Dream disciplines

[lapsedmodernist]

Sometimes 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? sissyhips?

Comments

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Tangential: have you read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell? I suspect you would like it.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I have not yet; it's been in my periphery, so to speak, but I think I've heard things that made me feel ambivalent about reading it--like the types of esoteric knowledge that drives the plot, and the way it's presented. I like alternate reality and alternate history, but I am really picky when it comes to contemporary-authored historical fiction (and by historical I mean before the 20th c). In general my historical fiction tastes run to either stuff like Dumas or certain fantasy subgenres (I am classifying steampunk in that last category). So the size of the book given that it's set during the Napoleonic Wars kind of daunted me up till now...

[msmsgirl.livejournal.com]

funny, I almost never read or clearly hear language in dreams like you do. But I frequently do have another kind of 'flash-narrative' dream, where the dream I dream is pre-structured in a literary form, frequently like a classically constructed modernist short story (or a movie faithfully adapted from a short story, if I were being more accurate) with flashbacks and revelations about things in the characters' pasts that unfold in my head in the order they would be revealed in the literary work.

I ALSO have dreams populated with larger-than-life architecture; something you and I have in common, though it's not all of my dreams by any means. The ones that involve moving through cityscapes, though, definitely. Bridges that arch into the sky and buildings so vast you can't see the sides, or the tops, of them. But these huge structures are very, very specifically rooted in places for me, and they recur. My dream-hometown-in-Mississippi has a weird gypsy-amusement-park with larger than life rides in the same slightly out-of-the-way location in nearly every dream I dream about it.

My dream-New York has a huge system of unimaginably high highway overpass bridges looping around and arching up into the sky, made even higher by the fact that they're on top of a very high mountain, in upper Manhattan. It starts in the upper 130s (I think at 138th street, actually). It's there, albeit slightly different, in every dream I dream that involves moving through New York.

(And a heart-of-darkness overgrown river corridor cutting across the Bronx, and more mountains, some of them rocky and some of them green and overgrown, in the upper Manhattan mountain range -- which missmimesis has dreamed of at least once, too!, and a red-brick Georgian-style college campus quad on the Upper East Side, and larger-than-life skyscrapers downtown and in downtown Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Gov. Island (that one's not too inventive, it's like the harbor is ringed by hundreds of even larger World Trade Centers), and secret hiding, locking, psychedelic grafitti'd canyons in Soho and Chinatown, and a compressed street grid that makes this all very close together. Not all of these are in every dream I have that's set in NY, but they have all definitely recurred. The mountains and overpass bridges in Harlem are definitely the strongest feature.)

I like your interpretation about it being a literalization of dreams' composition of hyperbolic symbols, though I had always thought of it as more specifically rooted to place, and to desire, honestly, like a dramatization of the bizarro-magic-realist places I wish in some sense existed. I can't recall ever having a dream set in an abstracted, 'nameless city street' where I don't know where I am, like so many people seem to describe. (Including Freud's daughter in your best joke ever!)

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I love your New York. In general I love alternate-reality/magical realism New York, hence I love books like "Veronica" and "Winter's Tale." And that is one of the many things I love about "The Royal Tenenbaums"--the alternate (kind of Salenger-ian?) Manhattan they created.

I am trying to think if I could do some kind of visual representation of this, some photoproject/digital art of this gestalt dream New York, from my dreams and my friends' dreams.

I have less of an elaborated New York geography, because I think I so often have a hybrid Moscow/New York city--my two formative cities, perhaps? I do have an elaborate subway system in my dreams, where some tunnels have the ocean right outside them, so you can hear the waves if the train slows down, and at certain stations only ghosts can get off the train (this existential state is indicated by carnival or Halloween costumes). Some stations are half-ruined, and some stations have sundials that are activated only by sunlight that trains bring from other stations (this makes sense in my dreams, natch.)

