Dreamlife

  In this dream, I’m at a celebration of some kind, among a
gathering sitting around a long oval table. The only other person
recognisable to me from waking life is Eduardo (I think my memory of
this dream omits a conversation with him). I have a camera with me (a
curious camera–it looks like a still-shot camera but works more like a
camcorder, since the scenes it records, each shot, lasts some time). I
mean to capture this scene with my camera. When I lift it to my face,
however, what I see through the viewfinder is not the hall and the
table but a scene of barren, nondescript street corners. I experience
some disquiet I don’t understand. I leave the hall with the table and
walk down a long and very narrow stairwell to the base of the building
we’re in. In contrast with the relatively luxurious chamber I’ve just
quitted, the entrance is a bare, doorless space, extremely wide but not
very deep, that opens directly onto a squalid, bustling street. I find
the din outside unsettling. I may or may not go back upstairs–I have
no definite memory of this. I take out my camera and look at the shots
I’ve taken. They’re blurry, shaky and marked by an unusual luminescence,
as of fire or sundown.

  I’ve let far too many interesting dreams go unrecorded in the
past month because I wasn’t satisfied with the detail and/or coherence
of my recollections. Bad move. This one, too, feels like a fragment of
a larger dream.
  What makes this dream so unusual is that I’m not its
protagonist, although I seem to have access to his interiority; I
perceive his feelings (not, as far as I can tell, his thoughts) but I
am not their subject.
  As the dream (or my recollection of it) begins, our hero, a
dark-haired man in his early twenties, is riding a light rail car home.
He’s sitting on a long row of seats that face the windows, so there are
various people to each side of him. His interest, however, is focused
entirely on a girl seated to his left. He holds her hand and I can
sense his fondness for her–not all-consuming love but he’s very
gratified by her presence.
  He gets off alone at his stop and walks toward the large,
pleasant house where he lives. However, when he enters, he is informed
that his aunt, who owned the house, has just passed away and the place
has now been converted into a hotel. He learns that he will have to pay
to access his room and to take the meal he’s expecting. I sense some
apprehensiveness at this but he produces the payment the attendants ask
for and goes on to the cafeteria-type setup where they serve him.
Outwardly, then, he goes with the flow. I wonder what he expects to do
afterward.

  I enter my apartment building (not one resembling anywhere I’ve
lived in waking life). In the bustling lobby, I’m approached by a girl
with a sharp face and Viennese accent who tells me she’s come to visit
the Ice Queen. I offer to admit her to the stairwell and guide her to
the IQ’s apartment. We ascend an even number of floors, four or six.
There’s an apartment whose door is elevated above the floor, so that
several small steps lead to it. I point the visitor to that door and
tell her I think Cissie lives there. I long to linger as she ascends
the steps to ring the doorbell but, exercising the fearful self-control
I’ve exercised in waking life, I move back to the stairwell and
continue my ascent, so that I only dimly hear the angelic voice that
greets the visitor.
  Several stories higher, I enter the apartment where I live. The
living room is occupied by a boisterous group. The sound of their
wassail irritates me a little and I quicken my pace toward my own
quarters. I pass several rooms and through long corridors before
arriving at my own ample room. There’s mail waiting for me on a table.
I pick up my subscription copy of Spider-Man and wonder how it got to
me, because the address printed so barely resembles anything
recognizable. Inside, Spidey meets an aged Venom who seems to be on his
last legs. His limbs are bony and long white hair flows from his masked
head. I’m not sure if they contend.
 

  In this dream, I’m back at my previous grad school, from which I
was expelled for my unacceptable taste in reading. I walk into the
seminar room on the second, or was it third?, floor along with several
of the students. These aren’t my classmates from back then but fresh
recruits. Two of the professors are present in the room. I begin to
discuss important authors like Hamsun. The professors’ reaction is
disapproving, as expected, although more muted than it would be in
waking life. But afterward some of the students express enthusiasm for
the ideas I brought up.
  I hope there’s more to this dream than meets the eye. It’s so
silly to dream of converting bigots or to curry their approbation.

