Friday, July 19, 2013
“Dream Lover Where Are You…”
Hearing accounts of other people’s dreams
is about as tasty as eating cheap mozzarella. They may intrigue, exhilarate,
perturb or cause great distress to those who experience them but today’s
listener generally remains turned off
by the telling – unless s/he is some kind of eager interpreter. Those
who, like myself, find them uncannily redolent of parallel worlds, may have
been influenced by Jung’s great work, Memories,
Dreams, Reflections. Every primitive culture accords the dream with
significance. In the so-called sophisticated west we have generally forgotten –
or deny – their importance in our lives. While science attempts a rational
explanation of the brain’s machinations while we sleep, it is their very
irrationality which links us to a kind of other-worldliness. Waking up out of a dream state is like
emerging from an underwater swim and finding life above its surface momentarily
foreign. The dream, still clinging wetly to us, then falls away in droplets as
we transit from one world to the other until. When we are dry again, we have
divested it from our consciousness.
Maybe like you, I sometimes wake with such
a sense of yearning for what I am leaving and a rejection of what I am
re-entering that an angst stays with me as a dull ache all morning. It may have
been a landscape or some other aspect of nature which I discovered like an
intrepid explorer or a realization
that I was in an ongoing, deep and intimate relationship with people in a world
far removed from my usual conscious one.
At times, when this sensation of having enjoyed another life with an
individual or network of people is especially strong, I am convinced that it is
the world into which I have woken that is the fraudulent one, the illusion, the
true dream state. I feel absolute despair at not being able to continue my life
with them.
After one particular event in which it
seemed as though I loved, to my core, a woman who bore no likeness to anyone I
have ever met, I started writing what turned out to be a novella called Through
a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story. The narrative plays with the notion described
above: which is the more authentic reality, the conscious one or the unconscious alternative?
@profjacksanger for tweets
Labels: #Dreams.
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