When I was in my twenties I was a psychoanalysis junkie. I read through the collected works of Freud and Jung and all that arcane material from Princeton and then, heaven help me, I began reading ancient poetry.
The funniest thing Carl Jung ever wrote was that in his opinion James Joyce’s “Ulysses” was “the ultimate devotional book for the subconscious” since, in point of fact, Jung would fall asleep every time he began reading it. He never did get through the book.
I liked reading that when I was twenty something, and I still like it.
I’ve never gotten all the way through “Moby Dick” though I did successfully manage “Trout Fishing in America”.
I still can’t get all the way through Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” though I did manage “Portrait of a Lady”. I will never likely attempt “The Wings of the Dove”.
I have read most of Faulkner, but I prefer his notebooks. What can I say? Plot is just an excuse for more action and in the poly-tropic perversity of Faulkner’s world action is an afterthought. Read “Sartoris”.
Anyway, I like dreaming and I’m not influenced directly by books or movies at bedtime.
I don’t for instance watch “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and dream about space aliens. I don’t watch Kate Winslett and Leonardo run through flooding corridors on the Titanic and dream about weird foreplay. Still I think Carl Jung was correct when he hypothesized that the human subconscious is aware of images and time that come before our respective personal memories.
This is why you can go to sleep in Muncie, Indiana, and dream about the horse tamers of Tuva. And when you wake up and eat your Grape Nuts you have the odd sensation that you were dancing on your hind legs by moonlight and you may wonder about this while the sound of the Grape Nuts fills your head. You say to yourself, while not quite remembering the dream, “well, I don’t have any hind legs.” Then the cell phone rings and it’s the PTA calling to ask if you can sell lemonade at the junior varsity pole vaulting tryouts and you forget all about the dream.
Once, while I was visiting Austria, I sat up all night with the Austrian jazz legend, Otto Lechner. Otto is blind and he’s a world traveler of a high order. He told me about his trip to Tuva where he performed with the famous throat singers. Otto told me that among other things, the throat singers of Tuva love smoking marijuana and dancing by moonlight. We agreed that such activities are impossible to subtract from dreams. We also agreed that dreams are, like music, purely mathematical. I should add that we had this conversation inside a cave inside a mountain in the city of Graz. Two blind guys talking dreams under a mountain…
So a couple of days ago we experienced the shortest day of the year. Dreams are mathematical. The shortest day of the year is always a factor of the “illud tempus” or “time before time” which means that if you feel funny at the solstice there’s a reason and it doesn’t have a thing to do with the PTA or the Dodge Boys or Holiday shopping.
In Scandinavia where my forebears came from they used to burn the furniture and all the demonized household objects when the shortest day came around. You know, getting rid of the bed that three successive children died in. Burning the sleigh that overturned and killed grandpa…
But of course you can’t have a cathartic bonfire without lots of drinking and dancing.
Okay, so back to dreams…
I wake each morning during the Holidays and feel that while I was asleep I have been riding around the world on a horse. Pegassus is not just an image or a logo for the Mobil Oil Corporation.
I have been flying in the dark.
A million of our ancestors felt this too.
This is why the three wise men looked to the sky. They felt as if they’d been flying. They couldn’t remember the dream exactly. There were stars and there were living bodies above and below. There was something going on that was intrinsic to light and language and the wise men were looking up and trying to remember what had been going on in their dreams.
I wake up during the solstice and feel the nostalgia for the dream. And I feel curiously unsettled. Robert Bly puts the feeling this way:
When I wake, I hear sheep eating apple peels just
outside the screen. The trees are heavy, soaked, cold,
and hushed, the sun just rising. All seems calm, and
yet somewhere inside I am not calm. We live in
wooden buildings made of two-by-fours, making the
landscape nervous for a hundred miles.
So I eat my grape nuts and reflect that I am wrapped in the reassuring and mildly unnerving dreamscapes of this blue planet.
I wake up later in the winter.
I walk around and I can’t explain the dreams.
SK
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