Dreamlife

  In the dream, I am looking into a mirror. I am looking for another face than the familiar one that gazes back out at me. So I adjust the angle, and forbidding eyes stare at me out of the stern, drawn face of what appears to be an Oriental lady in her fifties. I don’t like that, so I change the angle again. Now I see a thin, delicate, androgynous adolescent face, again with Kirghiz eyes, apparently absorbed in contemplation. I bring the mirror back to its original position and am relieved to see my own familiar friendly face again, although I recognize that it and the other two have features in common.
  Whose face was I seeking? Perhaps I expected, like Novalis’ Disciple of Sa

  First I’m in a car with my parents. My father is driving and
hits a pedestrian who looks too addled or inebriated to step out of the
way. Since the car is going slowly, he is merely knocked down. Father
stops the car and gets out to help, while explaining to me how he
intends to go about it.
  Then an aggravated variation on the same theme comes up. Now I’m
with Hector and we run over a pedestrian, crushing him most terribly.
We are driving separate cars and run over him one after another. But I
don’t think I actually see this; I think the sequence begins with us
discussing this retrospectively. Then we get back into our cars and
drive back to our hotel (perhaps this occurs during one of our M3
pilgrimages?) As soon as we park, there’s a cop beside me; he asks to
see my license. I realize I’ve left it in the hotel with my belongings
and offer to run in and get it. To my great surprise, he allows this. I
get out of my car while the cop walks over to Hector, in the adjacent
parking spot and begins describing in grim detail the injuries
sustained by the pedestrian we ran over. His tone is not outraged but
rather darkly sarcastic, utterly callous. (Doubtless my waking life
model for this is the state policeman who questioned me after our
neighbours, the Heinz brothers, had their shootout back in ’99).
  I enter our hotel. Once past the walls, it’s like a little
earthly paradise, with lush vegetation covering the expansive grounds.
Everyone I see appears to be in very high spirits. In my distress, I
feel completely alienated from the gaiety of this place. I get a hotel
employee, a middle aged Oriental lady, to remind me what room I am
lodging in. I then seek to provision myself with food. What my intent
is, I know not. Perhaps to barricade myself in my room and hope the cop
gives up and goes away?

  My dream finds me walking down a relatively narrow path. I might call this a tunnel, since it is covered, but the sides are mostly open, so it is more adequately described as a covered path. At the end of it, I come upon what looks like the tower of a Gothic cathedral of, err, towering proportions. A cathedral is, indeed, my destination but I know it is not this one. However, I do expect to find here some means of ingress to the place I seek. I enter. There’s nothing standard about the interior. There’s a large dais in the center. Mounted on it is a structure I can’t recall or describe very well, other than to say it is narrow and tall. Although there’s nothing especially neoteric about the hall, I get the sense that this pole, or whatever it is, is older. On the dais, around this structure, a number of people are sitting or lying. I expect what is in the center of the dais to be my gateway to wherever it is I intend to go. I ascend the dais and am surprised to find that, belying its appearance, its surfaces are extremely soft and yielding, pleasant to the touch. (Perhaps that is why so many people are lounging on it.) I walk toward the thing in the middle, which I expect to use to ascend (to heaven, I wonder?). However, this doesn’t work as planned. Although I seem to have correctly activated the mechanism of this pole, it only raises me several meters above the dais. In waking life, I’d doubtless be overcome by vertigo, but here I am simply stumped, wondering how I can ascend further. Perhaps it is my agitated perplexity that causes me to awaken.
  This dream parallels a passage I hadn’t read or thought of in years but just now opened up anew:
“With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration! And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I live, — opaque, though they seem transparent, — and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my birth-day: then I became an animal: now I am invited into the science of the real. Such is the hope, but the fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls, that this winged man, who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into the clouds, then leaps and frisks about with me from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a flying fish, a little way from the ground or the water; but the all-piercing, all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven, that man shall never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.”

  In the first part of the dream, I am riding in the back of a
rustic truck with ten or so other people, some of whom I know and some
of whom I don’t. This space is fitted with two horizontal planks. We
are sitting along the length of them, each group facing the other. An
ungainly girl, aged 16 or 17, decides to flash us, lifting up her
skirt. I am put off by this but others are amused. One of them
stretches out his foot toward her exposed pudenda. (I may have been
traumatized by two films in recent memory that include scenes of female
flashers, Cl

  Recently my dreams have been unusually intriguing but also
unusually difficult for my waking mind to grasp and articulate. Last
night’s dream was unusual in that I was someone else–a girl, age
roughly 9-12. In the dream, I am connected to a young woman
approximately twice my age. I can’t say what that connection is–I
don’t think it’s any kind of connection my waking mind entertains.
However, it is a source of apprehensiveness for me. At one point I am
in a cellar or, at any rate, a poorly illuminated room below ground,
with a man. The air is dank. The man notices in my mouth a certain
byproduct of my respiration. He examines it and what he finds confirms
his supposition about my origin.

  In the dream, I awaken in Steven C.’s house. He asks me what I
had been out doing. I tell him I’d been distributing guns, delivering
some to individuals, leaving others in random places in the streets. He
asks me if the guns were loaded and I reply that they weren’t, but that
I also disseminated ammunition. He informs me that the last person I
armed has come by, apparently while I was asleep/unconscious, and
remarks on what a fearsome character he is. At this, I glance over at
the door. I notice that it doesn’t close perfectly; apparently it is a
bit too large for its frame. However, there’s a chain on it that should
prevent it from opening. Steven reassures me that this character will
not be able to gain ingress. Apparently, we’re both concerned that
he’ll be back.
 Intriguing; I wish the dream had actually shown me my fears
instead of just alluding to them. It’s worth noting that the dialogue
transcribed is very much my waking mind’s reconstruction; the original
is much more ambiguous, possibly neither the words or grammar in
which I dreamt would make complete sense to my waking mind.

  In last night’s dream, I am sharing living quarters with several
friends who do not exist in my waking life. Most of them are older than
I am. There is some kind of division of duties between the male and
female residents and each gender is disatisfied with how the other
discharges said duties. Nietzsche says we dream interesting dreams or
none at all; this dream is nearly a counterexample to that claim. What
saves it from utter banality is a section of our house, perhaps a
patio, that has a transparent glass floor. That floor reveals that our
residence is at a stunning elevation. (How it is suspended at such a
height I cannot say.) Below, I see a land of land of lakes and
mountains, apparently not inhabited. The beauty of the panorama is
overwhelming and so is the vertigo.