SubscribeMay 1st, 2012
imagine that you
were in a dark space and around you dozens of simultaneous, but widely varied soundtracks and slide shows played, and invisibly there were perfumed trees moving around you. That’s what last night’s dreaming was like. I don’t remember much but there was a wondrous black and white dog, something to do with the beauty of power, the smell of a Neptune rose, the taste of ginger being like the opening of a chrysanthemum, and at some point I was swimming in a perfectly green lake. The water felt like the play of light inside a black opal.
Frack, that was great.
April 11th, 2012
nightmare
I’ve been gone from that job for just over 10 months and I’m still having nightmares about having to go back there. Had one last night.
It’s both horrifying and hilarious.
April 12th, 2011
marmot dreams
I dreamt about a marmot giving birth last night. It was a messy affair; she deposited the contents of her bowels prior to the contents of her womb. But eventually, the baby was born in a tumble of blood and mucus. They were both fine, and in short order the baby marmot was cleaned up and exploring. And mom was back to normal.
So what does that mean?
Here’s the thing about dreams. What meaning can be ascribed to the images, events and feelings is possible because of the things you’ve experienced, the people you know, the things you want and need.
For example, I know someone who has a sumesh relationship with Marmot. I’ve had dreams about Marmot before, told my friend about the dreams, followed up on the images and direction in the dream and found marmot bones under stands of mugwort at my local colony. I’ve also lived long enough to see the City of Spokane poison the colony and kill them all. So there is history here and the dream set must be taken into consideration.
As for the days before the dream – I’ve been reading Seamus Heaney. His approach to trouble, his relationship with the land, his concept of poetry as personally redemptive suits. Like a dream, a poem describes the situation, its violence and pain but it also re-orders it. A dream/poem transforms the fact of life into an art. When that transformation occurs, a new way forward is offered. Art is that: a new way forward.
And so the baby marmot, born after much muck, a new life follows the digestion of the last?
What new way is being shown? That baby Marmot obviously, but in my waking, prosaic life? I used to live near a marmot colony. Walking past them twice a day allowed me time to watch them, get to recognize individuals, watch for little guys in the spring. I would bring them treats: carrots, parsnips, celery, bits of apple. And when you’d backed off far enough, they’d come and drag the food into the tunnel. Such satisfaction I got from that! A gift accepted.
Telling you what my dream means to me would involve me telling you about my friend who’s partner is Marmot. It would involve me talking about mugwort, my collection and use of the plant, what I feel and know about the way marmot’s live. That would take a long time and many words and you don’t really need to know. But answer the questions for yourself. If it were your dream what would it mean?
I keep getting waylaid by how close dreams and poems are, and how similar the processes of interpretation. It’s a repetitious miracle. Surely, that’s part of what this dream speaks to?
December 30th, 2010
dreaming Yiddish?
I got scolded in my dreams last night—in Yiddish, a language I do not understand. Thankfully, I think, since this means I have no idea what I was being scolded for. It was my grandmother Polly doing the tch, tch, tching and while she was at least nominally Jewish, I don’t have any idea if she spoke or even understood the language.
Although now that I think about it, in her profession (money lender), in her neighbourhood (East End London, Whitechapel Road) it is possible.
This, by the way, is all Lilian’s fault. I’m reading her book The River Midnight and apparently it is raising old specters. So that’s today. I will take the book, and go drink a blackberry mocha in old Polly’s honour. Why blackberry mocha? Polly was a Guinness drinker and this is as close as I can get. Mocha looks a bit the same and I warrant tastes a whole lot better, and I do so love blackberry. So if you can bear Guinness, say sholem-aleykhem to Polly today over a glass or two. Not that she will hear us, she’s dead you know. But it does us no harm to honour our mortality by remembering our dead.
December 28th, 2010
more Hillman
When left to my own devices, I seem to follow a trail laid out by books themselves. Without reading lists generated in classrooms or book club participation, I don’t think about what to read next. There’s no need. I seem to live in a universe where I am mostly blind to what exists, or perhaps deaf to the languages of frog and tree, of body and branch. There is something nudging me, though.
