Unanswerable Sufferings of Sleep, a Q&A

lovers on an island by Anna Chromy

Q:

I am wondering what you would say about someone who wakes up with having recalled no dreams .. are we always dreaming and just can't recall and what does that mean??? last night again I was woken up by my spouse yelling in his dream .. it's amazing that he does not awaken but I do .. I guess that has to do with what type or cycle of sleep you are in..

A:

I've heard that we do indeed always dream, though it's a problem of memory whether we can remember the substance of our subconscious imagination during REM cycles. For certain cultures and traditions of varying times and origins, reflecting on dreams is an essential daily practice, as common to us as reading, watching TV, exercising, etc. It is a belief that such dream reflection, if you will, opens doors and provides keys to otherwise hidden aspects of ourselves. In our history, western psychology only caught up to the wisdom of interactive dream cultures existent throughout human history and still remote corners of the globe, based on the work of Carl Jung, who purported to exercise the notion that dreaming is the reality and our waking consciousness is made up entirely of myth, symbol, and such inert vanities as are controlled by our subconscious drives.

________

The night before we were to leave for the states I clicked purchase on my laptop while sleepwalking. The next day I called my mother. “A forty dollar purchase!” I spent the entire morning trying to return it. Meanwhile, my wife and I prepare to travel across the border from Canada. This has not been an easy for us in the past. Unbeknownst to me, she prepares her computer. As usual, in the final minutes before we leave my wife begins to mind our departure. As she walks into the bathroom, my mother and grandparents surprise us in our house. Simultaneously, my wife zips through the washroom doorway, shirtless. I talk my relatives down as I begin to re-assess our travel preparations. Trouble stews in the bathroom. She is cornered by border patrol in our own private bathroom! They threaten to confiscate her hard drive for security purposes. She goes into shock. I can feel her anxiety and fear, nightmarish and certain as day. I can’t help but accompany her in distress. Walking through an unknown labyrinth in my bathroom, I’m unable to see any one. I’m lost. The shower emanates with an opaque quagmire of steam. Groped thighs and high chests creak like wood in unspoken sexual majesty. Forbidden flights breach a proud, open humanity with a love forsaken beyond scrutiny, to instinctual rites of passionate floundering in the cruel pain of the body’s lowering, prehistoric travesties. Weak with sanity, I become raw with self-doubt, admiring and at once twisted inside. Where is my Love? We are far from family.  

_______

Computer

"The computer is saying 'put the pieces together to understand the overall meaning'...if you use a computer a lot during your waking life for work or play, your dream could be telling you to get out more and take a break from the screen."

_______

The unchallenged lurch into an Olympian fire,
brushing off the wintry air with a scent of northern herbs
collected by remote, yearning hands

The woman-philosopher, seated in absolute disguise behind a curtain of folk knowledge
beguiles the most aware onlookers, who know of the perfect scrutiny of knowledge
as an aspect of a specific place.”

“Knowledge is a performance for the Spirits!”

Light sparks rescind the importance of global community to a physical presence
holding each of our bodies with local sacrifice.

Fumes of wonderment & bewildered attraction fuel the traveler’s possessions with cathartic activity.

“And Life, is ongoing pleasure!”

“…What about suffering?”

Respect, communicated through body language, reciprocates

“I don’t have all the answers…”

- excerpt from "Catatonic Body Language"

Through a Subterranean REM Dreamachine Train

Are the effects of REM similar to that of a film reel, where the mind develops a way to conceive thoughts with equal momentum and speed as one would perceive, in simultaneous function with the the faculties of memory to create images, sound and other sensory phenomena experienced in dream as in memory? 

Is REM the Dreamachine in the flesh?

_____

In this Dream Series, I ask what about the recurring and unusual instances of action in dreams which remind me of the function of metaphors in myth and poetry. For example, the train seems to be a passageway, or link between worlds, memories and times. Next, there is the “emptying of the fridge” in Venezuela when the Christian world is coming down, and the frozen, armless hand of an enamored singer vying for my attention at the final dream cycle.

