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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
People in Dreams1/28/2007 11:45:36I was once given the good advice from an aunt of mine (which she in turn learned at a lecture as a young girl with her father) that one should generally tell a person if him or hear appears in one's dreams. Since hearing that I've tried to make it as much of a policy as has seemed comfortable. Mainly, doing this has been another way to stay in touch with people and let them know that I am thinking about them, even if they are far away. But recently I have been struck with another important reason why it is a good idea to call up the friend who shows up in a dream. It is a question of representation. I am willing to say provisionally that the person who appears in my dream is a concoction of my mind and is a creature entirely of that. My mind, in turn, knows the person her or himself only through a glass darkly: through the encounters we might have had together, and in turn, through my preoccupations in those and the limits of my perceptions. And then I forget so much. Even best, my friend in my dream is nothing more than a shadow of the real person. By definition, the person can have no autonomy. And that is assuming the dream mind has any interest in accuracy or apporximation. Often, it seems to be up to something else, which I'll return to. Perhaps because lately I am so far away from so many people I care about, my dreams can seem especially cruel. Dreams are sometimes the only chance there is to encounter these people face-to-face, in anything approaching the reality of waking life, where the face-to-face is impossible. In this context, calling my friends up just after seeing them in a dream can become such a tremendous relief. Even to get the answering machine, even the one I've heard a million times: the inflections of the actual voice are so far and above what my dreams could possibly represent. All the better to get a friend on the line, to say something, to see how he responds. When I do this, it is constantly clear that everything is different than the dream. Other people are so radically autonomous, and actually so much more interesting if we let them speak for themselves rather than our subconscious speaking for them. Whether the dream is good or bad, the personalities in it are imposed. Whatever truth there is in them is not about the people themselves or in them, but, if it is my dream, in me. My goodness, the real voice is such a relief sometimes, a forced recognition of the meaning of loving a person. It is not to love myself or a representation in myself but to love beyond myself, to bind my life to something it is precisely not, all the more to come to know what myself specifically turns out to be. There was once a time in my life where I spent an entire relationship trying to reach a point I had seen in a dream. It never happened and in the meantime I lost out almost entirely on what the person himself might have been able to teach me. Sometimes dreams can have good ideas in them, but they should never be allowed to interfere with the radical otherness of other people, to allow me to stop listening to the autonomy of others. On a road trip a few months ago (due to the limited selection at the local library), I listened to a book on tape about dream interpretation. It was very basic and had lots of silly music in the background, but the woman on it had what I think is a very powerful and sensible method. She said to take all the nouns in the dream, all the things and people and so on, and draw up a list of my immeidate associations for each. Then insert them into the storyline of the dream as if they belonged. Say I dream about a pumpkin growing on a vine. On my list, I say that pumpkins remind me of welcomeness and vines remind me of plainness. Then I can suggest that my dream is about a sensation of welcomeness growing out of plainness. Does that resonate with anything in my life? What strikes me as so worthwhile about this method is that it forces the subjectivist interpretation, while keeping the dream still salvageable. Even after I've called up the people in the dream and been reminded of their real voices and real otherness, I can retain the possibility that dreams are an opportunity for the mind to communicate with itself about important things. And, more or less as necessary, the blessed people around me can be left out of it. Of course in so many traditions dreams are carriers for the divine. I have never seen God in a dream, or virtually any religious representatives. And I wonder what it would feel like if I ever did. I've tried to write essays in the past on religious dream interpretation, like in the book of Daniel, but that has never been satisfying. Whether dreams are the voice of God or tell about the future, or anything of that sort, I feel utterly unqualified to conclude. Provisionally I'd say, "yes," generally, nonspecifically. In the meantime, though, it is best to sort out the confusion dreams can cause about human beings. |
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