Call in my unconscious if you like. In a dream I had a year ago, nearly exactly, I landed in the sea with Alfonden (my non-verbal dream partner) amidst an enormous circle of sea life. Whales I think, but all I could see from the air as I descended were giant ovoid shapes, and once in the water, I could feel their mass below me but could see nothing but water and sky. Even the land was too far to make out. My eyes, you see, cannot discern what is there. I just know that it exists all around me. “Choosing” reading material is bit like that for me. I feel a sense of “there-ness” in a text, open it, begin reading and if it persists—that gut bump and slither—then I continue the process of attending to the words. So I never know what I am going to read next; I don’t know where the whales will herd me.
What, you say, has this to do with Hillman? I found a copy of Salt and the Alchemical Soul and was so taken by the title that I ordered it from the library. After finishing Dream Animals (by Hillman) I checked my library account and found that Salt was ready for pick up. So I went to fetch it. There is an essay in Salt by Hillman, as well as one by Ernest Jones and a third by Jung. The whole book is a delight because it provides such good material for comparison of psycho-therapeutic “genres,” that it clarifies the bones (so to speak) of each approach. This seems to have been the purpose of the volume, and the introduction, which summarizes each approach, allows a broad overview of each of the three narrative worlds.
Reading the included essay by Hillman is instructive of his overall approach to the mind. It is a particularizing way of seeing the world. That is, each meaning can only really be said to exist in the interaction of its component elements in the environments which give rise to them. So there is no possibility of a steadfast symbolic meaning to any one image. Or there is, I suppose, but such a fixed approach is like pinning a butterfly to a board. All the flex and undulation of life must be absent for the “meaning” to coalesce. Hillman’s approach is a bit like Heidegger in a way: everything is bound to its time and place – or every “thing” is its time and place. I find this a powerful narrative and particularly persuasive. It’s a hard one though. One must become accustomed to paradox, multiplicity, the common intransigence of material nature with respect to human desire and uncertainty.
Reading Salt has broadened my reading of Dream Animals. There was a line in that book that caught me when I first read it, that now seems to have more body. He said, “animals as images.” Ooooooh, I thought—and the phrase ran right up into W.J.T. Mitchell and lodged there under his heart. I mean what does that mean? And then of course, Hillman’s approach slaps you and says, don’t do that! Reducing it to a concept, to a sentence or phrase, eats the heart right out of it. Animals as images. Imagine.
Then there is a phrase in “Salt: a chapter in alchemical psychology” (the name of Hillman’s essay in Salt)—salt matters. Oh my is that ever wonderful, because what he means is not just that salt is important, but that salt creates matter – it matters mind – matters as a verb. The larger idea that salt is the body’s sensation (the sting of salt water in a wound, for example), a physically based metaphor that allows us to discern types of feeling, and therefore the trail to be followed to this particular moment of self-awareness, this is a wonderful story. It is one that provides us (our conscious selves) with the eyes needed to discern the particulars of each shape under the surface of the sea. But it takes time and a willingness to follow the trail laid out by others, by the body—laid out by the history of stings and tears that experience makes. It is not a trail we (our conscious selves) can blaze. It requires a willingness to be led, but also to think along the way. It is not an abandonment of conscious life, but an inclusion of the unconscious as an equal partner. It is the recognition that we are not one, still and fixed, but many in constant motion, frolicking, leaping, hiding in the world at large.
So that’s today. Tomorrow?
December 27th, 2010
dream animals
Another busy day, trying to restore the house to rights. That’s complete now, and really it’s been a good day because I have somewhat of a passion for order especially as it pertains to spaces I must inhabit. The consequence, however, like yesterday, was that my reading time has been limited. Today, I chose to spend those moments on Dream Animals.