  In the dream, I’m at home (but I don’t think it’s my home in waking life) when Hector arrives. Although I had other plans, I find myself going out with him to hunt for CDs (a wonderful habit we had back in college). I then find myself at a shopping center and my spectacles are missing. I want to ask for Hector’s help but he has disappeared; I search apprehensively for them and finally, despite my blurry eyesight, descry them in the center of a large (by shopping center standards) fountain. I retrieve them and then exit the shopping center through an underground access to the subway. Suddenly, I am jumped by a long-haired Oriental teenager who proclaims he’s a Kung-Fu practitioner and starts raining mock blows on me. In the dream, he is a completely ludicrous, rather than threatening, figure, although I imagine in waking life I’d be more nonplussed by such an act, even if the blows did no damage. Then somehow I’m watching a television screen. A newscast reports two acts of violence. One of them turns out to be the murder of the Kung-Fu teen. They show footage of him in the subway station where I encountered him; he’s been shot. I don’t appear in the footage nor does the newscast connect me with him in any way. I wonder, though, if my dream isn’t implicating me in his unwitnessed murder.

At the end, I’m riding the subway with a female companion and am quite uncertain about whether the route we’re taking will lead us to our destination.

The bus I’m traveling on is passing through a bookshop ample enough to accommodate traffic. A large sign indicates an opera section. I’m uncertain how close I am to my destination but what I see on display is so seductive, I get off anyway. Something, I don’t remember what, thwarts my intention of acquiring new volumes. (Perhaps, in a Kierkegaardian mode, I discover it is the sign itself that is for sale?) I’m not especially dejected; being in the shop is in itself exhilarating.
When I arrive home, I have an unexpected visitor waiting for me, an affable, dark haired man with a moustache, slightly older than me. Even in the dream I know I haven’t met him before (I think he’s a friend of a friend) but I take an instant liking to him. The fellow tells me he’s blind (I sense this is a very recent and temporary affliction or perhaps I even suspect him of faking it) and asks me to read him a certain story. I open up the book and begin reading to him. It’s a violent detective story but it also teaches me a lot about Beethoven. Further, (shades of Michael Ende!) it appears to be writing itself as I go along.

  My family and I enter what appears to be a huge, sprawling
store. Once inside, it eventually turns out to be a hotel cum
convention center as well. I am looking for esoteric literature. I then
retire to the living quarters here, perhaps to read. These quarters are
very squalid. The walls and floors are bare and grey. The communal
restroom sports a toilet in each corner. The bedroom I retire to also
appears to be communal, since it contains a number of flimsy wooden
beds. Only one other bed is occupied at the moment, though, by
Carmelita Avila, a red-haired airhead I knew in high school, and the
simian boyfriend who made a practice of trailing her. None of us seem
surprised at the lack of privacy. I don’t recall what I read. Later, I
am alarmed by some impending danger and shut the windows. That may have
not been the most effective safeguard, since a black mastiff of
sinister aspect later appears in my room. Although it makes no overt
menacing motion, I take fright and hurry out. Eventually, I find myself
in the more public part of the place, which is as opulent as the living
area was squalid. In a large hall, a multitude of people throng around
a few who are giving out something. I join the crowd and find that was
is being distributed and enthusiastically received is political
literature pushing some kind of agenda. I find this vacuous and
uninteresting. “The crowd is untruth”?

  In this dream, I am introduced to my son. Curiously, he’s not a
newborn infant but appears to be already several months old. Cute kid;
the tenderness I feel toward him is genuine, deep and different than
what I’ve felt toward anyone else but falls far short of unalloyed
elation. I wonder what I can do to guide this lad to a eudaimon
adulthood. The length of the task weighs on me; I think I doubt my
resourcefulness. The mother is a respectable looking brown haired
woman; I don’t know if I’m married to her in the dream but, in any
case, she doesn’t play any significant part. Even in the dream, I
recall the claim Sarah repeated, that one is always overcome with
affection for one’s child upon sight and feel a twinge of sadness that
I don’t have that response.
  Was this an unsuccessful compensatory dream? Or is my
subconscious telling me that the Ice Queen’s rejection hasn’t
foreclosed certain life choices but simply , shall we say, emptied them?

  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?