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"

Dreams from the Arab World: Deadly Play and the Chaos of Freedom

Kalila and Dimna, jackal tale scene: the crow king and his counselors by Arab painters around 1210

for those who lost their lives...

Dream of Youngest Female Nobel Prize Winner Tawakkul Abdel-Salam Karman

From her acceptance speech:

"We were able to efficiently and effectively maintain a peaceful revolution in spite of the fact that this great nation has more than 70 million firearms of various types. Here lies the philosophy of the revolution, which persuaded millions of people to leave their weapons at home and join the peaceful march against the state’s machine of murder and violence just with flowers and bare breasts, and filled with dreams, love and peace."

____________

Semi-circle monkey bars, rusty, old, they rise to a very high altitude at center.

I’m videotaping an expert at crossing the most dangerous part of this abandoned playground. I cross multiple times, as I go on and on, it becomes foggy and humid. At the center, there is an opening, where my mind goes blank because I feel it’s impossible to cross, but I cross

At the last crossing, when I reach the bottom, it feels as if I am in an abandoned, mechanical children’s playground in Egypt, and I remember an Egyptian girl who seems like my girlfriend…yet she is missing. I flash to a scene that looks like her parents, and local police. They are speaking in Arabic, searching for her. I flashback to being directly on top of the semi-circle monkey bars, my friend who I am videotaping reminds me that he’s gotten rid of my poetry books because they give evidence of the missing girl…I flash in my mind these poetry books, immaculately printed with full color photos of the girl and professionally written poetry…I go to a field, and a mass of people are reciting this poetry, it seems I am at a funeral.

Sunday, January 29

Gothic Flight with the Wife-Sister in Mutilation

Supper Masks by Adolf von Menzel

I am in an setting strongly resembling the priest's starkly bleak and violently humorless abode in "Fanny and Alexander" by Ingmar Bergman. Between the cold stone walls that seem to press in closer and closer, I turn a bend to an outside court. I have a video camera in hand, and find a friend's father succumbing to a filthy heroin addiction. I video him shooting up and turning pale, with fangs as bloody and lifeless as a vampire's. In a kitchenette of sorts, a family sits around the table. The small home now mixes in an understated blur of unspoken silence. There is an inhumane stifled and drowned heart, now turned to meat in our soup bowls, its former life surrounds us quietly. I am reminded of a small kibbutz home that I once visited. The kitchen table is cornered in a lonely room. The family is missing the father, and I am seated without thought to mind the discomfort at knowing his whereabouts as he huddles lowered into the darkness of his poverty of will. Then, in the night, my room is ambushed by his figure, cloaked in staunch black robe. There is an air of over-religious prayer turned to a nightmarish cursing as he raises a black knife into the air above me. Motionless, I receive a monstrous gash beside my belly-button. I howl and receive two more along my side and below my left shoulder as blood streams effortlessly down my side. A gun is raised to my shoulder, and I receive a fixing blow below my right shoulder. Nearly inert, my mind turns to shade, yet my adrenaline picks me up with full lungs, I worry for my wife, now mere animal and sister of humanity, to be slaughtered by the tortured weakness of an insane mind frothing at the brim of his asylum grave; this house of fleshless waste enslaves me to a pain unknown, yet I feel life struggling to stand with the rhythmic plan of my heartbeat, calling me to go forth, and the beat is ever important as never before, if I falter I could miss one beat and fall into the void of the stale, rock floor. I finally find my wife, covered in the ash of wood burnt to its lowest ember, cursing through a throat densely saturated with blood overfull with pain. There is a spark of wonder at our meeting. How are we still alive? I am forced, embedded in this sick house, to confront the murderous wraith who balances life and death on the numb foresight of his insidious night killings. I quickly examine our wounds, and though we are in critical condition with flesh flayed in visible touch with our vitals, the swarm of inner heat beckoning us to kill the blind culprit sends me forth into the blackest corner of the most lightless room, to fulfill my fear's overcoming alas and travail the bloody path that I make walking inside the heavy wooden doorway to flash an uprisen knife and buckle down over loosened sinew and the butchered meat of this trivial nightmarish dream, imagining my blood sink with my would-be murderer and pave the stone floor with a distressed need to overcome this body of suffering, together with my sister of humanity.