I haven’t read James Hillman in many years now, but I remember liking him. Despite that I was concerned at first because there seemed to me in the opening transcribed conversation between Hillman and the artist (wonderful plates!), Margot McLean, and then in the following introduction, there was going to be that faulty logic that so disturbs me in some other authors devoted to mind arts, rather than the mind sciences. What it was that bothered me was this idea that the animals themselves come into our dreams. Now I cannot say what Hillman intended, but I found myself fervently wishing it was not the old tripe of psychic connection as it normally appears in works about “animal spirits.” Partly I hoped that because Hillman is really a very good writer and he enjoys language, and I adore that. Listen:
That Garden is a mythical nature. It cannot be found by dogmatic devotees digging in Holy Land dirt in search of literal locations.
What lovely alliteration. One can only admire and love a writer that takes joy in the bump and slither of words.
So I hoped, and read on.
Margot McLean, Risorius, mixed media on linen 1991
As I read further, I began to suspect that what he meant was something else, some kind of respect of animal kind that requires acceptance of otherness. This ability is what he calls “the primordial mind,” and is named “Eden.” The primordial garden is not a place to be dug up and displayed, but an attitude of equivalence, of inclusion, of the assumption of continuity of kind between all the garden’s denizens. This kind of mind is what I think of as the body-thinking; it is what our bodies do continuously and naturally as we live and move within the world. Body-thinking is when you address your dream animals with the respect due another. You do not command, or even suggest, but wait, listen, watch, dance and sometimes converse.
Margot McLean, Heart, mixed media on paper 1994
In the little essay on snake Hillman says
This is the psychological and imaginative work of animating the image, giving a life-soul back to the snake that may have been removed from it by your desire to understand it. The snake may have no objection to being understood. It may be pleased with your turning to herpetology books about snakes, by your visit to a zoo to watch them, by your reading of ancient serpent mysteries. But whatever you do, consult with the snake first so that you do not insult it by following your own plan without recognizing its arrival in your life. For its arrival is a summons to divert your intentions from yourself at least partially toward it.
Tremendous advice, and such a relief for me, since I am reading his “your” and “you” in the last two sentences of the quote as meaning “ego.” I feel that I can now complete my reading with out the tension of waiting for a logical belly-flop. Silly, aren’t I?
December 23rd, 2010
feeling odd today
I had another whopper of a dream last night. Not scary or disturbing exactly but intense and apparently transformative in some way. The reason I think this is how I feel. I’ve given birth three times and each time, near the end of the process when the contractions were completely overwhelming, there was always a brief space when the last one had quieted and before the next swell began. In that space I unfolded into the universe.
Now I know that sounds really odd and very unlikely but it is the case I’m afraid. Or at least, my body was sure that what was happening and my mind, being overwhelmed by the process of living those moments just went along with the body. It’s your show, my mind would stutter before it just shut up and curled in a ball under the somatic rug.
Anyway, I am past childbearing now but apparently my body still knows how to unfold. It’s exactly how I feel right now, like there are infinite strings in the universe and this small knot of them is just the part of me that I call Mary. The rest of them, well they are you and all the rest of what is—and I can feel them just in the same way I can feel my stomach turn over when I am nervous, or feel the heat radiate from my solar plexus when I breathe deeply and evenly for more than a few minutes.
The feeling is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but just there. There is, though, a small (very small) knot of the threads that wonders if this is a prelude to a “contraction.” I suppose that very small knot is my mind hiding under the rug. And, no, I don’t drink and I don’t drug. It’s just my form of an odd cerebral set up.
Why am I telling you this? Well, it’s in part because I am reading Chas Clifton’s her hidden children and it seems to be related to the process and to the dream last night. I am not sure how yet, but as I keep reading maybe it will become clear. If it’s not too boring I’ll tell you about it here.
December 17th, 2010
dream humor
Before I tell you the dream you should know that some years ago a friend asked me what the difference between “spirit” and “soul” was. I remember reeling off some answer (although I don’t remember the content) —It is said that… Some answer that draws a distinction without any notion that it reveals a flawed conceptual foundation.
Last night I had a dream that perfectly answers the question (thinking takes some people a lot of time).
In the dream my black cauldron was 2/3 full of water. (I have a cast iron flat-sided cauldron that I use for anything casserole-like or chili-like. It’s essentially indestructible and can go on the stove top or in the oven.) In the dream case the pot has the traditional rounded sides, you know like a truncated pumpkin. On opposite sides of the dream pot there were two small cracks. Through those jagged fissures rose a vapour. On one side it was “spirit;” on the other it was “soul.”
