Mythologies of Freedom and Dreaming: Interpretations and Reminiscences

“Human soul, should it dream of me, Let my memory wakened be.
/ Moon, moon, oh do not wane, do not wane, /
Moon, oh moon, do not wane....” lyrics from Dvorak’s Song to the Moon

“There is no freedom, because we die,” said Winston Churchill in a fated passage through the subtle imagination of nighttime visions – speaking as the personification of death itself. He emerged from the grave of innumerable veteran crosses and stars over unmarked graves lining an immaculately manicured grassy hillside in neat rows. The cemetery is reminiscent of the dead bodies once ordered with haunting linearity in the aftermath of the many battlefields fought over in world war.

The realization of human mortality is the psychological maturation of recognizing freedom as a myth. Even in dream there is limitation; the mortal scars of suffering – destructive emotions and negative repressions – continue into the deepest corners of the subtle mind. As in thinking, the natural mode of an animate and intelligent psyche is to comb through the vast interweaving analytic and creative spawns of experience and memory, as they unfold with newfound insights and revelations. Yet, in that process, the evolutionary cycle naturally spurns most content with the greatest psychological defense mechanism of mortality: forgetting. To release, let go or forget the contents of the mind as they build and diminish is part of the natural breathability of discernment that allows every person to function as a rational agent in both human society and in wild nature. Yet, there is intermittently a thought that recurs, as in dream, that reminds us that thought and the more subtle activities of the mind and of human experience are intricately linked to the repetitive urges of necessity in the libido or the gut, for example. When a thought is forgotten, it was meant to pass, and thus facilitate further emptiness, to clean the slate, or empty the glass, so to speak, so that it may become full with the nourishment of more enduring concerns. Yet, when a thought clings, as with the subconscious content of a recurring dream, it is calling out to be transformed through consciousness. There are many modes of transformation through consciousness, i.e. creativity, reflection, speaking, and action.

Similarly, as the facility of the mind to think filters through generative content towards enduring insights through word, sound, emotion, intuition, and image, the content of dream has like potential as an agent of subconscious “thought”. Yet, where thought is often sound-oriented, as the whisper of words, dream, and specifically dream-writing, entices the mind to reflect on what images endure, and why, through their free-associative interpretation. Those images that endure from dream into the memory of consciousness and daily activity are as thoughts that recur and beg further recognition. Both involuntary, subconscious – dream and thought – are inceptions of creativity that arise from instinctual mechanisms that the body has to self-reconciliation. Recognizing and listening to the inner voice that speaks in the image-language of dream and the sonic subtleties of thought through an internalized intellect form a holistic psychological healing likened to the regenerative quality of the physical body to heal itself.

Former child soldier and international rap sensation Emmanuel Jal uses storytelling and music for social-emotional learning. He says that peace is “equality, justice and freedom for all”. His triad of concepts that can lead to peace – equality, justice and freedom – will be the basis for understanding how dream becomes thought, and thought becomes action.

While there is no earthly, or worldly, freedom after a full recognition and confrontation with the mythology of human dreaming, both consciously and subconsciously, there is equality. In Sufi mysticism, it is said that all of creation essentially began from an image. In Hindu cosmology, the Self, or Atman, sat alone, and pondering a sense of cosmic loneliness, split into two. Thus, seeing a reflection of the Self gave birth to the world. In other traditions the first creation was sound, particularly in dominant Western religious tradition, “In the beginning was the word.” In more acute interpretations based on studying original texts and incipient cultural contexts, sound is understood to mean vibration. From this understanding, great wisdom energy emerges from the fabric of all creation, vibrating with the cosmic equality of being essentially of one substance, from one origin, and to one destination. Also, when people become competitive and separatist in worldly affairs, this sense of cosmic equality is lost. For ultimately, an individual is not born of their accord, nor is their lot in life prescribed by them, but they are subject to the cosmic interdependence of the I-Consciousness of All-Unity. Deep equality is seeing that there is beauty and tragedy, form and emptiness, sophistication and simplicity in every instant and every aspect, in every individual and independent form of being.

