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Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
(Well, or tangling them up at least.) I woke up this morning with an image from my dream fully formed. A man about my age is at a family gathering -- the crowd includes his parents, brothers and sisters and their families, and his child or children. Maybe some of his aunts and uncles as well. He is stoned and is scribbling random-seeming lines on a large piece of blank paper as he narrates in a kind of vindictive, complaining way. A few people are listening to him, others are involved in their own conversations. He moves on to something else and his son (perhaps nephew), 4 or 5 years old, starts coloring in the scribbles, eventually coming out with a very nice picture of a scene from the fairy-tale "The Frog King". Thinking about this brought to mind Shekure's observations about dreaming from My Name is Red; and that made me suddenly realize that my insight on Friday about bragging and complaining is exactly parallel to Shekure's thoughts -- with the added clarification that what I was talking about was not "ways of thinking" but "ways of narrating" my thoughts, talking about what I am thinking. And that Shekure was not saying she wouldn't tell a dream; she was just pointing out that the relation would be a lie in fundamental ways.
posted morning of September 11th, 2007: Respond
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Thursday, August 30th, 2007
Here is what Shekure has to say about dreaming, in Chapter 26: Dreams are good for three things:| ا : | You want something but you just can't ask for it. So you'll say that you've dreamed about it. In this manner, you can ask for what you want without actually asking for it. | | ب : | You want to harm someone. For example, you want to slander a woman. So, you'll say that such-and-such woman is committing adultery or that such-and-such pasha is pilfering wine by the jug. I dreamed it, you'll say. In this fashion, even if they don't believe you, the mere mention of the sinful deed is almost never forgotten. | | ج : | You want something, but you don't even know what it is. So, you'll describe a confusing dream. Your friends or family will immediately interpret the dream and tell you what you need or what they can do for you. For example, they'll say: You need a husband, a child, a house... |
The dreams we recount are never the ones we actually see in our sleep. When people say they've "seen it," they simply describe the dream that is "dreamed" during the day, and there's always an underlying purpose. Only an idiot would describe his actual nighttime dreams exactly as he's had them. If you do, everyone will make fun of you or, as always, interpret the dreams as a bad omen. No one takes real dreams seriously, including those who dream them. Or, pray tell, do you? It is impossible to pick from this cornucopia a signature line -- so much in it that just arrests your thoughts and makes you backtrack, retrace the steps of reason that have brought you to where you are.
posted evening of August 30th, 2007: Respond
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Monday, January second, 2006
Weird dream last night that I think was vaguely related to having read John Quiggin's post on terrorism and cancer* last night. Somebody I did not know except through blogs had ordered a prescription of epinephrine pseudoephedrine from an online prescription counter, and mistakenly had it delivered to my address. Then they realized the whole thing was a mistake since that combination of drugs is illegal. (I don't know if it actually is -- I remember a scandal about that drug combination a year or two ago but not the upshot of it -- in the dream it was definitely illegal.) So they contacted me and asked me to return the drugs, with complicated instructions I was to give to the online pharmacy about modifying the prescription and resending it to their address. I packaged it up and addressed it, but then left it by the front door and forgot about it until a few weeks later, when the other party contacted me with a very urgent message wondering what was going on. Woke up singing "Ep,inEPHrine, pseudo,ephEDrine" to a square-dancy tune**, and thinking I should go to Crooked Timber and leave a tongue-in-cheek comment to John's post, to the effect that "If we ever needed a regulatory state apparatus like the FDA, that day is certainly past -- with the advent of the internet and world-wide web, the only tool the consumer really needs to find out whether a particular drug is safe and effective, is Google!" but decided against it.