Here’s what I knew inside the dream: it was just plain old water, nothing special despite the fact that it shimmered and didn’t leak out of the splits in the side. The water vapour coming out of both sides of the cauldron was identical. The reason one was called “soul” and one “spirit” had to do with point of view. That is for the person looking at the cracked pot, the right-hand vapour trail was “spirit” and the left-hand emanation was “soul.” So someone looking at their own leaks would reverse the naming. This, I understood in the dream, was the source of all the confusion about who had souls and who didn’t, because not everyone had such a faulty pot as to have two cracks.
Here’s what I did when I woke up and thought about the cracked pot. I laughed. Not only do we get it wrong because we have a hard time recognizing that we have a point of view, but it’s a crack-pot theory, this “soul” and/or “spirit” stuff. It’s all just plain water that somehow sublimates—i.e. (to continue the dream metaphor) the fact that it looks like a ghost, doesn’t mean it isn’t water. At the top of this site there are some words: There is a difference between what we experience and what we think it means. I find that truly hilarious because in humans it’s such a recipe for disaster. Sort of like giving the three stooges a fire-station of their very own. Imagine the things they would do with that!
Side-splitting stuff huh?
December 14th, 2010
dreaming in colour
I think I’m reading too much alchemy. I’ve taken to dreaming in red, black and white. For days now. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
And I met Thanatos in one of the dreams. He’s a really nice guy and he likes washing dishes, white tea cups in particular. He thinks it’s delightful that my hair is green.
June 26th, 2010
Dreams and bodily prophecy
A short while ago I had a dream that prophesied some potential problems to come. And what’s true is that one of those “whales” from the dream smacked me nearly senseless as it went by only a few days after I had the dream. I won’t bore you with the details, but what may be of interest is how I cope with such things as “prophecy” given my atheism.
I know enough to realize that while dream images may be random firings of the brain, so, essentially is much else we experience. The point is what the brain does with those electrical and chemical impulses not just how they originate. There are many theories about how we achieve meaning and while many are interesting, I lean toward embodied cognition. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines embodied cognition this way:
The general theory contends that cognitive processes develop when a tightly coupled system emerges from real-time, goal-directed interactions between organisms and their environment; the nature of these interactions influences the formation and further specifies the nature of the developing cognitive capacities.
In other words, as Wittgenstein said, “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”
(I would add another phrase to make it: “The human body (as it comes to be through trying to accomplish things in the world) is the best picture of the human soul. Not as catchy of course, but more accurate.)
This idea is where I begin thinking about how dreams accomplish meaning. Because language and concepts are so blazingly important in our recent development, they drown out much of our older forms of communication. Things like “my skin is crawling” or “my gut tells me no” are messages now largely consigned to the realm of spirit and intuition. They have become all but inaudible in the time it has taken to move from Erectus to Sapiens. We have developed technologies to listen for those “messages” – meditation and the like – and now, given our conceptual dependence, we create stories to explain their origins. Since those zaps of insight often feel as if they are not like us (i.e. rational and conceptual), those “communications” are often thought to originate in the outside-us — in the spiritual world. I understand the impulse to consign the conceptually unknown to outside-us but I think it unnecessary to posit another world when our own will do as an explanation.
Our bodies, living and developing in the world provides enough of an explanatory net. Where do dreams come from? The bodily (non-conceptual) systems as they co-develop with the larger set of (non-conceptual) environmental systems.
The body is the model (think of it as a biological non-conceptual framework) which guides the activity of organizing those random impulses into meaningful episodes. Impulses fired because of events in the body in interaction with its environment, are organized into packets based on past experiences. Like rain flowing down a dry stream bed, where a particular rain drop falls may be random, but the pattern the water creates as it moves across the earth is not. Because those body/brain firings originate and are released into a fairly tightly organized set of pathways, many of which result in (and have been caused by) meaning construction of the waking mind, it seems silly to assume that dreams would not have just as much meaning potential as other waking mental events.