Unseen Pages

In the 1760s, a loose association of writers that might or might not have existed was scattered across Germany. From Baden to Bavaria, from the Black Forest to river cities, a diffuse band of eccentrics wrote treatises, stories, poems, and meditations. All of their inspirations had a center of gravity or allusive subtext concerned with the mystery of aesthetics and the eeriness of being. I’ll assume this shadowy group of writers did indeed exist. That way, I’ll be able to continue writing this essay.

The first stirrings of what would become known as German Romanticism were in the air — in the morning fogs drifting above rivers, through forests, around the forms of Gothic architecture.

The Society of Mutual Dreamers met twice a year – on the summer and winter solstices – at an undisclosed location. Karl Gottfried Fenstermacher (I’ll give him that name), who lived in the Black Forest, would bring to these gatherings the petals from a pale flower that grew in the shade of quietly troubled, darkly murmuring trees. During the secret meetings, attendees would partake of a liquid concoction distilled from those pale petals. They would collectively hallucinate into one another’s dreams and nightmares. They were determined, based on questionable hypotheses and principles, to derive or abstract a universal truth. They wished to touch the sleeping fabric of being, to examine its texture.

During these convergences into dreamland, they would compare impressions and mentally sketch stupefied rudiments for later pages. By such a collective oneiric experience, they hoped the sleeping spirit of the world might disclose a solution to the riddle of beauty and melancholy. These esoteric experiments, therefore, had a basis in Ästhetik und Weltschmerz, and were energized by the possibility of poetic transcendence. 

How is it that they could all appear in each dream simultaneously? No one knows.

Inspired by these sojourns into metaphysical regions, the members would return to their homes and write about imagination and abyss. They wrote pages that have never been recovered.

Friends, relatives, villagers, and city dwellers, who went about their conventional routines and thought their conventional thoughts, began to notice something odd about those dispersed members of The Society of Mutual Dreamers. At first, it was an aura of distractedness hovering around their personalities. It was as if, when spoken to, those literary eccentrics paid only half attention to what was being said.

Eventually, the situation became more dramatic, or perhaps tragic. The various odd ones began to appear anemic and pale. The collective condition worsened. As they became almost transparent, they were scolded and advised by their unknowing contemporaries to drink more red wine, to build the blood. Soon, none of them was ever seen or heard from again.

They had taken up permanent residence in the atmospheres of old dreams and evocative nightmares. While in those farther precincts, the members of The Society of Mutual Dreamers would convene seminars. They presented their morbidly ecstatic treatises, stories, poems, and meditations based on how it seemed to be in this tangent world. Those written works were very strange and very beautiful and very profound. They have also never been recovered in our waking world. But in the natural time of mornings and the quiet time of evenings, a gist of those unseen pages would occasionally sigh through trees, villages, and cities. How is that possible? No one knows.

One late afternoon, a young man – Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, also known as Novalis – was strolling through a grove of brooding trees in the Harz Mountains. That same pale flower also grew there. Novalis would kneel to breathe the fragrance of that flower, but it never occurred to him to render the petals into an occult liqueur. Nonetheless, he was now on his way to becoming odd. The wind picked up, and Novalis heard the ghosts of impressions from the lost Society of Mutual Dreamers. He heard and could almost read those lost pages drifting from the realm of great dreaming. About Novalis, Hermann Hesse would later allude to a new poetic dimension, to marvelous and mysterious work.

Some of Novalis’s pages have been seen:

Hymns to the Night

“The more poetic, the more real.”

By Tim Buck

desperate measures

I'm labeling, indexing this post as: "dreams, life, science."

"Science" -- Ha. 


I have a hypothesis about dreams. 

The phenomena that occur in dreams are less striking to me than the tenor of dreams. I can only speak from my sleeping experience about a general dream atmosphere; maybe others would have different experiences of "climate" (variable instead of consistent?) and have alternate opinions about the nature of dreams. 