*Just realized the connection may not be immediately clear: propertarians in the comments thread are putting down on the FDA, is why I thought there might be a connection. And for some cognitive dissonance, see this Making Light post, in which Teresa is angry at the FDA, or, well, at Public Citizen for its lobbying of the FDA. **Aha! the tune was Roly Poly by Fred Rose. "Square-dancy" is probably a poor choice of adjectives, picked it in a hurry and it does not communicate much of relevance here.
posted morning of January second, 2006: Respond
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Saturday, December 24th, 2005
An odd blog tie-in in last night's dream. We were in our back yard, and Wayne and Darcy had come over for breakfast. (Approximately; this is where my memory of the dream begins and there are some complexities I'm missing.) In the dream, they lived next door instead of across the street. We went with them to watch the dress rehearsal of a children's theater production, perhaps it was in the auditorium at South Orange Middle School. The first act of the show featured some alphabet-themed singing, with kids holding up letter signs. However they were not holding them up in order or waiting their turn -- I couldn't tell if this was an intentional part of the production. Sasha was playing a role, and Amy Scherber (my one-time employer) was directing. It gradually emerged that I was supposed to be doing something in the production but it was not clear exactly what. I did not have a script and there was some suggestion that my role was not in the script in any case. As the second act began, Amy suggested that I should read as a voice-over, some of Kevin Drum's posts "from around the time he started writing posts about Jim Henley." This made sense to me (though it does not now) and I gamely started searching Kevin's archives for such posts. The woman seated next to me suggested I should search for woodworking-related posts -- again, not sure why; I remember looking at her laptop and noticing a large key where "Esc" should be, labeled "Sanskrit", and wondering about that.
posted morning of December 24th, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, December 13th, 2005
Microdream: As I arrive at work in the morning, an invisible claw closes around me and lifts me cradled into the air, where Ben Wolfson or a hologram of him is standing next to me and reading an announcement from my dentist, instructing me to remember to come to my appointment this morning (which I had forgotten). But the appointment is only minutes away and I, Country Doctor-like, do not see how I can possibly make it in time. I wake up thinking, "Oh crap, do I have a dentist appointment this morning?" But I do not; the dream must have had something to do with tonight's Unfogged meetup (where Ben will not be) -- not sure what though.
posted morning of December 13th, 2005: Respond
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Friday, December 9th, 2005
(I seem to be remembering more dreams these days.) Last night Nathaniel was planning a long-distance run from New York to Washington, D.C., in protest of the war. "Planning" is too strong, he just decided to do it; and I said I would accompany him. After a few blocks I got tired and said I would get my bike, then double back and ride along with him. When I returned he was also riding, an expensive Italian bike (maybe named Torrino, I'm not sure) that it turned out he had liberated from being parked on the sidewalk. I felt worried and tried to tell him I didn't support that sort of thing. The last image of the dream is me looking at the bike, which still has part of a U-Lock hanging off its front wheel.
posted morning of December 9th, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, December 7th, 2005
Last night's dream involved charting a course for a day trip. I was pedantically explicating the route, with whiteboard and pointer, to Deedee and my nieces, who were not familiar with it. We were at home in New York City, on the Upper West Side. The plan was to drive first south and west, to a Canadian city, which was identified, but I cannot remember how, nor what we were going to do there. Then we would double back east into Toronto, where I would attend school; then east into Queens where we had some errands. There are a couple of levels of misnaming going on here. The most obvious (to me) is that New Jersey has been dubbed Canada, and Newark Toronto. Then there is the reversal of my day -- instead of living in the city west of Newark and commuting in to New York City for work and school, I am living on the Upper West Side (where my school is IRL). (I believe the unnamed Canadian city west of Toronto was a dream representation of South Orange.) Not sure what all this means but it seems kind of interesting.