On a deep level, freedom and equality are absolutes. There is no true freedom, yet ultimately all are equal. Justice is relative. Time and the fabric of relations temper Justice as it is broken and mended by the conscious action of peoples, animals and all forms and modes of being: ocean and acidification, mountain and mine, consumer and resource, victim and perpetrator, predator and prey. Freedom is a dream that never becomes real. Equality is a reality that does not extinguish by dreaming, and also a dream that does not extinguish in reality. Justice is a dream that may, or may not become a reality, unless dreams are made real through conscious action, and then waking realities can potentially become our greatest dream.  

___________

Barroom fade-out, the groveling aspiration of a few young guts feeding on the fermented sting of a foreigner’s every desire. The walls steam and sweat to the touch of human skin, crowds meander and mingle in a scintillating core of the ruthless dance. The beat of bare feet on the wet soil engraves the trammeled heart of the night onto the soles at every step.

Le bar des Martégales, Marseille by Marcel Leprin

Escaped into the washroom, the narrow claustrophobia is deafening, with a seed of empty remorse, I trudge backwards, to scale the heights of misdirection, and a friendly face peers through the swinging doorway, a member of the female race, she glides back dispassionately. I wade through swinging bodies back to a table, where my friends eye my every movement with a gentle regard for the creative word, emanating like sunlight from my chest like a cross-legged aesthetic seeing visions of outer space. I am warmed, basking in tongues of like entanglement. A live hip-hop act floods the ceiling with the reverberations of bass and rhyme.

Fuge in Rot by Paul Klee

Next morning, the cemetery air is thick with warning. Veteran markers stretch 3,000 deep down a coursing hill, steep with shadow and disbelief. The anger mounts like an unchallenged breeze on the face of the beloved. And I starve for words of remembrance and the final end to the deep finishing hate that swarms and seethes in our bones like the lost blood of too many young men and women. We are guided along by the preeminent Allied emissaries of WWII; Roosevelt, Patton, Eisenhower all emerge from the ground of the lain, and lastly Churchill.

The Cemetery, Etaples, 1919 by Sir John Lavery

Rising from a grave bed, the sparse, delicate grass wakes with air at his emergence. Churchill guides a small tour through the narrow passage between the blinding dizzy-spell of white crosses. After reading the bare bones epitaph of one fallen, slain by the brutal, forsaken. We can almost hear the utter ignorance of speed, metal and waste. Scanning over a generic war axiom, he says with spitting disdain, “There is no freedom on this earth, because we die, because we are mortal, freedom is a dream within a dream.”

The Hat of Freedom by Herman van der Mijn

Freedom is a tear in the cry of eternity.

___________

The mangrove is a peculiar tree, featured most recently in Ang Lee's Life of Pi, the man-eating vegetable is an interesting folkloric attribution to the reciprocity found in nature. "Sour Mangrove" is a piece that uses two types of percussion, doumbek and frame drums together with digitized xaphoon with an atmospheric ethereum of shakuhachi.

This instrumentation breathes with the three minute narrative, an experimental movement that gives voice and embodiment to the numbness of apathy and dogma that drives humanity to unprecedented elevations of ignorance with regard to the environment. With the reduction in the rhythmic pace at the very middle of the track, there is a slight turnaround, where natural objects are at least recognized, yet by the end, there is mere allusion to voice as performance, reduced to mere agency in the creation of an all-consuming, and ultimately cheap contrivance: the public.

The mangrove, a gorgeous and exemplary form of environmental wonder in its sheer aesthetic beauty, and its symbiosis with the ocean (and especial trait that modern humanity lacks) is simplistically reduced to an act of consumption as a disagreeable taste, sour.

This chapbook is comprised of thirteen selections from Cyclical Wordplay under the subtitle, "Sleep Cycle" as they were all written during meta-conscious states of creative emergence. This chapbook release celebrates the music release of the feature piece, "Sour Mangrove" on my bandcamp site, where I upload experimental sound art and different forms of narrative readings. "Jailed Desire" and "Sour Mangrove" were published in "ditch, poetry that matters" on April 24, 2012.

Sleep Cycle

Food for the Imagination: Contributor Article Completes Sketches of Style

Dream Cuisine by RK

I am happy to present the first contributor article to SoJourn(al): Private Dreams to Public Art. I am especially proud to present this article because it speaks to many themes in the life of the Dream Author. I have been a vegetarian for over seven years, many of which were spent in the Middle East and Latin America, which posed interesting challenges. 

