Exposing Consciousness ~ Expanding Subconsciousness ~ Entering the Unconscious
Primarily a writing exercise, this dream journal-inspired blog is a quiet introspective sojourn into the process that we traverse in going from private dream to public art. I see our dreaming as an internalized mythmaking. As I philosophize and expressively exhibit dreams, both private and public, I encourage and delight in creative language as a way to practice experiential metaphors through a “public dreaming." Writing Theory: Creative Dream Fiction
Detail of a stained glass window depicting Saint Kieran
(St. Brendan's Church, Ireland - Photography by Andreas F. Borchert)
"Kieran of Saighir was the first saint born in Ireland...Before she conceived Kieran in her womb his mother had a dream: as it were a star that fell into her mouth; which dream she related to the magicians and to the knowledgeable ones of the time, and they said to her: “thou wilt bear a son whose fame and whose virtues shall to the world’s latter end be great [i.e. notorious].” Afterwards that holy son Kieran was born..." Life of S. Kieran of Saighir. at Celtic Literature Collective
Strangely familiar to the origin stories for Buddha, I first read about this aspect of Irish history in Joseph Campbell's Occidental Mythology. Reflecting, I see similarities to Mexico's Virgin de Guadalupe, who was seen in a vision (see also my post: The Imperial Ethereality of the Christian Cross), to incite the mask of christian history over the indigenous face. I wonder, was the story more brutal, covered up by fables of dream and superstition, to align with dominant perspectives on native irrationality.
In the penthouse suite version of my tiny apartment, I
cavort around the fine art, baby grand piano, clear glass tables and impeccable
wood floors with my mother. She is youthful and gay, enjoying the space with
matchless ardor. As I look into her face, I begin to call out for my wife.
“Where is she?” I ask pleadingly. Strangely, the stars shine clearly outside,
entering our dimly lit space through the window. We are high above the smog and
pollution, high above the human world of earthly obligation.
Cupid and Psyche in the natural bower by Hugh Douglas Hamilton
As I step down, to visit my grandparents in their New York
home, I wait, fixed in place within the center of a foyer condensed by the
continuous movement of relatives up and down the stairs. The air is heavy. I
embrace each family member longingly, and with a strength characteristic of my
waking need. Our grandfather is dying.
Interior by William Gerard Barry
Later that night, my wife and I decide to cross a high
river. Our kayaks soon tip in the rushing torrent, flooded with murky water. We
swim earnestly to the edge, where my wife quits on me as I gather strength
enough to submerge in a second-hand craft to retrieve one of our vessels caught
in the shoreline brush. Sitting in a sinking vessel, with only a dilapidated,
half-worn paddle, a family of ducks begins attacking with an incessant hunger
for my pruned, sore fingers.
_______
Where am I falling?
Who do I call?
I have fallen, I am getting small.
Say what is sleep? and dreams how passing strange!
When action ceases, and ideas range Licentious and unbounded o'er the plains, Where Fancy's queen in giddy triumph reigns.
Hear in soft strains the dreaming lover sigh To a kind fair, or rave in jealousy; On pleasure now, and now on vengeance bent, The lab'ring passions struggle for a vent.
What pow'r, O man! thy reason then restores, So long suspended in nocturnal hours?
What secret hand returns the mental train, And gives improv'd thine active pow'rs again?
From thee, O man, what gratitude should rise!
And, when from balmy sleep thou op'st thine eyes, Let thy first thoughts be praises to the skies.
Excerpt from "Thoughts on the WORKS of PROVIDENCE." by Phillis Wheatley (Source)
Phillis Wheatley: "the first African-American poet, and the first African-American woman to publish her writing." (Wikipedia). Watch a great reading of one of my favourites, "Hymn to the Evening."