Does the more-or-less uniform background aura of dreams that I encounter -- pensive, tragic, hyper-existential -- also contain a tentative, experimental feel to the ambiance? And signify anything that can be talked about coherently, conceptually?

Darwin basically gave us this: creatures trying not to die and in the process becoming different things. Sort of a Great Escape. Living and dying are quite serious concerns for an organism. But humans have gotten so abstracted into realms of social mediation and cultural metabolism that the instinctive "mind" gets shoved aside or turned down to a barely audible volume. The biological-subconscious frenzy of being doesn't get fretted over very much by us while awake. It's left to operate on autopilot, so to speak. But when we get very sick or when someone dies, we are then briefly shocked into confrontation with Darwin's creature mantra -- "Live, live!" 

If Darwin and the neo-evolutionists -- including evolutionary psychologists -- are right, then all forms of behavior are adaptive techniques. So what kind of adaptation is involved with dreaming? Merely a sideshow for the mind while the brain reboots itself at night? Or something stranger and cooler?

I prefer the strange and the cool.

The consistent aura of my dreams suggests to me that the soul (that impossible nexus of biology and spirit) is taking desperate measures. It's making nightly attempts to save memory per se -- a whole life -- not just memories in particular. And is trying to circumvent time and space by projecting the self's being into other, possible worlds. A futile nightly act of bio-meta-mythic survival. 

The phenomena of dreams -- events, interactions, predicaments -- are the residue of memory per se refined into new substance. And from this dark material is extruded quasi-experience as a something palpable enough to be projected toward a tentative, potential-eternal situation.

Survival. 

Deep interior self is alerted to, reminded of eventual death as it succumbs each night to the metaphorical little death of sleep, as consciousness involuntarily goes away. That triggers the mania to construct an after-world. But the spherical architecture of the dream won't permanently cohere. The bubble eventually bursts into a lingering mist only of frustration or sadness.

And nightmares? The specter of extinction, despite great substance and process to the contrary, is eating its way through the tissue of our survival-sphere. We wake, and a perspiration of horror is residual on our spirit. 

Our biological-subconscious soul has made a desperate and exotic effort on our behalf, for a continuance after the day of our bell's tolling. That gesture is doomed to failure. But I think it's extraordinary to consider the vast resources of instinctive art and experimental elan -- those actualized holographies, those populated narratives -- our consciousness musters, brings to bear against mortality while we're sleeping.

Beneath the waking mind is another mind that broods and plots the coordinates of symbolic escape toward further and farther experience.

I Saw Three Cities
Kay Sage (1944)

Some dreams...

...are stranger than strange. At least that's my opinion. Those stranger-than-strange dreams are rare ones. How can I describe them? I'll probably make a mess of trying to describe them. But I'll proceed by the seat of my pants.

I suspect that we absorb more "data" than we realize. I think consciousness is a vast and baffling reservoir of collected experience and impressions. I think we know more subconsciously than we realize.

So........

some rare dreams bring into "awareness" that hyper-subtle data we don't know is there when awake. Someone of our acquaintance will appear in a dream in a seemingly uncharacteristic way -- their mannerisms and reactions to your dreaming self contradict how we assumed their attitude toward us to be.

Is that merely crazy-quilt dream invention, sleeping paranoia? I suspect not. I suspect that is our deeper mind bringing to our sleeping mind a true image based on hyper-subtle information.

Someone who we think, when we're awake, has a favorable attitude toward us is revealed in the dream as having a contrary disposition toward us.

You wake up and can be quite hurt from this new realization. But then you can also marvel at the large aptitude and unexpected talent of your hidden mind.    

I consider last night a success

I managed to have another of those dreams from which I wake up disturbingly enriched and wonderfully crestfallen. 

A car-traveling dream, always somewhere between east Texas and south Arkansas. Bogged down and disoriented in a strange town. Lost and frustrated. Can't find my way out of that town. 