posted morning of December 7th, 2005: Respond
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Saturday, November 26th, 2005
Last night I was watching a Beatles movie -- I remember at the end of the movie/dream, when John was rushing about trying to produce a film, saying to Belle Waring, "What is this movie? It's better than Let It Be [by which I meant Magical Mystery Tour] but not as good as Help!" -- she agreed but did not know either. I felt aggravated at there being a whole nother Beatles movie about, which I knew nothing of. For part of the film I was onscreen, trying to inveigle my way into hanging out with the lads; my plan was to convince George that I was a friend of John's, and John that I was a friend of George's -- surely I lifted this from the plot of some old sitcom or buddy movie. George and Ringo were rather short, and John and Paul were taller. Everybody was at Coney Island or some similar place, where John was trying to put together a large conceptual art project. I do not remember its precise nature but it involved a lot of props -- scenery, costume jewelry, etc. I was in the process of bullshitting George about my acquaintance with John, when Jim Cross called me on my cell phone -- I pretended it was John and told him to "come on over here, I'm with your friends" (I had suddenly forgotten George and Ringo's names) -- come to think of it this particular sequence had a strong feeling of "I Love Lucy" to it. There was a short sub-dream after this one ended, in which I woke up and feverishly scribbled down the bit about John's conceptual art project on a tablet I kept on my bedside table for the purpose of recording dreams. Ellen woke up too and was reading over my shoulder -- my script was uncharacteristically sloppy and I was misspelling a lot of words. Lots of self-reference in this dream about movies and writing. Ellen said this morning, she thought we should rent "A Hard Day's Night". Update: We are watching "A Hard Day's Night" this evening, and I am surprised at how close the appearances of the Beatles in my dream were to this movie (except for Ringo, who looked more like the Ringo on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's, sans uniform). But: the dream Beatle whom I identified as George, was John; and vice versa, mutatis mutandis. Don't have much clue what this means. Sylvia, in response to the lyric "I know this love of mine, will never die, and I love her": "Sometime you'll die!"
posted morning of November 26th, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
Last night I was reading a post by Sebastian Holsclaw at Obsidian Wings -- it was a long post about a visit he had made to meet the new baby of his friend Caithie in Iowa. The first part of the post was how he had felt out of place in the Midwest, like his clothing identified him as an outsider. He spoke of reading a newspaper editorial opposed to gay marriage and gay adoption. (Here I picked up that Caithie was gay.) The next part of the post was about a restaurant where he had dined, one nationally famous for its mouse. (I think that's what it was; this part of the post seemed to have been composed and edited in a hurry with a lot of typos.) He said he thought the dish was actually some different small rodent; it was very good, "but the end kept running out from under my fork." This seemed like an excellent image -- there was still the main body of the post to read, but I skipped down to the end wanting to leave a comment about how I was picturing a little mouse tail and legs scampering away from his fork; but at this point (in the dream, still) Sylvia came in and started climbing on me, which took my attention away from the post and woke me up. (Odd that I could be woken up by something happening in the dream.)
posted morning of November 15th, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, October 26th, 2005
At the beginning of last night's dream, I was reading an article in a history journal, regarding the discovery of a bag or box lunch which Martha Washington had prepared for her husband. It was believed to have been from early in their married years. The central idea of the article concerned the discovery that George or Martha (I forget which) had not deigned to smell the lunch; or maybe that George had requested that Martha not smell it, or prevented her from smelling it. This was presented as evidence of a lousy marriage, specifically of George denying Martha's full humanity. I remember thinking both, Wow, how would you discover something like that in the historical record, and That seems like a pretty wild extrapolation from the data point. Maybe they just didn't have good smellers. Or something. I was reading the article on the train going in to work and as it arrived in Hoboken, I climbed out the porthole onto the platform -- this train was equipped with portholes next to each seat. I was sitting in the front of the second car, as is my wont. Apparently I did not wait until the train came to a complete stop, because a conductor (a black woman) yelled at me from the first car to please return to my seat until it did. As I made my way back to the second car so did she, more quickly than I, and when she got to my seat she found the bag lunch which I had forgotten to take with me, and handed it to me through the porthole. Not sure what the relationship is between the two parts of this dream.
posted morning of October 26th, 2005: Respond
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