Dreamlife

  What a varied night! First,
I was threatened by black magic and found I didn’t have my Teutonic
cross to ward it off. (I had, in waking life, forgotten to put it back
on after bathing.) Then I went to look for food. The shop I entered was
abandoned, with no people and only scattered items on its shelves. At
the end I left with a piece of bread and sat down to eat with someone I
saw exactly once at a party in waking life some five years ago.
Finally, as though I were a child again, I was off on a school field
trip to a stately building in New York City. What the purpose of the
trip or the building was, I can’t say. There were quite a few rooms and
in many of them people seemed to be waiting for something to begin but
nothing did.

  In the dream, I am in class
with Steven A., the effeminate analytic professor who taught my Emerson
seminar the year before last. Or, rather, he and I are in a small room
adjacent to the one where the class is being held. I read him a poem
(Rilke, I think) I have in a folder. I guess he approves of it, because
he tells me to go out and read it to the class. He goes ahead of me. I
intend to go in and read the poem, but when I look for the poem in the
folder, I can no longer find it. It seems to be full of landscapes
instead. Minutes seem to pass while I rifle through the folder. Then I
hear my voice reciting the poem from next door: S.A. has decided to
play a recording.
  Then I’m walking through a
swimming pool that stretches indefinitely ahead. My feet are following
an underwater path. However, I reach the end of the path and my head is
nearly submerged. I look around and am relieved to see an egress from
the pool not too far away. (In waking life, I can swim adequately but
in the dream it doesn’t occur to me that I can do anything but walk.) I
emerge from the pool and make my way to some apartments nearby. I don’t
reside there, although it seems to me I know someone who does. I enter
an apartment that is clearly inhabited although no one is there at the
moment and begin to remove my soaked clothing. I am surprised that the
body–specifically, the dark, muscular legs–I see in the mirror are
not recognizable as my own.

  In this dream, I’m visiting Susanna at an unspecified location.
Rather, I am visiting this indeterminate location and make my way to
Susanna’s. She is living in a very large but squalid house and is deep
in thought in her room, so most of the time I am not with her. I think
there are also other guests, whom I am not entirely comfortable with.
There is also a large spider in my room who I have some kind of
relation to–maybe he’s a friend of a friend. A couple of times he
tries to scurry up the bed or chair I’m resting on toward me and each
time I knock him down by blowing on him. (I think this spider is also
human at times–we’re traveling somewhere and he stops to try to get a
can of soda from a vending machine.)
  At some point, we take a bus from Susanna’s house to somewhere
else. She is not with me when I get off. My destination looks a bit
like a graveyard, although there are no graves in sight. It is cold,
grey and lonesome. Mist clouds the gothic turrets clustered thickly on
the horizon and I think I see my cat Lola racing along them overhead
but I can’t be sure it’s her. I enter a building, bare on the inside
and outside. A room within overlooks the narrow road that brought me
here. I peek out through between the blinds and see buses with diverse
markings there. I realize I would be unable to identify the one that
brought me here from Susanna’s house. This troubles me because I’ve
conveyed my dunnage from my original destination in this town to her
residence and now I have no idea how to find it again.

  It’s been ages since I updated
this thing. I’ve had a handful of memorable dreams in that interval
that I’ve neglected to record. In general, I don’t remember my dreams
well these days but, hmmmm, maybe it’s not just that clear recollection
makes a relatively complete record possible. Maybe it can work the
other way around as well. So I am jotting down very very fragmentary
recollections in the hope that this practice will anchor some more
fragments in the dream stream.
  I’ve dreamt about the Ice Queen twice almost consecutively (last
night and Monday night). What is notable about these dreams is how low
key they were. Dreams about her normally pack an intense emotional
charge (which doesn’t guarantee my waking mind will be able to retrieve
or reconstruct them). The first dream is like a reversal of the
nightmare I had before I wrote to her two summers ago: I’m part of an
audience at a lecture she’s giving and I don’t understand a thing. It
would be facile to say that this is an oneiric expression of my
inability to make sense of her responses in waking life. In waking
life, that incomprehension drives me to despair; in the dream, I’m
simply bored. Of the second IQ dream I recall only one detail: she had
a brother who was a werewolf. Again, the most natural interpretation is
facile: this could just be my dream showing me the misgivings I’ve had,
wondering what I will face in her household when I go there. A slightly
less facile analysis would be that the werewolf is a figure for the
dualities I perceive in her: so supernally beautiful, so insouciant and
vindictive.
  Between these two dreams, I dreamt I was in some kind of complex with
Matty and his new wife (whom I’ve never seen in waking life). I wander
off by myself and at one point become apprehensive because I realise
I’ve forgotten my spectacles. I rush back to look for them, panic over
not finding them, then take a breath and realize that my vision is tack
sharp. A good metaphor for a number of things.