Prefix – Poly

[continued from previous post….] Anyway, the other dream I had was last night; huge engulfing, destructive waves – hmmm, there’s a pattern here, my dreams are quite destructive! – well, this time the dream was slightly different, the waves were not so threatening, and I wasn’t running away in terror as I usually do, I was helping people up on to this ledge, I remember being really scared that I had the responsibility to pull these people to safety. My little brother was there again, and my dad and sister, I was worried they wouldn’t make it. I looked up in horror as the next swell increased; it looked like a giant wall of darkness, it just kind of froze there, and then I think I woke up.

Well, I’m not really sure what to make of it, there is definitely some resounding themes. Responsibility seems to be on the forefront. It’s interesting how the water dream has changed, ever so slightly; I will be interested to see how it changes again. I’ve never actually been swept away by it, it is always a threat. Maybe I need to let myself get swept away, perhaps then I will stop being so afraid, or maybe that will start a whole drowning dream reoccurrence.

As puerile fantasy and adult longing grease against one another in their attempt to assimilate, they slip in-between, leaving a gap in which I have come to inhabit. One of the many things that cajole within its confines is the dreaming mind. I find it fascinating that we are unconscious yet we possess the ability to remember, I also find the fact that many people share similar dream experiences rather interesting, especially those dreams/nightmares that make us anxious, for instance, teeth falling out, flying, falling, etc. Why are our fears manifested in such ways, and why are they synonymous with others?

I often remember my dreams, even dreams I had many years ago, they leave a stain, sometimes a Technicolor blemish on my memory. There are a few reoccurring motifs in my ‘anxious’ dreams, they are as follows:

*Teeth falling out – mainly my back teeth (whether that’s important I don’t know)

*Trying to turn on the light switch but it is doing nothing, and in panic I frantically switch it on and off, but to no avail, my efforts are impotent (for some reason this dream really invokes a feeling of terror in me – very odd)

*Water – usually tidal waves, tsunami’s, flooding etc (and it is strange that usually one of my brothers’ is usually present within the dream somewhere when the water occurs…don’t know what that means?) – although the best dream I ever had involved water, but it was calm and glistening, a beautiful azure blue that lapped up at the shore leaving tiny crystals that glittered in the sunlight – water seems to be very important to me in my dreams, and is a regular feature.

In the last few nights, I have had two recurring motif dreams, teeth falling out, and scary waves! In the losing teeth dream, I was taking the puppy of a friend with me to work, it was so cute, and I was really happy skipping along down the road with it. I got to work far too early, so decided to head back home for a bit and return later. With my back to work, I eagerly bounded homeward, not looking behind as sweet little puppy yapped after me, I didn’t look at the road properly and the puppy got run over. I was devastated, and felt so guilty. I didn’t know what to do. (There was something in between involving roller-skating and falling over lots, and feeling that I deserved it for letting the puppy die, but it’s all too hazy to recall – is that important? Is my inability to remember, my desire to keep what the dream is really about away from my grasp?). Then later in the dream one of my back teeth started to crumble, then a big bit of it came away, I remember thinking ‘I can’t afford to go to a dentist here in Holland, I don’t have any health insurance!’. Then the tooth next to it just fell out, along with another one directly adjacent. The other side started to crumble and the same happened to my teeth on that side. Halfway through I remember thinking that perhaps I am dreaming because I often have dreams about my teeth falling out, but then it suddenly felt so real to me, and I was telling myself that it wasn’t a dream and that this was really happening. I was so glad when I woke up to realize in fact it was a dream. As daft as it sounds I can’t stop thinking about the poor puppy. I really felt the loss. What does this puppy mean to me? Is it about responsibility, or perceived responsibility to other people? I always feel guilty and responsible for some reason, in this instance, it was my neglect of this other being that resulted in its death. But is death always really ‘death’? It is a loss, definitely. Perhaps something I needed to let go, or am worried about letting go of.

Sherlock ‘Holmes claims he does not know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, as such information is irrelevant to his work. Directly after having heard that fact from Watson, he says he will immediately try to forget it. He says he believes that the mind has a finite capacity for information storage, and so learning useless things would merely reduce his ability to learn useful things. Dr. Watson subsequently assesses Holmes’s abilities thus:

Knowledge of Literature – nil.Knowledge of Philosophy – nil.Knowledge of Astronomy – nil.Knowledge of Politics – Feeble.Knowledge of Botany – Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.Knowledge of Geology – Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks, has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.Knowledge of Chemistry – Profound.Knowledge of Anatomy – Accurate, but unsystematic.Knowledge of Sensational Literature – Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.Plays the violin well.Is an expert singlestick player, boxer and swordsman.Has a good practical knowledge of British law.’

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes]

Time is a funny thing. I constantly complain that I do not have enough of it, it seems to mysteriously slip though my fingers. However, at work, time seems to laboriously elongate, and I stand there watching the spidery arms of my plastic watch crawl by. Today is my day off, and I am annoyed because it is half one and I am still in bed, things like getting up and showering, going to the shop, making dinner seem to encroach upon my day like an uninvited guest. I put them off for as long as possible, then resent the time I have to spend with them. So far today, I have eaten two breakfasts in bed – the pink landscape of my duvet seems to provoke a hunger in me – I have worked for two hours from the soft confines of my single bed (at 29 I seem to have regressed to the solitary confinement of my childhood cradle), I have replied to emails, dawdled across the pages of others creativity whilst indolently dreaming of my own, and when the need to move my body became too much for me, I embraced the pages of pornography to return once again to my slothful state.

And now, I sit here propped up upon paisley pinked pillows writing of my idle immobility, it’s a kind of ‘busy idleness’ that renders all of my willful ideas into a fatigued snooze. I possess a long list of the things that need to be done, and yet here I am, still in bed at 2pm. I am not alone in my static meanderings, for example there was the florid fancy of Alice in her Wonderland mis-adventures, the languid stupor of Sherlock Holmes in between his cases, the fatigued overstuffed creatures of Cosima von Bonin, where, for the time being reside in Witte de With’s 3rd and 4th floor gallery space in Rotterdam, bearing the term ‘dolce far niente’ which literally translates as ‘sweet doing nothing’, and indeed it is. In theory, most of the things that matter, can be done from my bed, and here I am doing one of them, writing…I may just be writing about my lethargy, but it’s a start – although perhaps I should watch out for the impression of my body on the mattress – I have been meaning to write for some time, not just spurts of writing – which I seem to sporadically produce, but something that formulates into more than just words….is that a tall task? So I may be indulgently lying here, supine, but I have accomplished one thing on the list, to start this blog. It is my hope that I can continue to write in this manner, as I am sick of having things floating around in my head, they need some materiality to them. Perhaps then I can step in to action….one thing at a time hey, Rome wasn’t built in a day!