Directions sought from sullen inhabitants lead nowhere. I consult the town's beautiful blond travel-agent oracle, who sits behind a desk on an elevated platform. She tries her smiling best to inject charts and information into my head, to no effect. Then wandering on foot through industrial precincts.

The way it all felt and seemed, the sense of an eternal dismal marooning -- it just doesn't get any better than this!

Gérard de Nerval said this:

Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us from the invisible world.

 

1808 - 1855

Lucid? -- probably not

I don't want to call nobody a tall tale teller, but it's time to put lucid dreaming snugly to bed. I'm as skeptical as a wildebeest at a muddy, crocky river crossing.

I've had one lucid dream. I was a young fellow. For a brief moment or two, I was aware that I was dreaming. That will mess with your head big time. Reality will shake and tilt for days afterwards.  

I think all the "lucid dreamers" out there are either exaggerating things or confusing modalities. Again, I don't want to call anyone a fibber -- if someone wishes to insist he's a lucid dreamer, go on ahead with it. 

But becoming aware that you're dreaming while inside a dream is not natural and not something to be proud of. Persistent lucid dreaming (many people say all their dreams are lucid) would, I'm quite sure, turn a person into a permanent mute nut. 

I think this is what's actually going on: some people have sharp and detailed recall of their dreams. They confuse the mode of vivid recall with actual prior dream awareness. Or if they're just stretching things, I suppose that's okay. It can make a person feel dramatic and special, if that's what they need.

But again...waking up inside a dream will crack the inside of your skull and leak out your brains. It's just too bizarre and unnatural. After a real lucid dream, a fella would be so screwed up, he wouldn't be able to talk real English for many days. And if someone placed a compass on his head, the needle would spin around like a lost goose. 

toward art and simple wonder

Philosophy, as a world-grasping and world-ordering milieu, eventually gives way to deep music, unusual poetry, and the mapless condition of dream. Thought, given enough time, gradually releases itself from the brain's algorithmic, relational neurosis and begins to feel its way toward and into the abyss behind symbols, which is the mystical (or whatever).

I'm tired, and I'm babbling like a drunken platypus.

it must be so

It's the rare thing that lasts 30 seconds while also never ending inside your head. A sideways space has been opened to become a volume of the inexplicable. And within that space, something not exactly real weaves around itself a palpable web of the truer-real. 

In my arrogant opinion, coming across genuine contemporary surrealism is something that verges on the impossible. These days, you observe painters, writers, theater directors, and filmmakers trying too damn hard to be surreal. It's cloying, and it pisses me off. Surrealism flowing with the natural-unnatural is rare and beyond the pale. 

Yet four years ago, my first encounter with author Kris Saknussemm was in the form of 57 words lasting 30 seconds (which also never ends for me). That written eruption gives the true masters of surrealism from back in the day a tight run for the money. There's a quality of strange beauty and a quality of spiritual it-must-be-so about it. For a Westerner, only China could be the endless aesthetic of the sideways sublime. The symbolic of a regular dream finds itself shanghaied into the awesomeness of a hyper-dream.

Here it is:

Watching the old men betting on a cricket fight in Guangzhou. Two female students I knew float by in an enormous tea cup, the kind with the dragons on it that change color when you pour in the hot water. It looks strangely innocent in the sludge of the Pearl River amongst the barges and industrial boats.

what dreams may come

Jessica Duchen is a rather neat person. She also has an aesthetic sensibility. That unusual condition can sometimes cause a special dream to happen.

In fact, I can imagine an unwritten Jessica character appearing in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. At the Davos sanitarium, she is sitting for breakfast at one of the dining hall tables. Hans Castorp, at another table, overhears her telling about last night's dream:

"Has anyone seen my dream aria?"

lost in a Chinese night

Yesterday, I had an actual reverie. An official daydream, approved and stamped by a shadowy bureaucracy in charge of dubious precincts of time.