The dreaming begins with my wife and me traveling to the East Village of Manhattan to see a friend. This friend allowed us a place to stay and offered his peer support as a successful musician to my wife, who is also a successful musician. In the dream, however, instead of a musician peer to my wife, the individual who we are staying with is a friend of mine, a fellow writer, who engages with me in very healthy ways to support our common goals as writers. When we meet this man, we find that he is extremely effeminate. He wakes from his unkempt bedroom and greets us warmly, however bedraggled and immediately throws on a pink, fishnet, sleeveless shirt and walks out the door, we don’t see him again, but he offers us his place.

Later, I find I am late to pick up my parents at the airport, as they are arriving to visit with us during our time in Manhattan. I am very late, and we have missed dinner, as the time reads after 10, however they are relieved to see me.

As I am returning to the East Village, I find myself in what looks like it may be Bedford-Stuyvesant, where I once walked through, with intimidating hooded men standing motionless in small groups on street corners. I feel out of place to say the least. I band of small Latino kids face me and jeer and bat at my clothing as I try to walk away unseen. I offer them money and they simply reject my idea that they are Mexican or somewhere in some poor country in Latin America and need my money. They don’t take beggar’s money, they say. Finally, I meet my wife somewhere in the city and we board a subway train. The train pulls off at what seems like we are now in Venezuela! There is a choral group busking beside the benches in this very outskirts subway stop. I flip them a coin behind my back so as not to let my wife see, as she dismisses them. As we walk from the underground train platform, we walk into a realm of pitch black darkness. There is no way to go, so we head back to the subway. The choral group is gone and the platform is completely empty. I try to find my coin, but find nothing.

______

“The Pride of Bedford-Stuyvesant”

Interview with Randy Weston on Democracy Now!

"I grew up in a very powerful, spiritual, cultural area in Brooklyn, what they call Bedford-Stuyvesant...Everybody had to take art, you had to take piano, or trumpet or violin or dance, that was in the neighborhood, and economically everybody didn't have money, but culturally it was so wonderful.

[Marcus Garvey's] philosophy of Africa, is our ancestral home. We were taken away, those of us who were taken away, we have to give back, we have to rebuild our motherland, which is Africa, and all of humanity comes out of Africa anyhow, so he was way ahead of his time. 

Your history, your ancestry is your foundation."

______

When we exit the train at the next stop, we are still in Venezuela, only there is a field of sparkling light before us. Within the field, my father and step-mother’s house lies empty. In the field, a highly religious ceremony is taking place. They are enacting the end of the Christian world, the last Christian rite it seems! As the high-rising organs sparkle with incandescent crystals as one would believe heaven to appear, everyone present forms a mass around a ceremonial hearth of heavenly glow. My wife and I dive inside the house, wishing to escape such highfalutin religious activity, and begin emptying their fridge, cleaning their expired foods out from their dusty and neglected icebox. All the while, we see on television, the center of the Roman Catholic world crumbling away, as the central image appears, where the great Jesus statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil falls down the mountain like Saddam Hussein’s statue in Bagdhad.

Then, out from the ceremonial mass, as its Christian imagery begins to fade into an archaic celebration in precious stone, naturally encrusted over a celestial mountain of pipe organ, I am somehow called out into the midst of the open field, and led into a palace of sorts. There seems to be royal intrigue about, a changing of the guard causes slight anxiety in those present. One lady, however, turns to me and begins chanting and singing lightly to calm us. She gives me her hand, which freezes in the grasp of my palm with effortless burden. She then turns, leaving her hand in mine while singing to everyone present, calming the vibration of the palace, near-crumbling at the end of days with her strong, human voice. She comes back to me, though leaving her hand in mine, her palm is now mangled, fingerless and bloody, though she is calm and so are we.  

_____

in the livid pull of train wreck desire

the followers’ sneering crimes become awake

to the rush of the wading horror

that thrives innocently on beer and hate

while our nonplussed singing escapes into the cruel, driven spines of the wicked slink of fame

that shines like hosts in a steaming ballroom of creative play

and shaved rasping throats blunder over towers of hypocrisy

engraved mores of hunger and celebration link together within insane, aesthetic duality

to please the entranced few 

in a skinny pathway across ever-shrinking pores of history

wearing narcotic bracelets and shaming our alien tours with priceless need

in the random chores of spurious fornication

on bedside hordes that tame the blue African skies to dried jungles

that feel free with deserted lies 

in the political waves of a corporate, shark-ruled tribe

swearing and leaning into the hounds of biblical law

- excerpt from "When No Stars Appear"