Nonetheless, I stayed true to a time in my life when I was thoroughly exposed to interpretive experience. My mental development was spurred on by alternative living practices, founded on a diet of psychoactive compounds and creative literature. Maintaining an alternative diet has been an essential ingredient in living a life based on principles of subtle recollection and acute awareness. 

Blurring the separation between external causes and their internal effects has been a lifelong inquiry. The experience of how foods have an impact on the subtle realms of dreaming is an invaluable source of critical thinking. As Terence McKenna put it, to "dissolve boundaries" is a natural step towards creative thinking, and becoming a seer of "true hallucinations" of which dreaming is an integral example.  

Food for the Body Equals Food for the Imagination

When Scrooge was visited by the ghost of Jacob Marley in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, he believed that he was dreaming and put the apparition that stood before him down to ‘an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.’ ‘There’s more of gravy than of grave about you,’ he joked. The idea that foods can influence our dreams has featured heavily in literature throughout the years. There is a commonly held belief that what is going on in a person’s digestive system can have an affect upon his or her subconscious mind during sleep. To what extent is this true though? Can eating the wrong thing really plunge somebody into a world of nightmares?

Does Cheese Give you Bad Dreams?

There is significant evidence to suggest that eating healthily can help to keep a person’s mind to remain healthy. According to the Dieticians of Canada, maintaining a healthy diet can reduce irritability and mood swings and increase an individual’s ability to concentrate. Does this only apply to when people are awake though or does it also make a difference when they are dreaming? The food that has the strongest association with nightmares is undoubtedly cheese. However a study carried out by British researchers in 2005 suggests that there is actually no correlation between cheese consumption and bad dreams. The results of the study actually indicate that different varieties of cheese are capable of inducing specific types of pleasant dream, for example cheddar cheese is thought to lead to dreams about celebrities. The good dreams that cheese can bring about are believed to be due to the fact that it contains the amino acid tryptothan, which is commonly linked to a reduction in stress.

A report published in the Folklore sociology and anthropology journal questions whether the idea that cheese causes nightmares is linked in some way to its association to witches in literature. In ancient Roman writing, women who were viewed as potential sexual partners were referred to as ‘cheese’. In eleventh century English literature, several stories about ‘night witches’ came into being that included references to cheese. Folklore suggests that this was used to imply that the witches had a sexual element to them and wished to corrupt their victims by exposing them to sin. The report puts this forward as a possible reason that cheese might have ended up being blamed for bad dreams.

Spicy Foods

Spicy foods are also thought to lead to nightmares, which is backed up by the results of a study that was published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology in which a group of healthy men were given spicy foods to eat before they went to sleep. They were observed to have a more restless night’s sleep than they did when they had not consumed any spicy foods before they went to bed. The author of the study speculated that this could have been due to the fact that the spicy foods had elevated the internal body temperature, causing the discomfort to work its way into the participants’ subconscious and leading to bad dreams.

Unhealthy Foods

Research cited by Justine Sterling of food magazine Meatpaper indicates that consuming foods that are high in sugar or fat immediately before going to bed can lead to nightmares. The study also indicates that going to bed on a full stomach can bring about bad dreams and low blood sugar caused by going for a prolonged period without eating can lead to vivid nightmares. This is because the body releases adrenaline when it is desperately hungry, which translates into the subconscious.

Mustard

Mustard was another foodstuff that Scrooge blamed for Marley’s appearance – and with good reason as well, as a study carried out by researchers at the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, indicates that consuming it can result in nightmares. The researchers concluded that this is probably because it contains capsaicin, which can change the body’s temperature and lead to discomfort. It appears that what we eat really can affect the way that our minds work once we have passed over into the land of sleep. Perhaps cheese was not the main culprit in the case of Scrooge though; maybe Marley was merely a result of too much mustard before bed.

Evelyn Donaldson is a mother of two and full-time writer. She grew up in Idaho, but now lives in Kansas. She recently became vegetarian and has long been interested in dreams and their interpretations.

__________

My blanket drifts up into sky, its multicolored fabric bleeds scarlet and lime into the nearing front of storm clouds gathering. The wind-whipped fabrics touch and scatter the bedroom floor, above without ceiling, empty unto the grandiose firmament. I wake to the numbing air, as on a mountain summit, where the thunder resonates in delicate cyclones. As I rise, the storm pierces the earth with overgrown fingernails of Zeus. A crepuscular storm, breathing in an unwelcome morning, filled with signs of a new god. 

