Perchance to Dream
Considering that roughly one-third of our lives are spent in the sleep state, it would figure that we'd have quite a bit of dream experience logged in as well as waking happenings. 33% of our total existence. Like, wow...
Dreams are, of course, our psyche's cinema(indeed, often coming off much like Scandinavian Theatre), with ourself as not only author but also director and all the actors. Things that subtly get stuck in the carpet as far as our conscious awareness of them seem to find themselves into the rem cycle nightly shows.
Do we actually go anywhere? Well, at least figuratively. Hell, who knows? I'm asleep for chrissake...
Sometimes the dreams I have are completely abstract(certainly abstruse)and follow a logic which seems sound while I'm there but completely evaporates once I open my eyes. The closest I can explain is one where I had a feeling of happy/sadness akin to a major/minor chord with some other kinda alteration and was experiencing both the feeling and the chord. A sunny/rainy day. And I'm still not totally nailing what was happening in the dream. But it was a quality of emotion..
And sometimes they're kind of abstract, somewhat explicable but still goofy. Like one I had about driving a car in 3/4 time. A little mind-bending, eh?
It's been awhile since I had a real doozy, but I used to have some total Cecil B DeMille productions in my nightlife. As a kid I once had a dream I had a disorder called "funk" wherein my eyes would blur and I'd levitate. And another where my Dad was 20 feet tall and had to live out in the street because he couldn't get in the house.
And they stayed weird for a long time. Here are a few from College daze:
1)I'm having dinner at Ralph Nader's house. Dinner is cooking and he's giving a lecture, using a blackboard. 'We must view reality without bias', he says. On the blackboard he draws a 9-point star, and within it, "solves" various philosophical problems, much like a Geometry proof.
The phone rings. I pick it up and answer, "hello?" "What's for dinner", the voice asks. "Isoscoles macaroni", I reply- thinking that a rather witty retort.
2)I'm walking along in the Belgian countryside. It's a beautiful sunny day. I run into a dog, who tells me he can fly and offers me a ride. Hanging onto one of his paws as he flies us through Belgium, I ask him what it's like to be a dog. " Ehh, there's some dumb shits, but.." is his reply, in kind of a Brooklyn accent. Soon thereafter I have him let me down, and continue on my way. A beautiful sunny day in Belgium(never been there!).
Well there are more, but those are two of my favorites. For a time I tried writing them down, but they just got too involved, too episodic, too weird!
The unconscious, in this setting, is a Pandora's Box best opened a crack at a time, and when "it" is ready to open. Otherwise you'd feel like you were getting all the channels on a TV at the same time(and with today's cable & satellite service, that's a pretty good number of channels..)
But dreams, if taken in one's own personal symbolism, can definitely help one figure things out. Or at least see what the problem is. I once had a dream I was portrayed by a professional actor. He just went through my paces, interacted with the people I'd interact with, did my stuff for the day. Strangely enough it was someone with no resemblance to me, physical or otherwise: Timothy Hutton. Go figure.
Some days that'd sure be nice. To just hire someone to be you for the day, put up with all the shit you'd put up with- for a reasonable fee of course. But that's a whole 'nuther blog..
Dreams are, of course, our psyche's cinema(indeed, often coming off much like Scandinavian Theatre), with ourself as not only author but also director and all the actors. Things that subtly get stuck in the carpet as far as our conscious awareness of them seem to find themselves into the rem cycle nightly shows.
Do we actually go anywhere? Well, at least figuratively. Hell, who knows? I'm asleep for chrissake...
Sometimes the dreams I have are completely abstract(certainly abstruse)and follow a logic which seems sound while I'm there but completely evaporates once I open my eyes. The closest I can explain is one where I had a feeling of happy/sadness akin to a major/minor chord with some other kinda alteration and was experiencing both the feeling and the chord. A sunny/rainy day. And I'm still not totally nailing what was happening in the dream. But it was a quality of emotion..
And sometimes they're kind of abstract, somewhat explicable but still goofy. Like one I had about driving a car in 3/4 time. A little mind-bending, eh?
It's been awhile since I had a real doozy, but I used to have some total Cecil B DeMille productions in my nightlife. As a kid I once had a dream I had a disorder called "funk" wherein my eyes would blur and I'd levitate. And another where my Dad was 20 feet tall and had to live out in the street because he couldn't get in the house.
And they stayed weird for a long time. Here are a few from College daze:
1)I'm having dinner at Ralph Nader's house. Dinner is cooking and he's giving a lecture, using a blackboard. 'We must view reality without bias', he says. On the blackboard he draws a 9-point star, and within it, "solves" various philosophical problems, much like a Geometry proof.
The phone rings. I pick it up and answer, "hello?" "What's for dinner", the voice asks. "Isoscoles macaroni", I reply- thinking that a rather witty retort.
2)I'm walking along in the Belgian countryside. It's a beautiful sunny day. I run into a dog, who tells me he can fly and offers me a ride. Hanging onto one of his paws as he flies us through Belgium, I ask him what it's like to be a dog. " Ehh, there's some dumb shits, but.." is his reply, in kind of a Brooklyn accent. Soon thereafter I have him let me down, and continue on my way. A beautiful sunny day in Belgium(never been there!).
Well there are more, but those are two of my favorites. For a time I tried writing them down, but they just got too involved, too episodic, too weird!
The unconscious, in this setting, is a Pandora's Box best opened a crack at a time, and when "it" is ready to open. Otherwise you'd feel like you were getting all the channels on a TV at the same time(and with today's cable & satellite service, that's a pretty good number of channels..)
But dreams, if taken in one's own personal symbolism, can definitely help one figure things out. Or at least see what the problem is. I once had a dream I was portrayed by a professional actor. He just went through my paces, interacted with the people I'd interact with, did my stuff for the day. Strangely enough it was someone with no resemblance to me, physical or otherwise: Timothy Hutton. Go figure.
Some days that'd sure be nice. To just hire someone to be you for the day, put up with all the shit you'd put up with- for a reasonable fee of course. But that's a whole 'nuther blog..
posted by Roger U Roundly at 10:41 PM
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