The Wordless Dream Language of Myth

Chinese Goddess Nuwa by Unknown

"Until we get to dreams, there is a tendency to think of stories as 'words.' In dreams we experience stories as structures and patterns that evoke images and experiences, often without words...In dealing with dreams, such noted authorities as James Hillman have instructed us to "hold the image."By 'Holding the image,' the conscious mind can begin to discern patterns and structures that can eventually reveal rich psychic content...Some have said that, 'Myths are cultural dreams.'" Ontogenic Mythotypes by G. Charles Andersen

What is the relationship between language and dream? Dream is a language in and of itself. Language is mutable to Dream Language, when traditional dream interpretation is foregone, and creative writing is utilized as a means to "hold the image" in the mind of James Hillman. Such psychological import brings to mind the psychoactive artistry of Laurence Caruana and others who have respected the imagination as a prehuman remnant of archaic information. "The world is made of language" says Terence McKenna. And so, in using that language, we may hear our mythic vocation, a calling towards that which we had never dreamed, unearthed as from the unsaid and unconscious mysteries of our own psychic invention. 

__________

What a breath of fresh air! To drink, and see. I could feel my brother’s weeping, his heart caving in his shaking flesh as he triumphed again over a nervous breakdown, carrying him by air through the over-privileged dome of Western skies. And into the darkened haunt of old coast bumhood, and the numbing agents of a musical life amid the New England smile of selfish mockery and divulging swine. The ruthless remark, a self intensified in the bitter alcoholic night, the cobblestone streets, swept of hurricane feet and tires of his once-sickened flight returning.

Lombard Landscape by Fulvia Bisi

At home, lost to the time of his forgetting, he returns, an old man in his distant youth. The tingling respite of belonging in the gutters of Eastern fame, the ruinous gold of a mind enslaved to eternal seeking, he clambered down tumbling steps of creaking wood and linoleum brains, as I stared immobilized into the dark porch silhouette. A large man sat there, with dreadlocks lower than his back, and as he lifted an ember of smoke to his lips, his dark skin shone with the muscular life of a physical laborer on break, alone, a nameless body of the historic present.

Man with a Hoe by Jean-Francois Millet

I could only see him clearly under the bar lighting. The dizzying indoor lunacy of the drinker’s habit, a hovel of bored and roughened life spoke through his bristling mouth. After the rare silence of a few pints, he ended the night with means to see each other again. And like that, he disappeared in the great fog of blackness, opaque as the light-polluted air of a once booming industrial city, now smoking upward with the final ashen gasp of smoky incineration. 

__________

“What grievous horror betook these dumb streets?”

Touched with the unkindness of a meek following
From the near elderly, an old town deemed to inquietude
...
Taking off the English hat of a long gone America
Seeing no one in the mist fired laugh from this war

Breathing ocean
Suffocated by the calm before the storm
...
Clucking behind the chicken wire of suburban fate
...
Gripping for death at the edge of the western, manifest

As nature’s law thrives in disbelief

excerpts from "Calm before the Storm"

Dreams of Palestine: A Transitioning People, An Ephemeral Mind

I usually begin with a cultural dream context and then select a creative dream description, however when I read Rashid Khalidi's book, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood I was struck by a fact regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, namely that the Gaza strip is only slightly twice as large as the area of Washington D.C. (Source)

It is one thing when a dream can be applied to a cultural context, though it is wholly another when the cultural context can be applied to the dream. 

On that note, I have always been highly intrigued by the similar plight faced by both Palestinians and First Nations/Native Americans. Which is why the article, "What is Settler Colonialism?" by Maya Mikdashi has resonated in my memory so deeply.

For a great resource on Palestinian films and writings visit Dreams of a Nation

Also, see my earlier post, "Making a Home with an Identity of Conflict" on Rashid Khalidi

_______

A map of New England, pieced together with intersecting lines and pure conceptual space, is represented in a form unknown to me, a son of the land. An unmistakably present empty space lies in the middle of the map. The white of the uncharted territory stands out like a mirage over the sandscape, deluding the eye into such incredulity enough to trick any human sensibility.