Jupiter and Semele by Sebastiano Ricci

And the machines of war rape our Earth. Nazi terror sweeps as the witch’s broom throughout the countless, destroyed Jewish homes of Europe. My family is strangled and sucked clean through the medical tubes of an astral fire as hot as the blunt knives of torture. I escape. To Russia, I follow the blank news pages with a heart kept earnest. Directions swarm as the buzzing of toxic insects, and my rivals are blended as fruit sap in the teeth of metallic pincers. 

Nude II by Willy Fick

In the heart of Russia, I am free; yet full with a dark heart. The Earth trembles and fades each day with a transparent rush of nostalgia. I wish and writhe for the beating hearts of my beloved mother and father, sisters and brother. The wedding feasts and blind bliss, how we gorged on the salt of the seven seas with triumphant abandon. Every day, there was a moment of repose.

Cigarette Seller (Wandering Jewish Man) by Dome Skuteczky

We knew the day might come, when all would be rent, cleansed by the impotent flood of mad war. Should I wander further astray, eastward to the cold forest sands of Siberia, or westward, to the commercial forge of America, and sleep by the pill of forgetfulness? Lost again, if found anew, will I be recognized? 

___________

Sketches of Style by

As per SoJourn(al) tradition, I have prepared a free PDF for the entire Sketches of Style collection which has been excerpted in the past few months in complement to my dream writings. 

Enjoy! 

Basement Emptiness and the Great War for Alaska!

Moon Spots in the Forest, Winter by Arkhip Kuindzhi

I am seated across from my step-father, although I can not see him, he is grayer and older. His presence is sunken and lost in age. I reach out to him, yet he is distracted by the television as usual. We are on cushy, white sofas. I am drinking beer from a glass bottle. As the night gets dark, the ceiling windows illuminate with moonlight cast on the laminated wooden floorboards. He is asleep. I toss the beer bottle across the kitchen in the direction of the cellar door. As soon as I do this, I realize I have to retrieve this bottle. I head down the basement steps, only to find the basement completely empty. I have never seen the basement empty since we moved into this newly built home in 1998. The basement is my step-father's refuge, full to the brim with musical equipment, records, books, boxes and a weightlifting set. It is bare. I find the bottle amid other beer bottles swept asunder in the cobweb corners of the concrete foundation.

I find myself sporting an Eskimo jacket, though militarized. I am in the center of a battle field which slightly resembles my readings on the Great War; World War I. Barbed wire and trenches are masked by the deep snow. I sprint effortlessly across the tundra, murdering my enemies with broken pieces of wood, spears left without whittling, leaving a lacerated, dirty wound. I stick the wooden shaft beneath the snow in the hard-packed, frozen dirt as I would with a peculiarly serrated WWI knife used specifically to infect its victim. Suddenly, I face a formidable foe. As I swing the a vampire-slaying weapon into the torso of my enemy, he lifts his weapon, a broken wooden shaft as well, in a circular motion. I am impaled in the stomach with swift intention.

Bleeding and helpless in the open tundra, I become delirious. The enemy who's mortal blow has impacted my vital organs lies dead, as an insignificant speck of bloodless flesh and white cloth on an ocean of ice. I turn to face the horizon. Curiously, I am led into a domestic home. I find my way through a corridor. I am in an enclosed, outdoor court. A small altar rises with a light bowl at its apex. As I move with delicate strength, on the edge of my last breath, I approach the bowl. I want to see inside to its contents. Before I can see over the lip, I feel the presence of a man in the uniform of a soldier in the War of Alaska entering a side door. I wake.

The Dream Gamble of Hannah Szenes

She was a heroine of WWII, fought to save her people of her fatherland, the Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz.

Before her death by firing squad at the Hungarian border, 1944, she wrote her final lines of verse (found in her cell after execution)

One - two - three...eight feet long
Two strides across, the rest is dark...
Life is a fleeting question mark
One - two - three...maybe another week
Or the next month may still find me here,
But death, I feel is very near.
I could have been 23 next July
I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.

- Hannah Szenes


To all those who give their lives to Dream and falter, ask: does the Dream yet live? I have Dreamed it so.