I keep thinking about that reverie. I think it lasted for only a few moments, yet those moments were stretched into a different form or quality of duration. Those few moments seemed to last an incredibly long while.

I was afoot and moving at night through a town or village somewhere in China. This night was dynamic and clangorous with bodies, faces, trumpets, dogs, chimes, flags, leashed monkeys, and neon signs buzzing unknowable ideograms.

But the faces! Everywhere faces. Peculiar, probing, insinuating, alarming faces.

The streets (some paved) were coming and going at odd angles and refuted any possibility of destination. The houses and other buildings were close to the streets and were all built in the old Chinese manner, with curving, sweeping roof lines. Asian trees spread their perfumed branches. Traditional lanterns glowed here and there, like the pale heads of forlorn ghosts.

The sense of utter and bedazzled alienation took my daydreaming breath away.

Those faces! People swerving up to me, close to my nose, wide-eyed, gesticulating, staring with the expression of vaguely threatening hieroglyphs. Faces that were, in contrast to my own, completely at home in this world.

There was no point to this reverie. It was simply a divergent moment stretched out into forbidden space. If Carl Jung was still alive, perhaps I'd drop in on him, to ask about this dark tumbling into a town or village of my subconscious hysteria. To find out the reason why I tumbled there. To discover what form of psychological ruin this episode was a foreboding or what form of spiritual talent this episode was a possible presentiment.

Marina Tsvetayeva and me

She and I share the same sense of this:

Oh, Boris, Boris! How well I know the other one [world]! From dreams, from the ambient air of dreams, from the density, the essentiality of dreams. And how little I know of this one, how much I dislike it, and how hurt I have been by it! But the other one -- just fancy! -- light, radiance, things illuminated quite differently, with your light and mine!

                                                                                        ~ from Letters: Summer 1926 

More than once on this blog, I've tried to describe that ambience, density, and essentiality of dreams. The poet's words are perfect. Often I'm struck by how dreams are expressed with a peculiar depth and substance. A situational gravity. A surreal quiddity. A holistic thereness.

amazon.com

dream trauma

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
                                          -- from Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger


I had a dream. 

I was somehow tuned into an international radio show (90.5 on the dream dial). It was a culture show, with an English-speaking announcer. Someone known to me began speaking their poem-song. A voice in a language I don't know. A voice imbued with great and worldly qualities. A poem-song beautiful, poignant, and profound. About things beyond my experience and existence. Of things in a realm to which I don't belong. Spoken-sung in a transporting cadence. The lyrics moving on a subtle melody. Her voice was so very far above me in its rich conveyance of poetic atmospheres, of visionary eloquence. In a language I don't know, yet the gist of the poem-song came to me between the lines. As if the music of her voice translated the words.

When her poem-song was over, I turned off the radio. I went outside, eventually wandering into an unknown, colorful little neighborhood.  A car stopped to pick me up. Inside were four men, belonging to an ancient and foreign religious affiliation. I settled into the back seat. In the front seat, one of them began speculating about a secret, apocalyptic code. A number gleaned from his studies in Kabbalah. 

I soon realized they were driving me toward my home, from when I was a little boy. I asked them to pull over and let me walk alone the rest of the way. The old hill, the other side of which lay my childhood house, grew steeper as I approached. I began struggling to find handholds in what had now become a boulder-strewn mountainside. The brush and forlorn roots hanging here and there morphed into frozen water sprays. The heat of my climbing caused the ice-sprays to begin melting. This somehow triggered the bursting through of a terrible river above. Torrents of floodwater poured over and onto me, washing me back down the mountain(hill)side. The old road I had taken was now a hopeless ravine. I was swept away into death and eternal oblivion.

I woke up.


So...isn't it astonishing how consciousness can speak to itself allegorically, through the ambiguous form of an oneiric tale?

those who have been dreamed

The people I meet in dreams have an idiosyncratic presence more remarkable than that of people in real life.