Later that night, at my grandparents, I am transfixed by the emptiness. The open white space turns my attention inward, as I meditate on the image, as in an unconscious stupor, half involuntarily though secretively through my utmost will, unchallenged, I ruminate on the mystifying aura of a palpable nothingness so close to home.

The next morning, a family friend tells me all about the emptiness on the map. He is Arab, ancestral to the Levant, while a proud American. He tells me exactly how to get there. I am awestruck, undone as with a viral need, doubly expressed as an escape from the normalcy of the known and also to confront the other.

I arrive to a gate of barbed wire fencing, an entire society of Arabs, transplanted as it were on the uncharted map. A rudiment of the colonial present, a territory, though flown upwards with a gargantuan mall, the area is blistering with the heat of overpopulation. As I enter the grounds, I am constantly watched. Every passerby regards me with a hard edge, though delicate and unassumingly friendly. 

It is Palestine in America! Though they say they are Lebanese. I am taken by their quaint humility and sensitivity to intercultural warmth. I am welcome, though an alarming fear abounds uncannily as thick as the smog-worn air. As I feel for the exit in the train terminal-style, busy street-esque bustle, I stray towards a news kiosk to ask the man behind the counter a question.

Inquisitive as ever, I observe ruffian street children buying single smokes, and so I follow suit with deliberation, quite taken by the overt signage in Arabic absolutely everywhere. I try a few phrases I remembered from Egypt. The man is quiet. A deep pain seems to inflict his chest, almost speechless in the act of a simple exchange. The transaction, while gentle, struck a chord of such powerful resonance that I was never able to return to that emptiness, for the nothingness was filled only with my own ignorance.

_______

Interpretation: The Achuar and the Meaning of an Indigenous Map

_______

a reach
to touch Love's palpable drift
in the body of one Northeastern life
slipping softly from consciousness
into the unending scream of ignorance
as waves of ghosts piercing the cracked, loose air,
and our lonely exit comes to fruition

...

dreaming soundlessly into the never-ending swarm of heart

...

sensitivity under the 95 year old skin of true feeling
resonating in the earthy hair of guitar & piano strings, cut
burning in the night's long internal ache,
that fires the ebullient seed in grass-thundered vocalizations
giving melodies to ancestral brother and sisterhoods
calling throughout
the music of surprising beauty

- excerpts from "Fortune's Glutton" 

Icicle Melts in the Warm Heart of a Loving Dream

It came to her in a Dream…

Listen to “Atlantea” & “Dreaming is all I can do”

______

There is a recurring dream-character. She is reminiscent of a Maya girl who I once gifted a jade ring to in her home village in southeastern Mexico, however this dream-character also has very French features and darker, thicker hair braided in a massive pony tail fatter than her spine, looking like it’s exploded with sparks of static electric strands of finer hair in the shadow-cast light. I can’t completely see her face.

There is a great distance between us as she is always cast in shadow. The scene is one of an arranged marriage, however my wife is beside, and who as I reflect now, is to become my second wife in dream! During the night of the marriage, however, I renew feelings of love for my first wife, who is my dream-woman in real life, and abandon the younger girl who is arranged to be married to me on this day.

As my parents leave the scene to run an errand for the wedding services, they tell me about their recent news, where they’ve become billionaires and are buying homes in Newport, RI, which will be sure to benefit me and my new married life. I respond with ghastly sarcasm and they leave indifferent in their swamped lives of money and possessions. I take a car for my wife and I, and we head down the road. We are in a place similar to Connecticut, resembling the industrial surroundings on the highway to New York City.

Next, I find myself singing, as the foreman of a folk band. With guitar in hand, we perform songs on stage in front of a lively sit-down crowd in the dim light of a downtown music venue. This music follows me into the living room of my father’s house.

My stepmother is there alone, cleaning the house by herself. I am in the center of the room, practicing my singing. As she nears, I begin to belt out ever-higher falsetto notes, as my heartbeat intensified and began to shake my whole being in loneliness and stark presence against the mundane vacuity of house-making before me.