I don't have "dream architecture" in all of my dreams, but in a lot of them, certainly. I used to have dreams specifically about pools that were deep as skyscrapers a lot. The bridges split between majestic bridges that awe me, and the bridges that are somehow associated with a series of images that imprinted on me from my stay in Guatemala City--images of abject poverty, and desolate survival in urban cracks. In such dreams/images, I see families living in dirty hammocks under these giant bridges, barely visible in the fog of the pollution.

[all-or-nothing3.livejournal.com]

I dont think Ive ever had literal narrative that I actually read in my dream but I do sometimes have dreams where, when not fully in deep sleep, it feels as if I am reading the dream to myself, something like reading a play. Now that I think of it, it is strange that I can't recall literally reading in any dream because picturng pages in my head is generally how I remember things well, I suppose like a photographic memory in a way. Such, when studying for exams I would write out my notes and read them and then I could recall them with the image of the page I had written and just 'read' from it, from the image in my head.

I have many many dreams about trains as well. I think trains are the most frequent obvious imagery in my dreams. Often freight trains and train tracks as well as subways. These images are often coupled with themes about escaping from something chasing me, police or some authority like that usually. The source of this imagery is obvious to me, having spent a lot of time painting graffiti and worrying about getting caught. Modes of transportation other than trains are common too; planes, busses, streetcars as we have in Toronto.... usually these objects are larger than life for me. HUGE airplanes, HUGE streetcars...interesting.. I had never thought of that before.

My dreams are also never placeless. Occasionally they are a collage of places I care about or that have made an impact on me; Toronto, Savannah, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philippines, Vancouver. It sort of becomes this map as a hybrid of all the important nodes in my life.

hrm this is all reminding me of things I have read by Yi Fu Tuan. He talks about space and place and the emotional connections between those things. It has been a while since I read him but you might like it. The book I am thinking of is called 'Space and place: the perspective of experience'

some things that also touch on this by Henri Lefebvre and Ed Soja.

It is my favourite part of urban studies. Thinking about how people interpret and 'feel' the space they are in as something other than a material reality.

Sorry a bit of a tangent there :)

[nearly-there.livejournal.com]

I don't usually have dreams where I'm reading text, but writing - usually laboring over writing a poem or an emotional letter - is a common trope for my dreams. My dream-writing is almost always difficult or feels half-obscured, partly-conscious. One exception was a very vivid dream where my creative writing mentor at Swarthmore read me a poem that she'd written for a reunion of some kind. I know I wrote down and saved what was left of that text when I woke up - now I want to find it.

My only dreams that I might classify as "flash-narrative" have a very clear genre structure. In those, I know that I am inside of an already-begun narrative, and I know the resolution of the story, even if it's not obvious to the other dream-characters. Those, I think, are about me working out the meta-narratives that are at play in my life at the time. I had a ton of those dreams right before we got married, actually - the dream would say "this is a wedding, and you are the bride," and I would say "but no, not THIS wedding."

As far as dream architecture, my most common place is a hybrid among different schools that I've attended: a central building with gothic-chapel windows like the school where I taught in London, a quadrangle like my high school, a massive arboretum/garden like Swarthmore's, and a denser forest that bleeds into a London-like city on the edges. It feels old-urban: winding and hilly streets, stone walls, and a gritty, empty, slighty-decayed ambiance. That place is not necessarily larger-than-life, but it does surprise me. In those dreams, I'm often cognizant of the fact that I've been there before, but frustrated because I can't find my way without experimenting - it's not quite "right."

Classrooms, too, are everywhere in my dreams. I teach in them (the typical teaching-without-your-notes or teaching-naked dream? Oh yeah, that's me), I look into them, I walk through them or sit in them even when the dream is ostensibly "about" something else (like the dream I posted about yesterday).

[cascadianista.livejournal.com]

My dad is plagued constantly by long narrative dreams that are often presented in text. I occasionally have text-based dreams but not often.

[exterra.livejournal.com]

sometimes I read texts in dreams, but I can never remember them when I wake up. I always think I will be able to -- I can see the individual letters, the page, the words, they are so clear -- and I want to remember them. But the moment I wake up they are gone. am jealous that you can remember years.