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Dream disciplines
May. 28th, 2008 08:59 amSometimes I have these not-quite-dreams, usually when I am lingering between sleep and wakefulness, where passages from dream texts are either narrated from my benefit out loud, or appear in a way that I can read them (such as this one)
This one arrived last night, aurally:
His voice is comprised of silver bells. They always keep one of the bells, so at best a lilt, a rut, or a dip slips into his voice. When he is being silenced, they take all of the bells, but he always keeps one. He isn't ever fully mute.
I am actually really curious if anyone else experiences these kinds of flash-narrative dreams. It seems to me that a lot of dominant features of the way my dreams work are somehow more about structure or metanarrative than narrative. Of course, I have recurrent dream themes, like everyone--most notably involving an elaborate dream network of all things related to trains, including train tracks, elaborate and baroque or run-down and dusty train stations, active and abandoned trains, subway systems that are hybrids of the Moscow and the New York metro systems, etc.--but the two really persistent and unifying aspects of my dreams have to do with language and architecture--so, really--structures.
So much of my dream world is constructed around revelations through text, through the reading I do in dreams. Dream reading, of course, where letters are liable to turn into insects and crawl off the page, or, in true apopheniac fashion, the messages are spelled out, literally, in clouds. Same with word games and puns. Of course, if Lacan is right and the unconscious is structured like language, then my dreams really try to make the connection very explicit, with results that range from feverish-surreal to hyper-symblolic.
The other dominant feature of my dream world is the dream architecture. It is an almost constant feature of my dreams, regardless of the subject, or the emotional hue of the dream, and I can't say that it's a leitmotif in the same way that the trains are. My dreams happen in a world of larger-than-life architecture. Bridges that arch into the sky, so tall that it is impossible to see where they end. Swimming pools the size of inverted skyscrapers. And maybe this is a terribly literal way of thinking about it, but architecture is all about the way your surroundings are structured, right? So is this a kind of meta-aspect of my dreams, where they translate the larger-than-life, hyperbolic essence of dream-reality, into visual representations that serve no narrative or symbolic function in specific dreams except to highlight the way in which dreams are made up of raw symbols? Like names in a Howard Barker play?
thoughts, anyone?![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sissyhips?
This one arrived last night, aurally:
His voice is comprised of silver bells. They always keep one of the bells, so at best a lilt, a rut, or a dip slips into his voice. When he is being silenced, they take all of the bells, but he always keeps one. He isn't ever fully mute.
I am actually really curious if anyone else experiences these kinds of flash-narrative dreams. It seems to me that a lot of dominant features of the way my dreams work are somehow more about structure or metanarrative than narrative. Of course, I have recurrent dream themes, like everyone--most notably involving an elaborate dream network of all things related to trains, including train tracks, elaborate and baroque or run-down and dusty train stations, active and abandoned trains, subway systems that are hybrids of the Moscow and the New York metro systems, etc.--but the two really persistent and unifying aspects of my dreams have to do with language and architecture--so, really--structures.
So much of my dream world is constructed around revelations through text, through the reading I do in dreams. Dream reading, of course, where letters are liable to turn into insects and crawl off the page, or, in true apopheniac fashion, the messages are spelled out, literally, in clouds. Same with word games and puns. Of course, if Lacan is right and the unconscious is structured like language, then my dreams really try to make the connection very explicit, with results that range from feverish-surreal to hyper-symblolic.
The other dominant feature of my dream world is the dream architecture. It is an almost constant feature of my dreams, regardless of the subject, or the emotional hue of the dream, and I can't say that it's a leitmotif in the same way that the trains are. My dreams happen in a world of larger-than-life architecture. Bridges that arch into the sky, so tall that it is impossible to see where they end. Swimming pools the size of inverted skyscrapers. And maybe this is a terribly literal way of thinking about it, but architecture is all about the way your surroundings are structured, right? So is this a kind of meta-aspect of my dreams, where they translate the larger-than-life, hyperbolic essence of dream-reality, into visual representations that serve no narrative or symbolic function in specific dreams except to highlight the way in which dreams are made up of raw symbols? Like names in a Howard Barker play?
thoughts, anyone?
sissyhips?
