The new academic year starts today. I've been up since four o' clock, having slept but little. I know I slept a bit, because I dreamed I was in trouble with a bunch of Muslim men for having invited a woman into my house - here a rather charming Greek island-style dwelling on a hillside overlooking the sea. One of the men, a former student of mine, tells me that the morality police have been apprised of my action, and that they will take steps. I find I'm holding a small plastic packet the size of those that hold a 'Stop' condom. (Available at good Greek kiosks everywhere. Widely, although probably unjustly, held to be as fit for purpose as bubble-gum.) On the packet, it says: 'The Naked Truth'. Well, the morality police are going to love that, I think, and I dispose of the packet by pushing it down a chute in the wall like a 'memory hole' in 1984. And Christ, I'm thinking, the house is probably chock-full of incriminating books, atheist stuff, gay stuff, Buddhist stuff, all the sort of thing you cannot justify to grubby-minded literalists of the kind I now expect to have to deal with. Fearing arrest and possibly torture, I get into wall-climbing paranoia and... why, it was all a dream!
Fed up of tossing and turning and meteor showers of old memories, I got up at four, made coffee and dutifully wrote up the dream in my dream-diary. Here is more fuel for what Anthony Stevens calls 'hermeneutic frustration', i.e., the 'what-the-fuck-was-all-that-about?' feeling you get when pondering the symbols thrown up behind your eyelids every night. Am I letting the coming month's teaching keep me awake, for God's sake? Well, yes. I get dreadful stage-fright before meeting new classes. There's something even more nagging in dreams this year, though. Botched performances, collapsing stage sets, awaiting execution by beheading or being pushed off a high building - it's as if I am constantly being told I'm a fake, or at least that there's something elusively inauthentic about the way I am living.
Dear, dear. Must get into the shower, got to get the bloody train at seven today. All this will seem rather odd and quaint when the sun comes up.
Fed up of tossing and turning and meteor showers of old memories, I got up at four, made coffee and dutifully wrote up the dream in my dream-diary. Here is more fuel for what Anthony Stevens calls 'hermeneutic frustration', i.e., the 'what-the-fuck-was-all-that-about?' feeling you get when pondering the symbols thrown up behind your eyelids every night. Am I letting the coming month's teaching keep me awake, for God's sake? Well, yes. I get dreadful stage-fright before meeting new classes. There's something even more nagging in dreams this year, though. Botched performances, collapsing stage sets, awaiting execution by beheading or being pushed off a high building - it's as if I am constantly being told I'm a fake, or at least that there's something elusively inauthentic about the way I am living.
Dear, dear. Must get into the shower, got to get the bloody train at seven today. All this will seem rather odd and quaint when the sun comes up.
2 comments:
Oy - poor poor you. I am more affected by my dreams than by the real thing. It is so difficult to shake the feelings they conjure and many times I have been brought up short during the day as an arresting dream image re-appears. My most often visited dreamscapes are me struggling along teeny narrow ledges with massive gaps to be jumped across, stones or broken glass to be walked over - barefoot. I think this may indicate that I have either chosen or am forced to follow the rocky road rather than the primrose path of whatever it is - dalliance.
The narrow ledges are a common theme in my dreams as well. Usually I'm crawling along them near paralysed with vertigo.
I bin to Dalliance. It's a shit ole.
Post a Comment