July 15, 2008
the dream logic of everyday life
when i talk about my dreams, i do so in a way that people (who, say, stumble into the conversation) don’t know i’m not just talking about something strange that happened to me. (and i do have a pretty strange life, to be fair. when i said, last friday, “yeah, i had liquid valium chemical burns on my tongue, realized i don’t really like strawberries and i’d been talking to my depressed cartographer friend most of the evening” that was just a fairly accurate description of the events of the night before.)
anyway, i realized that steve has the complete reverse problem i do. too much dream logic talk. he can tell the most mundane anecdotes, and he’ll give you so much irrelevant back story that it sounds like he’s talking about a dream. the details seem urgently necessary, but it’s hard to follow because there are so many of them. you know we’ve been together too long, because we both know that i can’t follow his long-winded anecdotes, so i just say, “too long” to indicate i can no longer follow what he’s saying, and he’ll, in the parlance of our relationship, give me the executive summary.
i was thinking this morning, do dreams have themes? i don’t think so. they have common elements (i’ve had four about typewriters made of hamburgers), but to say a dream has a theme is to imply that dreams are somehow crafted entertainment. i tend to think dreams come from the part in us that is most splintered and least capable of self-consciously creating anything. they are exquisite and involuntary. i think superstition (that our dreams are trying to tell us something, for instance) comes from wanting to deny that part, unreachable by either interpretation or divination, exists. which is understandable. we want to think things are meaningful. we want to think it’s all adding up to something, but then we close our eyes and we’re on a bombed out space ship and our bodies are eating our clothes and someone we haven’t thought of in ages is stroking our hair.