As soon as I stopped, she raced a remote control car out into the hall, as I shrunk into one of the rooms, which to my surprise was still made for a small child. I wrapped myself in an undersized knit blanket and while still dreaming, thought that her actions symbolized not growing out of child rearing and only participating in people’s lives through objectified play, an inverted disconnected electronics. 

(The end of the dream juxtaposes with the electronic music reference above, where electronic creativity is central to making intimate connections. The Buddha resides in all things, even your computer!)

Interestingly, my wife’s dream this same night had me also marrying another woman. On the night before we were to be married, the entire family and even she slept together with us in a living room on the floor space. She could hear me arguing with my wife-to-be about. “This is not how it should be, this is not how people love one another,” I would say. She felt the same strong emotions that I felt in my dream in the same night, of longing for true experience with one’s love and feeling a sense of loss at having to watch them become distant. 

______

Choose Art

Art is a choice, between perception and dreaming, when both are combined in active creativity.

The residue of dreaming infused with an enlightened consciousness on the positive qualities of becoming increasingly aware of and interacting with dreams as an essential aspect of life, sometimes expresses itself in life as the perception of art as "dreams" within reality.

Envisioning the Unconscious From The Cusp of the Atmosphere

Rocky Landscape by Ludwig Richter

When I see my dream, I am being lifted. The vapors of an immense hot air balloon warm the cold ground, the icy supermarket lights dim with an apparent lifeless sickening that dies suddenly to the snow-felt covered pavement of a parking lot. I am outside a lowly bowling alley bar where my step-father is playing rock and roll covers from the 70s. I escape outside to the car and am suddenly approached vociferously by wild predators; jungle cats with voracious appetites in the bleak misery of a New England modernized by the corrupted spoils of war, domesticated, yet freed into the all-vanishing gore of human flesh petrified by a society stifled by the categorical satiation of a thankless search for Nothing to entertain nothing. I find my Love with me at my side, she transforms curiously in and out of being my Mother. As she nears the car, I find one of the jungle cats is eating her alive! Yet somehow, she emerges from the carnal End of human being, and steps with me into the car. A rope somehow dangles in front of the car window, the jungle cats swat at the window, breaking and creasing the exposed metal like paper. I grab onto the rope. I am pulled upwards at an incredible rate into the glowing cusp of the atmosphere. I find my loved ones are in the basket of this hot air balloon that is lifting me up to the edge of Earth's last point of life. I begin climbing the rope, however its length is endless. I fall. My chest fills with cool air, and I inhale deeply, surfacing to a waking state in a moment as if floating to air beneath water. Again, I am submerged, into what is now mere mystery.

Moroccan Blues Visitations and Riding an Exotic Animal through Suburbia

Traum by Franz Marc

In a small home, I barely have any clothes on. A recent friend made, a calm, collected man from Morocco, lover of music and conversation, appears to be somewhere near my door, expecting me to engage in a night on the town. Instead, I act as if I am unprepared for the visit. He says to me, “Well, what about the Blues!” as if I need to see some live blues music. There are some other people in the small living space, I am still getting dressed as about three others pull out electric basses and other instruments. I also take out a bass, and while we all begin to jam, I get extremely creative and lead the jam with an experimental, percussive approach to the bass that is at the same time quite bluesy. The people in the room admire, and the Moroccan man seems to have had his fill of blues and respectfully exits my living space.

Next, I am in what seems to be New England suburbia, exploring a yet to be developed area of housing projects for the upper middle class of America. I find myself boarding the top of an elephant-like species, a huge towering animal, that is at once friendly and at the same time seems to represent an extinct being, with great tufts of light, matted hair and an unusual shape. The animal is very warm with me as we stride carefully along the margins of a paved road as it ends unexpectedly off into the under-developed woodlands of the northeast coast American ecology. Suddenly, the animal takes off after letting me down, through the forest. I watch, feeling an empathetic compassion for this animal and its charge into an unredeemable fixation with a wilderness on the brink of being tamed.  

Friday, October 7, 2011