________
The grasses spell warm delightful, cracked insect green coloration, the chalky incompleteness in the waving eye of nature stares back with full recognition, restitution with human presence. Eagerly, I walk through the high rushes, stung with the tail end of a long forgetful period of mourning. The air fills my nostrils with intense humidity. An overwhelming lushness gravitates towards my brain. All the follicles from the plant world betray my unaware scents with awakening need. Aromatic, I speed through the vibrant, near-neon lime-green touches and find my way to a log cabin under the gorgeous density of a well-pollinated atmosphere, bred for the mind’s eye to pierce through to planetary secrets untold.
Penniless, I am a drifter of smiles, a careless frame, basking in the gathering of those my age. Who do I see? I am at a loss.
My mother! Young in her prime, she takes pity on my beleaguered state, handing me a Canadian ten-dollar bill in front of a lunch stand. The light mountain air feeds our intoxicated bliss with an embracing strength unknown in normal life, there is a silent energy about, allowing us to traverse the freedoms abreast in this long-sought after hollow of meadow and cloudless rays. I brim over with gladness, alive at once, with my friend and mother. Holding her in the sunshine womb of celestial pride, we walk through the silky meadow, renewed. Attaining the final vision, before the gully drops off the edge of a nearby cliff, I turn around and follow the nightly smoke of fellow friends, preparing for parties in the aftermath of youth, meanwhile, my mother stays behind, patiently awaiting my return, at the precipice of subterranean mystery.
_______
Mother
"The general image of 'mother' in a dream may symbolize a variety of feelings and ideas: caring, nurturing, love, acceptance, hard work, sacrifice, martyrdom, etc. The mother in your dream could also represent the 'collective unconscious,' the source of the 'water of life,' and the yin. Carl Jung suggests that women in dreams represent the collective unconscious and men the collective consciousness. Thus, the woman is that force, or current, inside of you that nudges you on and inspires you. It is your intuition and knowledge that is not necessarily attached to words."(iDream)
_______
in the deep silent tragic night, blizzard disarray and the electric blankness recedes throughout our psychic presence
with ethereal dismay, morbid as the desert solitaire, of rose-laden heights
"Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream." - from Wikipedia
"Thinks he’s a writer, too, by the way. He just can’t understand that a book’s a deed, not a paycheck. A poet must stir the soul, not nurture idolaters.
I keep having my dream. When I dream of the log walls and dark pantry, I sense that it’s only a dream. Then my joy is clouded, for I know I’ll wake up. Sometimes something happens, I stop dreaming of the house and the pines by the house of my childhood. Then I grieve and wait for the dream, that will make me a child again, and I’ll be happy again knowing that all still lies ahead and nothing is impossible…"
I plunge headlong into the rocky ledge, a violent overfull valley, spilling into a mountainous void. I roll with the water amid the fixed stones, at the lip of a great waterfall. The pristine water is translucent. I am enwrapped in its confident downward pressure, to another world below.
At an Iranian friend’s house, I gaze at his wall of historical Persian metal wares, ancient pitchers and serving plates. They are bedecked with vibrant floral patterns, subdued with aging pigments amid a host of cultural décor. I notice one plate, standing against the wall behind most with an unusual patterning and coloration. “That one is Iraqi,” my friend confirms. A mysterious air breathes into our space as I gaze wearily into the Iraqi plate.
The house opens into a full party, with laser neon club lights and steam flashing in a cacophony of mixed emotion and volatile potency from a youth desiring some greater fame than their abundant cultural upbringing. Tired of their unmatched indecision, wallowing in a spiritual squalor of heady daze, I shrink back outside into the unseen fold.
As I exit, I am at the entrance of the Amazon River basin as it snakes through the city of Iquitos. Looking forward through the dense canopy horizon, spindly serpent branches reach with emerald fire into the painstaking honesty of life and death. The humidity, secreted as from the pores of a mythic dragon, interchanges with the burly clouds shading the triumphant waterways. A diamond white streak of light, a perpetual lightning strike, an unwavering sunbeam, steals a path in the river, filling its surface with a radiant sheen from bank to bank. A path is lit toward the horizon beyond, where the river snakes into the pure touch of jungle, a celestial calling, a way out.