Besides fully inhabiting their dream personalities, there's also a trace or an aura of the forlorn about them. As if they know, quasi-subconsciously, that they are figments. To compensate for not being real, they bring to their dream roles an indelible quotient of pseudo-being.

It's very weird.

Dreams...

might be where the body and the mind come together -- the physical and mental/emotional nexus where both argue against the other's formal and legal existence. That's as good a place as any for them to meet up, since their meeting up at all is a philosophically intransigent problem (see David Chalmers).

Think about it.

Out here, we get all involved in the out here: politics, flying saucers, spaghetti. As if that's the only place where anything happens. But consider the weird chambers and textures of things inside: enzymes, tissues, marrow, and junk. Even farther afoot -- freaking molecules doing strident things. We have no idea about the existential standing and compulsions of the stuff inside our own skin. Surely though, it's a dark and macabre territory.

Now consider the unconscious! Whatever it is, when it meets up with slumbering aspects of body in that  tavern called "dream," all hell is going to break loose. Hence, brooding nightmares, depressing atmospheres, miserable ecstasies, forlorn exigencies. And surreal paintings by those dire psychonauts in the early 20th century.

Dreams are just too bizarre to think about.

But they do suggest to me a renewed appreciation for the primacy and potency of the unconscious. Just as our body parts are a swirling, squishing mass of improbable beingness, the unconscious must be even more centripetal, deranged, and impossible.

It's a miracle we aren't always exploding into shrieking confetti.

Desiring the impossible...

...is hurtful but better than being dead. Nonexistence is even more futile and bizarre.

a gift of nightmares

Work with me.

Let's say that all dreams are forms of nightmare. And thank goodness for that!

Even the ones that are kind of wish-fulfillments. After the fact -- after waking -- the residue of what can never be, that perpetual fading of the sought-for presence becomes not a pleasant oneiric memory. Waking up to such an absence leaves us in the beautiful atmosphere of a soft lingering nightmare.

Then there are the dreams expressing a continuum of lostness. Existential mazes of confused experience. The horror is subdued, folded into sagging planes of perplexed emotion. That is so damn groovy.

But the full-on nightmares. Those are superb. What can be better than a night of spiritual wrack and ruin? An unseen demon pounding on the door of sudden panic. Inanimate objects coming to sentience and malevolence. Danger. Possible death (a different form of wish-fulfillment) driving the soul to extremis and a grimacing delight.


All of this stuff of the night and great despond! What would life be like without dark poolings of such beneficence? A gift of nightmares is a treasure bestowed from the vast storeroom of uncanny art and deep pathological élan.

reverie

Let's say we're walking toward that forgetting fog. Someone is emerging from it and approaching us. It's Novalis. How is this possible?

In this forest, we have fallen through time, and the year 1797 is damp in the air. We have forgotten the future. Novalis is sleepwalking as he moves along the leafy path. His dream is drifting toward us. It moves around and into us. Our own dream becomes older, more farfetched. We wish to hear of roses wilting and the loneliness of trees. Why did we come here? No one knows.

it's something else

Again last night I saw the lost country -- René Daumal

Entirely too much has been written about dreams, and I am not pleased. That stuff rings hollow. Just like consciousness per se, dreams have no explanation. They just are. Whatever they are, they are something else than what has been said about them.


[That's my opening salvo. I might have more to say here about the unsayable nature of dreams tomorrow or whenever.]

The horror! The horror!

I had a dream when I was about 35 years old. I was standing in front of and compelled to enter a building that looked exactly like this place.

The building in my dream contained a vast, invisible, and implacable spirit of unspeakable metaphysical horror. The kind that would blast your brains out of your head just being so close to it.

I woke up before entering that building. It was one of the best dreams I've ever had. I'll never forget it.

my dream last night...

...was complex and miserable. It would crack open the soul of a saint. It would make rocks moan lamentations. It was unusual. I enjoyed every minute of it. But I can't remember what occurred.