The world may objectively exist but our encounter with it—in whatever way—fictionalizes it.
From most books on writing the novel, you will find that dreams are taboo. “Do not go there” is the general advice.
No one ever asks what novel the dream would write. Truth be told, all dreams are incipient novels.
Dreams, of course, are the focus of endless analysis, but analysis does not write novels, is not interested in this potency, always turning the dream into something else—to be generous, perhaps this too a fiction.
James Walton has reviewed Keith Ridgway’s new novel A Shock, titling his review, “Everything is Fiction,” in the December 16 edition of The New York Review of Books. Read it. Then read Ridgway. Then read your dream.
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“All Dreams Are Incipient Novels…. Read Your Dream!”
During my time of the great unravelling in Seattle, I lost everything that gives one an identity in society. This gruelling process was eloquently brought home in two incidents. In one, I was lying on the carpet in my office late at night having lost my home and family. All my clothes were in the back of my Mazda truck on the street below. I heard a noise and saw down on the street someone breaking in and stealing everything I owned. I was too exhausted to intervene. So I lay back and listened to the noise of the theft. Weirdly I muttered, “he must be an angel!” I later wrote a poem about that event. The second incident began with my leaving my dream book and wallet on the top of my car as I drove onto the highway one day. They were all swept away. I saw pages fluttering down in my rear-view mirror, stopped the car, and ducked in and out of traffic to collect my dream book. To this day I have that busted book with some pages of my dreams enjoying a wide tire track racing across them. I never found the wallet.
But I have since had many dreams of losing my wallet, being in a city, lost, not knowing what to do next, how to join society again. These dreams all had an anxious character, showing my desperate efforts to re-establish an identity (wallets, identity cards, license, job, etc.) so that I can once again function in society, as before. So many variations explored in these dreams…that is, until last night’s dream.
Once again, I get off a bus in a strange city, late at night, nowhere to go, no one to meet, alone at night on an empty street. I pull out my wallet and I am stunned at its unexpected beauty, shiny, black, soft leather with rich sewn lining. I open it and it is empty. In this dream, however, I do not anxiously focus on scrambling to recover an identity to rejoin society. The wallet is in fact displaying my new identity. And so a new question—how can I proceed in this life from the foundation of this new identity?
The point I want to make here is that my dream series of being lost in a strange city, not knowing what to do next, enduring losing everything that would tie me to living in community, anxiously seeking a way for this condition to “not be” has gone on for decades now, each dream with some variation or twist. I simply endured each dream as it arose. But a story of many threads is being woven in this series of dreams. And the story has led to this latest dream, leaving me with an entirely new focus—how to live from the foundation of a new identity. Frantic anxiety to recover a familiar social identity is no longer relevant to this story. A new chapter has opened. All the chapters have been told by my dreams which amazingly seem to remember previous dream chapters and to thus further develop the plot.
I am being written by these dreams. I believe this power of dreams to write our plots can only happen if the dreamer participates fully in the dream stuff, and does not, as Russ warns, merely analyse them (which is to start up another irrelevant story). The dreamer must suffer the dream JUST AS IT IS (“it is just so”, says Jung) as it weaves its story into the fabric of the dreamer’s life.
As Machado says, “I dreamt last night—marvellous error!…”
A comment from Robert Juliano:
The external world from a quantum physics perspective could be seen as “fictionalizing” objective reality, as could the internal world from a Madhyamaka philosophy perspective in that the notion of objective reality collapses into contradiction when subject to careful examination. Crucially, with respect to such an inner examination, this collapse does not depend on the definitions used nor on the system of logic/reasoning. As an illustration of the latter, when a Madhyamaka philosopher would engage in debate, he/she would make no assertions. Instead, they would let their opponent make the assertion and, using their opponent’s definitions and system of logic/reasoning, skillfully lead them via debate argument to a contradiction thereby demonstrating the original assertion was false.
I am not sure how to take your claim that “no one ever asks what novel the dream would write.” How many times have we had the dream or at least read someone else’s dream where a book is emphasized, one perhaps even said to have been written by the dreamer. Have we not wanted to know what was in that book – wanted to go back into the dream to read it – regretted not having done so?
“I am not sure how to take your claim that ‘no one ever asks what novel the dream would write.’ How many times have we had the dream or at least read someone else’s dream where a book is emphasized, one perhaps even said to have been written by the dreamer. Have we not wanted to know what was in that book – wanted to go back into the dream to read it—regretted not having done so?”
Given Robert’s unsureness here how to take the above claim, I thought I could contribute a bit here. As I read his note, I immediately remembered a dream in 2005 that seems to be related to his proffered understanding of Russ’ claim i.e., it could mean, according to Robert, “a dream where a book is emphasised.”
My dream of 2005 goes like this: “A kindly blue-collar worker finds a copy of Walter Benjamin’s third book. for me. I want it but he says it costs $350. I try to find ways to negotiate the price. I go to another book store to see if they have it. I am driving and pull over quickly at a gas station. as three people call me to show me a small book by Benjamin. It shows beautiful illustrations along with his quotes. I want to have that one, too.”
I discovered that Benjamin in fact wanted to write a book entirely consisting of quotations but did not manage to do so. I also had a collection of quotes gathered over the years and on the basis that my dream also has to do with me in some sense, I wrote that book of quotations. I also enjoyed imagining that I had done something for Walter as well in writing the Book of Quotations. (See my book Making New Worlds: https://www.academia.edu/24722371/MAKING_NEW_WORLDS_the_way_of_the_artist)
This meaning of the claim then is certainly one way to understand Russ’ claim and indeed as you can see, a very fruitful way, as I found out.
But there is another meaning altogether I think. I tried to express that meaning in my post (the one before Robert’s). To talk about a dream writing a novel in this different sense is about a weird as being “told” by a dream that “Your life is High Gothic Novel” (as I once was “told”). This is the kind of dream experience can lead a dreamer to think some weird and unfamiliar thoughts and then, more importantly, take some action in the world based on those thoughts. I tried to describe all this is my previous post. This sense that a novel is being written by the dream becomes a lot clearer when a sequence of dreams is recorded. I have been shaken to find that the dreams in a sequence seem to remember previous dreams as chapters, and build on them, so that a “story” becomes evident. This has occurred in my life several times. Even more weirdly, such stories also seem to include and expand upon the dreamer’s waking responses during the sequence. One example: I once dreamed a sequence of dreams in which I was “awake” and seeking to penetrate a “concrete wall”. At first in my dreams I was too afraid, thinking I would get stuck, but then I had one dream which “remembered” that I had been previously afraid and now I could try not being afraid. I pushed through the wall with ease. The story of this sequence created by the dreams, became a book too, in which I explore how love and fear work in relation to overcoming materialism. See my “Overcoming Solidity: World Criss and the New Nature”.
Anyway, some food for thought perhaps. Very evocative questions, Robert, thanks
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The correct URL for my/Benjamin’s Book of Quotations is here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ry8w5sdzcvpi3ce/inception%20vortex.pdf?dl=0
To download go to upper corner of page