the series
where Fantomas battles a renegade lama. However, when I open it up, I’m
appalled to discover that all the images have turned to postmodern art!

When my alarm clock rang this morning, I was on a Houston freeway trying to determine which exit to take.  Susanna once told me ” no one speaks of a car in a dream as a symbol of the self, but that’s because cars are recent
inventions, so you have to figure out how they’d relate,, and cars are
like a second home, which makes them analogous to the archetypal symbol
of home as self.. and there’s the transition, movement element.”  So, could the project of exiting the freeway signify looking for an end to transition?

    He wanted to walk beside it,
   
    Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.
    He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest

    In a permanent realization…
       (Stevens)

But if that’s the project, why did the choice of exits seem to weigh so heavily? In waking life, cars drive me up a wall. I don’t think they’re my second home in dream life either.

When my alarm clock rang this morning, I was on a Houston freeway
trying to determine which exit to take.  Susanna once told me ” no
one speaks of a car in a dream as a symbol of the self, but that’s
because cars are recent
inventions, so you have to figure out how they’d relate,, and cars are
like a second home, which makes them analogous to the archetypal symbol
of home as self.. and there’s the transition, movement element.” 
So, could the project of exiting the freeway signify looking for an end
to transition?

    He wanted to walk beside it,
   
    Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.
    He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest

    In a permanent realization…
       (Stevens)

But if that’s the project, why did the choice of exits seem to weigh so
heavily? In waking life, cars drive me up a wall. I don’t think they’re
my second home in dream life either.

In the first snippet I recall, I’m in the middle of a three tier bunk
bed in a hostel room when the police enter and show me the photograph
of a criminal they’re looking for, a mulatto who may also be me. His
crime is a breach of computer security, but it is punishable by death.
Somehow this makes sense in the dream.

Next I’m in a dormitory or a studio apartment in a complex. Esteban,
the epicene valedictorian from my high school, and Sabrina, a
militant metrosexual from my current grad school both knock on my door
wanting to borrow my mp3 player the next morning. Esteban voices his
request through the door; I don’t open for him at that point. I think I
give him the mp3 player later and get it back from Sabrina, who
complains about how difficult it is to gauge the subministration of heat
in all its forms where we are (I have no idea where we are). We notice
there are no markings on the dials of the radiators and then she shows
me a photograph of a chicken someone tried to prepare and overcooked
because he couldn’t tell how hot he was making his oven. I meet
Sabrina’s family, who tell me how much lovelier their hometown of
Bellemore (not hard to figure that one out) was. (In waking life, I
have no idea where she’s from.)

  I recall two dreams I dreamt this week. The first finds me in
the locker room of a gym. (There are baskets lined up on
shelves like the ones in the locker room outside Autrey
Court; in no other respect does it resemble any particular locker room
I remember from waking life.) There’s a red-faced, unkempt, stocky
middle aged man in another segment of this large locker room. I
discover, perhaps I am informed (although I don’t remember by who) that
he has wronged me in some way. I go over and remonstrate with him. He’s
quite unapologetic and rude. It is decided (I don’t remember how,
whether by ourselves or in consultation with anyone else) to settle the
matter through trial by combat–a plain locker room fistfight. The
terms are that the loser will be transformed into a dog. We trade blows
and I prevail very quickly and decisively. The lout is stretched out on
the floor when I exit the locker room. So far, so good.

  In due course, however, I return… somewhere. I’m not sure
if it’s to the locker room where the fistfight took place but, in any
case, in the dream it’s somewhere familiar where I am often. When I get
there, I find something unusual and unexpected: a black mastiff wearing
a rather abject expression. It lunges at me as soon as it catches sight
of me, sinking its fangs into my calf. Someone is at hand to lend
succor–it may be one or more members of my family. With some
difficulty, our combined efforts release me from the beast’s jaws. My
troubles don’t end there but I remember nothing specific about what
ensues.

  The second dream is far less distinct–only snippets by now.
I am at a get-together hosted by Fred, a studious fellow philosophy
major whom I saw often in college but seldom crossed word with. Perhaps
he is being f