_______
Valley
"If the valley is barren, the reverse is predicted. If marshy, illness or vexations may follow. Vistas of green valleys with pleasant streams running through them show that you are embarking on a wonderful change that will bring you only happiness and much peace." (iDream)
_______
to catapult mind's range beyond all unknowing
further than the outermost reaches where our love, once was gone,
and now with her,
returned
"...it was like we was both back in the older times, and I was a horseback going through the mountains in the night, going through this pass in the mountains, it was cold and there was snow on the ground, he rode past me and kept on going, never said nothing going by just rode on past, he had his blanket wrapped around him with his head down, when he rode past I seen he was carrying fire in a horn the way people used to do, and I could see the horn from the light inside of it about the color of the moon. In the dream I knew that he was going on ahead and he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark, in all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he’d be there..." from No Country for Old Men by The Coen Brothers
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The road from the American Southwest opens in a lightning flash northward. A literal streak of beaming spectral intensity whitens the sand-whipped pavement unto the Canadian border beyond. This is my road, from Mother’s home of her dreams, to the creative migrant’s expatriate sway. A great triangle figures over the backdrop of North American flight. A sweet host of ethereal musing enlightens our unforeseen paths with adamantine wisdom. More southerly, the Peruvian fleet screams in my head with a need to lie beneath a doctor’s analyses, feet pointed horizontally, outstretched and fixed on the meridian point of loosened stress. Though, I am always late.
Waking up, exhausted and bedraggled, I find a representative from Amazon Watch at a doctor’s office, telling me I’ll be seen on the morrow. He’s an astute Englishman, proud and busy. I head back to Mom’s. A car pulls up in our driveway as we serve dinner. A human rights organization representative accompanies my old friend from Sudan.
My heart flies to cerulean heights under the darkening late feast of sky. His African build glows through a rejuvenated skin. His head, bald as usual, is unblemished and perfectly globular, fitting for such an astounding brilliant balanced mind. He greets us and I immediately have my mother fix him a decadent plate of meat. After dinner, he and his organizational representatives stay for conversation. My parents have retired upstairs.
“You have been a father and a friend,” my eyes tear with conviction at understanding our separate paths, crossed by pure benediction in our shape-shifting inglorious world. “Thank you for visiting me in person.” I am ever relieved to see him healthy, glowing and taking on his dream of working for his people, forced migrants of Egypt, in the comfort of a socially and technologically developed country as we enjoy in the West. His road is unlighted. With pronounced intent, their vehicle sets off into the unforgiving American night.
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West To dream of going west represents fulfillment, opportunities, and growth. Alternatively, west symbolizes death, old age or an ending of something. (Source)
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western civility estranged captivity in genital awareness a rough and tumble, hide and seek gathering pushing into skin draped exotic law, broken by caress and gentle magic, winning over the ravaged tragedy of attraction: a sounding for the war on sex
- 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
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.
“For more than two years now, the Iranian state has tried to crush the dreams of freedom which arose in June in 2009. Dreams, such as those which others in the Middle East have seen come true this year.”
Pahvan Fahimi – spokeswoman for grieving mothers
“He was a child of 19, preparing to go to university. He hadn’t fulfilled any of his dreams. Who killed him? On whose orders? Why? I ask all of you. What was he asking of this country? Only peace and freedom of thought.”
Narrator
“Bahar is a student and a rapper. Like most young people, in 2009, she dreams of a different Iran.”
Bahar – student and rapper
“Like an enchanted castle crumbling it took just 6 or 7 hours to erase hope. And all those who voted for Moussavi realized it was just a dream.
The Islamic Republic has always been a nightmare for me.
…they’ve done all they can to try to take that hope from us... It will go on and on, until you scream your deepest feelings, you see freedom, and you’re no longer afraid to speak your mind. And that’s the day your hope will become reality.”
