Wednesday, October 10, 2007

And What of Dreams


I began this blog a couple of years ago in the context of dreams and darkness, nightmares and absences, memory and the immemorable. I wrote, in the beginning, of segments of dreams that I had, in the event that they somehow connected themselves to an idea, philosophical or otherwise, that I found interesting and applicable beyond the scope of me me me. Of course, this has always been a blog that focuses primarily on issues of religion, philosophy, literature, and Jewishness, but always along with an undercurrent of dreams.

And then a curious thing happened. I stopped dreaming. Or, perhaps my ability to re-member dreams the next morning ceased abruptly. Or, maybe the possibility exists that we might get to a point at which dreams become indistinguishable from reality, a point where there is no such thing as waking up and realizing that we are awake, and that we have dreamed: truth and fiction fused so seamlessly that they are one and the same. And we find that we are happy.

For many months I did not experience the sensation of dreams and dreaming. This is exceptionally odd because I have always had very intense, often disturbing, and always vividly-detailed dreams. And then, nothing.

But now, for the past few weeks actually, I awake with a jolt nearly every morning (and sometimes at various points in the night) and find that I have been dreaming. The dreams are always frightening. They typically involve someone I love betraying me in the cruelest of ways, or else I walk outside to find that a loved one has been violently dismembered, and I can see it all there before me. They are so detailed, and contain so many elements straight out of my "real" life, that I find myself starting to confuse the boundary between my daydreams and my nightmares.

But the real nightmare is the daytime realization that I can't necessarily extrapolate what has truly happened, from what has happened nonetheless. I wonder if that is really a bad thing, though. I wonder why I need to think in polarities: dream vs. reality.

It is all real.

Tonight I was reading Blanchot:

We cannot recall our dreams, they cannot come back to us. If a dream comes--but what sort of coming is a dream's? Through what night does it make its way? If it comes to us, it does so only by way of forgetfulness, a forgetfulness which is not only censorship or simply repression. We dream without memory, in such a way that the dream of any particular night is no doubt a fragment of a response to an immemorial dying, barred by desire's repetitiousness. There is no stop, there is no interval between dreaming and waking. In this sense, it is possible to say: never, dreamer, can you awake (nor, for that matter, are you able to be addressed thus, summoned).

I think, also, of Delmore Schwartz's In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and wonder if, indeed, responsibility is somehow connected to dreaming. And yet, writes Schwartz, "I am a book I neither wrote nor read,/ A comic tragic play in which new masquerades/ Astonishing as guns crackle like raids . . ."

7 comments:

Casey said...

This post qualifies as literary, Monica -- I really enjoyed it, sympathized.

Monica said...

Thanks, Casey. Sometimes I fear that it is dread, loss, and sadness that suit me best when it comes to writing. Always dark . . .

Anonymous said...

This is why I started reading your blog: darkness, sadness, philosophy.

--Uri

V. said...

I saw your post on Laughter and Forgetting and I thought I would check out your site. I like your description of the dreams. It helps me to know I am not crazy. My dreams lately have been me caught in the act of being unfaithful to my wife and I wake up feeling guilty, but I know it is a dream. So why do I feel guilty.

Great stuff on your blog.

Monica said...

Thanks for stopping by, V. Yeah, dreams can really make one feel crazy, especially when the memory of them bleeds over into times when we are awake. I've had dreams in which someone has betrayed me, and though I woke up and knew that the betrayal never took place, it was hard for me to not feel anger toward that person. It's terrible...

Anonymous said...

Hey Monica,
what the heck happened to Nedric? He jsut up and dropped out...

Monica said...

Hmmm, great question, Anonymous. I have been wondering what happened to Nedric myself. Hoping everything's okay...