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opinion
A
dream too far
When
the monkey visits at night, sit and listen because her fury might
be the key to your hidden torment. By Victor Paul Borg
Colin's abstracts can be described as a palette of doodles, scribblings,
and children's fuzzy and fudged images – a combination spluttering
across the canvas like a serious prank. His artist's muse, spurring
a journey of self-exploration, finds an expression of the self via
the child. He is a disciplined artist, and he has to paint every
day to lull his creative anxiety. When he visits, he asks for loose
papers and proceeds to leave a trail of ten pages of doodles scattered
across my living room. His compulsion to communicate through art
is only equalled by his impulsive drug use.
Some nights when I called him I would be greeted by a voice screaming
hoarsely with neurotic anger. He would be drinking himself to sleep.
But it was crack that crowned his love affair with intoxication.
Halfway through the night he would wander out, score some crack,
shoot it up and paint all night.
When he saw his health withering, his sanity slipping to psychosis,
he woke up one day and decided to quit all drugs, wine and beer
included. Now he's been drug-free for three months and, having blunted
the initial heady urge to relapse, he monitors his dreams closely.
Recently, in one of his worst nightmares he was walking home one
night when a group of gangsters ambushed him and pinned him to the
ground, guffawing as they injected crack into his body. He woke
up sweating and screaming. I asked him what the dream meant. He
said, ‘The monkey has come back. It won't leave me alone. It
takes a long time to tame the monkey.'
As enigmatic as his explanation is, it is rooted in folk and scientific
mythology. The monkey, personifying withdrawal symptoms, rears its
fury in the alternate reality of dreams. Conscious thoughts during
waking hours skid past our attention without warranting second thoughts,
but dreams – the fugitives of our subconscious – haunt
us. When we dream we take notice.
In their surrealism, dreams feel more profoundly real than reality.
The nineteenth century Russian scientist Dmitriy Mendeleev's ‘passionate
search for order among the elements' eluded him until one night
he conjured the Periodic Table in a dream.
In literature, dreams are employed as metaphors woven into the storyline,
functioning as subplots. Their emotional resonance is louder than
anecdotes partly because dreams stage internal conflicts and self-tormenting
drama, echoing submerged character motifs. You could say that in
literature dreams make a point, but in real life they only conjure
a situation. And if there is a meaning to be had from our dreams,
we have to interpret and theorise, much like we try to understand
– with inconclusive and frustrating leaps of reason why a lover
dumped us or friends ostracised us.
In the most disturbing nightmare I had lately I was sleeping soundly
when I stirred awake and saw a silhouette of my dad sneaking towards
my bed in the dark. When he turned round, I saw the raised knife
in his hand and I cowered in readiness until I could hear his furtive
breathing, then I flung off my duvet and kicked furiously towards
his face. When I flounced awake, I found myself bawling with fury.
That was one hell of a psychotic dream, but what did it mean? I
made a mental note to remember the dream for its usefulness in a
story one day. Dream analysis, however, can be a revelatory exercise
in self-knowledge, and it could be fun, like playing the game where
you have to interpret someone's action from a mime.
During waking hours we take in a deluge of sensory information and
our mind only processes a fraction of it. The rest is deposited
in the moshpit of our subconscious, snippets and traces of information
that blend and simmer. When we sleep and the curtain shuts on our
conscious, our subconscious dredges morsels of observations and
cognitive left-overs to construct a situation much like a writer
selects incidents and facts from knowledge, experience and imagination
to create a story.
The theatre of dreams creates situations that dramatise different
viewpoints or hidden factors at work below the surface of our present
preoccupations. Dreams express our fears and desires, or blow the
comfort of our illusions, or clarify the motives behind our actions,
or expose the true nature of our emotional anguish. In this view,
dreams can be considered as a continuum – on an alternate,
hallucinogenic level – of our thinking processes.
But what about prophetic dreams? To the uninitiated, these might
seem like heavenly divinations or a visit from fairies of apparition,
and many people start believing in their psychic prowess, but the
truth is mundane in its plain logic. A week after we backtracked
from a destructive open-relationship, for example, my ex-girlfriend
dreamt of a couple. He was saying, ‘Let's be a normal girlfriend
and boyfriend‚' and she replied, ‘We are a normal couple.'
As they purported their normality, she was cutting herself with
a razor and he had put on a mask and was painting his body. We had
had that same conversation a week earlier and the dream, an omen,
showed us the extent of denial, lies, and pretensions we were employing
to whitewash our mutually destructive relationship. Soon after,
we broke up in a bitter power struggle, but there wasn't anything
uncannily prophetic about that dream. Her subconscious had simply
picked up pieces of her intuition and hunches that lay below the
surface of the conscious and dramatised them into a theatrical situation.
With or without the dream, we should have known. Yet, because the
true nature of our union beamed us in a dream, our observations
were heightened and our engagement with the situation unblinking.
No one knows this better than one American psychologist who dedicated
her life to dream analysis and interpretation. To recall –
and study – her dreams she set her alarm clock to go off every
hour during sleep (we have tens of dreams every night but remember
only those which we wake up in mid-dream), and then she would quickly
jot down the dream.
Her husband, unable to put up with the shrill of the alarm clock
interrupting his sleep every hour, was forced to sleep in a spare
room. At one point she inferred that dreams operate in the same
reality as LSD, so she started tripping to explore the relationship
(she later established an empirical connection). Now maddened by
LSD, lost in reveries, forgetful by exhaustion, her husband gave
her an ultimatum: your family or your dreams. She chose her dreams.
He left with the children.
When she published her book recounting her experiences and carving
out her theories, it was praised for its passion, vision, and clarity.
Like a dream.
victor@borg.tf
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