Perhaps every night we accept the risk of experiencing, while we are asleep, sufferings which we regard as null and void because they will be felt in the course of a sleep which we suppose to be unconscious. And indeed on these evenings when I came back late from la Raspeliere I was very sleepy. But after the weather turned cold I could not get to sleep at once, for the fire lights up the room as though there were a lamp burning in it. Only it was nothing more than a brief blaze, and - like a lamp too, or like the daylight when night falls - its too bright light was not long in fading; and I entered the realm of sleep, which is like a second dwelling into which we move for that one purpose. It has noises of its own and we are sometimes violently awakened by the sound of bells, perfectly heard by our ears, although nobody has run. It has its servants, its special visitors who call to take us out, so that we are ready to get up when we are compelled to realise, by our almost immediate transmigration into the other dwelling, our waking one, that the room is empty, that nobody has called. The face that inhabits it, like that of our first human ancestors, is androgynous. A man in it appears a moment later in the form of a woman. Things in it show a tendency to turn into men, men into friends and enemies. The time that elapses for the sleeper, during these spells of slumber, is absolutely different from the time in which the life of the waking man is passed. Sometimes its course is far more rapid - we think we have taken only a short nap, when we have slept through the day. Then, in the chariot of sleep, we descend into depths in which memory can no longer keep up with it, and on the brink of which the mind has been obliged to retrace its steps.
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1013
" . . . I entered the realm of sleep, which is like a second dwelling into which we move for that one purpose. It has noises of its own and we are sometimes violently awakened by the sound of bells, perfectly heard by our ears, although nobody has run. It has its servants, its special visitors who call to take us out, so that we are ready to get up when we are compelled to realise, by our almost immediate transmigration into the other dwelling, our waking one, that the room is empty, that nobody has called." Proust reflects upon the world of dreams. As much as dreams play such a central role in popular culture, and for that matter the popular imagination, I wonder if dreams will ever mean in the future what they meant for future generations? We've long since left behind the belief that God or the Gods spoke to us in dreams. Even Freud's belief in the Id and the Unconscious possessed a certain romantic charm, or at least a logic we could understand. If the neuroscientists are correct and dreams are just one part of the brain shuffling memories and trying to create a narrative out of random sparks from another, more primitive, part of the brain then we've definitely dispensed with a lot of the magic.
I guess this is speaking to me right now because I had the strangest dream last night and it woke me up and wouldn't let me get back to sleep, mainly because I immediately started trying to sort it out. It wasn't disconcerting in the way that scary dreams are, and I have enough dreams with monsters or ghosts (too much imagination for my own good), but rather it didn't seem to make any sense, but yet hinted at the fact that it did make a lot of sense if I just looked closer. My ex-wife and son and I had just moved to Vermont and couldn't find a place to live, which was actually true at the time. In the dream we bought an old gas station because it was all we could afford and we were planning on living in it. The upstairs of the gas station (illogically, but logically based on a David Lynch dream logic - as Proust reports: "The face that inhabits it, like that of our first human ancestors, is androgynous. A man in it appears a moment later in the form of a woman.") was the second floor of the house in Barre which we did eventually move into all those years ago. We never actually went up there, but I knew it to be the case. Repairmen were still converting the gas station into a living space, which included taking down signs and lights - and selling the last cases of beer to passers-by. People were stopping to look in the windows, and we discussed the need to get curtains so we could have some privacy. My old friends Bill and Kathy Farrington were there briefly, and they helped me clean off a couple large flat rocks that were on top of a dresser. There was also an African-American man there that I didn't realize, who had stopped by to welcome us and lamented the fact that I had not accepted the job he offered, which led us into a friendly discussion where I reconsidered his offer (of what I don't know, but he was very friendly and excited that I was reconsidering). I woke up, not with a sense of dread, but rather that I was missing something important that I could unlock if I just studied the dream. Again, Proust - "Then, in the chariot of sleep, we descend into depths in which memory can no longer keep up with it, and on the brink of which the mind has been obliged to retrace its steps." When I woke up at 4:30 I began to retrace my steps, but the only greater truth I discovered is that I'm clearly a lunatic - and now a tired lunatic.
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