A Long Sleep in Fellini's Most Vivid Dream

"I can't come down.

I can't land.

It's your fault.

It's up to you."

"A long sleep."

- From the penultimate scene of Fellini's "Juliet of the Spirits" when the main character receives a barrage of visions and the spirits haunt her as no other time in her life, consequences of the "long sleep"

In my experience, a longer, fuller sleep induces more vivid, more frequent and more discernible dream narratives. What the penultimate scene from "Juliet of the Spirits" and indeed the entire film points to, in my mind, is the idea that Juliet, the protagonist, has been submerged in subconscious urges and preoccupations for too long, that their inescapable manifestations begin to peek out into her waking consciousness as in the stupor of sleep. The gorge and slew of both inanimate and living tempests swarm about, as a march of assailants in the form of multiple kinds of attractions and diversions. Has she simply been subject to her own delusions for too long? Or has she been too unable to realize that her very surroundings are incontrovertibly diluted by the anxiety of an unremembered dream or a lingering past, whose burden weighs on her as a traumatic background in her now semi-formed consciousness.

[Dr. Ernst] Bernhard’s focus on Jungian depth psychology proved to be the single greatest influence on Fellini’s mature style and marked the turning point in his work from neorealism to filmmaking that was “primarily oneiric”.[31] As a consequence, Jung's seminal ideas on the anima and the animus, the role of archetypes and the collective unconscious directly influenced such films as 8½ (1963),Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Satyricon (1969), Casanova (1976), and City of Women (1980).[32]

31 - Kezich, Fellini: His Life and Work, 227

32 - Bondanella, Cinema of Federico Fellini, 151-54

- from Wikipedia 

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A frenetic blur of imagery sparks like lightning through an overcast sky in my subconscious as I travel through unknown whereabouts and experience fragments of lived time with indiscernible rhythms and consensual mysteries evacuating from my internal realizations as soon as they are actualized. Upon waking, there is an absolute fading of dream memory at once overcome through cleansing the doorways to my dreaming with pristine internal perception inspired by listening to John McLaughlin’s composition “Lotus Feet.”

I walk through the volatile lighting of an American department store. Above, through the radio speakers latched against the top of the high-rise shelving reaching to the visible reinforcements in the ceiling, a couple having passionate sex is emitted very audibly throughout the air of the building. As I pass by the cash register, I notice people are mostly trying to ignore this obvious audio incursion. Looking through an entrance to the back warehouse behind the cash register, I see a half-naked woman and her lover. I continue on, ever more rapidly in pace to the back of the department store, which then is suddenly converted into a movie house.

I am seated with my wife and a woman who very much resembles an acquaintance I made in Cairo. She was a nice young lady and very tall, who used to give me rides in her dilapidated Volkswagen bug through the atrociously busy streets of Cairo, driving with an ease and confidence unlike even the most seasoned taxi cab drivers. Here she was sitting next to me and my wife. I could tell we were watching an experimental video installation by the artist John Cage. All of the monitors are three different sizes, placed in different areas of the room, with exchanging audio frequencies, but mostly silent. Two of the monitors screen the same video, while the one behind us is a totally different screening. This experimental cinema is fascinating, however I am distracted by the two women beside me, one who is coaxing me to stay, trying to seduce me, the other is leading me away, trying to get me out of this confrontational presence. My wife soon leaves, and the Cairene lady sits in the theatre ever welcoming, however I soon exit.    

The street is cold, it is night and your breath exhales as thick as a cream-based soup out into the freezing air. The weather is dry, and so the breath evaporates and disperses as quickly as my wife’s gone and disappeared. I cross through the low-lying wintry brush of a coastal woodland environment. I can feel the salt of the sea on my skin and on the felled trunks and trees. At a clearing, I stop, inhale the glorious freshness of the seaside air and lean against a massive horizontal tree, lying upon the ground with its majestic, silvery gray icing.

I find my way into a house resembling a wood-floored home of my upbringing. I am at a computer, as I used to sit at one when I first began to use a computer. I feel an intense anxiety. My mother walks in the room with my tropical biology professor from Peru. This is an odd sight however I am completely pre-occupied with an overwhelming nervousness, as I feel that I have missed my final exams to complete high school. I become extremely angry and frustrated with disbelief at having to continue on into my pre-mature schooling. I wake relieved.   

________

she exits

diminished to bodiless spirit 

or soul wordslip 

(meaning)

at the door

he crumbles 

grandfather cookie 

a humility that knows only human end 

laugh

after the show 

before coffee

- excerpt from "Soul Wordslip"