From “Letters from Iran” an Al-Jazeera Documentary
___________
This week, from March 20-23, it is Persian New Year, or Nowruz.
New Years
Happy New Years!
Persian, Hebrew, Roman, Chinese
Many in One.
May the New Year live up to its Name.
_________
I am outside of the concrete square homes that the Maya people of Xmaben, Campeche in Mexico construct as a symbol of prestige beside their grass huts, however they don’t live in them. They used to hang my hammock from wall to wall, but before sleep each night, I was visited by a local girl. A small, petite young lady with unmistakably Maya features, she used to send me sweet smiles and laughter from outside, beckoning me to join her in the night. I wanted to marry her. I gave her a jade ring and consummated our innocent feelings. In my dream, I feel as if we are married. After I leave the village, I find myself in a furnished bedroom in a Mexican city. In it, I await my other love, a Spanish woman, a few years older than I, with a gorgeous wit. It seems we have married as well. Our life, however, becomes overly domestic and soon I wait for her, to find only our empty abode.
As the dream cycle continues, I attend a high school reunion. I am excited and confident to see my old friends from the days of superficial cliques and institutionalized learning. I tell people I married twice in Mexico. They don’t find this surprising from me, and go on to talk in their circles of indiscernible chatter. I later return home to my mother’s house in this same town. My stepfather and her watch television as usual. The television portrays ghastly scenes of war. Children, it seems of Southeast Asia, are being run over mercilessly by tanks, their bodies scarred with burn marks and ash. I react, abhorred and deeply offended by the mindless atrocities that we are witnessing via television, and my mother cries, but my stepfather watches without emotion. I leave.
_________
Dreaming, Composing Poetry, Meditating
I pass my days
Contemplating the dead students of Tiananmen
And the Green Wave
Childless mothers silenced
Full of blood
A body
Language of resistance
Firm as the vicious fluid of life
Soft as the flesh
Emaciated with the steel of tank tracks
Or torn open in a single kill shot
Or E. Mehtari
Whose stern face became lip-bitingly serious
Upon mentioning the “trouza”
In English, rape
How he holds back tears
A fight against self-pity
The death of the ego
Asking, “where is God if not in you”
Yet, when asking you fall headlong
Into your deathless presence
Where you cease to be this body of crime
Ponder yourself
As the total equation of here
In the moment
At one
With the ground of all being
We humans
Why do some attain self-realization?
Only upon being split in half?
Sundered in shreds by our fellow man?
When did this arcane spiritual responsibility bestow devils of such wonderful emergence?
The Ahriman is certainly turning in its cemetery
Sheathed in female coverings and riot police uniforms
In these pain-ridden lands
Whose story immediately translates into our one story?
Throughout human history
In reclaiming that story
Allowing the truth to resurface naturally
As a feather, thrown with a handful of stones
Over an open lake
Thick with the opacity of crude oil
Hardening urges of those who sleep,
Still, sitting
Upright I petition the burning skin of my Love
To recede into her inmost self-forgiving
Be healed
With the same immediacy that one may feel oncoming death
Approaching with futile procession
Toward the white of their eyes
With equal subtlety
Plunging their ethereal hand
In the porous open of their now entered body
A mere passage
For the voice of all truths
For the Peaceful Youth Protestors Around the World
Twenty-five hundred years ago, nestled in a fertile valley along the border between India and Nepal, a child was born who was to become the Buddha. The stories say that before his birth, his mother, the queen of a small Indian kingdom, had a dream.
A beautiful white elephant offered the queen a lotus flower, and then, entered the side of her body. When sages were asked to interpret the dream, they predicted the queen would give birth to a son destined to become either a great ruler or a holy man.
One day, they said, he would either conquer the world, or become an enlightened being—the Buddha.
from "The Buddha" a PBS documentary by David Grubin
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.
