“Supper, sir, and tonight's movie. I'm sorry, sir, it is another Doug McClure.” By which I mean to say, more today on Finnegans Wake. Only in the middle eight though. Little bit at the end. Read it, you’ll enjoy it and you’ll learn something. Read on, MacDuff
We Are Such Stuff As
Dreams Are Made On
We are such stuff as dreams are made on: our little life is rounded with a sleep
The Tempest act 4, scene 1
I love sleep. One of the many reasons why I never really took drugs (certainly not ‘uppers’) is because I can’t imagine anything I’d less like to be doing than taking drugs and stay out all night clubbing. Yawn! All things considered, I’d rather be reading. That and getting an early night.
The Tempest act 4, scene 1
I love sleep. One of the many reasons why I never really took drugs (certainly not ‘uppers’) is because I can’t imagine anything I’d less like to be doing than taking drugs and stay out all night clubbing. Yawn! All things considered, I’d rather be reading. That and getting an early night.
I say an early night, but my sleep patterns are so notoriously
off when not engaged is regular servitude (I mean employment, sorry, sorry, my
bad – attitude) that I can be getting up at anything from 4am to midday to
midnight. I can easily sleep for anything up to fourteen hours at a time, often
staying awake for a day or more just to try and reset my body clock. It usually
works, at least for a couple of weeks.
To sleep, perchance to
dream1. As I sleep, I dream. I have friends who claim to never
dream or to not remember their dreams. I can’t even begin to imagine what
that’s like. I have four, five dreams a night and usually remember all of them.
They have regular plots, themes and moods, like episodes of TV series.
There are the post-apocalyptic zombie dreams, the escaping
from government agents or criminal mastermind dreams (same difference, am I
right?), the dreams where real life locations miles apart are connected by
shortcuts through the woods or under the M61. Whenever I leave a job, a house,
a town or a relationship, I have dreams of being back there for months
afterwards. My father died of cancer eighteen years ago and yet every other
month I still dream that he turns up alive and no one but me seems suspicious
at him not being dead, even though we had him cremated.
I have dreams where I’m running, but move more like a
marionette, feet never quite connecting with the ground because the mind can’t
accurately reproduce the sensation of running (or, more likely, because I
rarely felt the need to run and so have no stored experience of what that’s
like). I have dreams I am on bike, struggling to get up one of the monstrous
hills that surround this village. I dream of being on boats all the time, steam
boats on Russian lakes and speed boats on canals and some version of my
fictional sailing ship, the Anna Livia Plurabelle, zipping around the oceans of
the world. And if I’m not actually on water, then I’m walking along the bridal
way of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal. Except, it’s a dream, so it both is and isn’t
the Leeds-Liverpool Canal.
I have dreams that I am in the United States and, most
bizarrely of all, I have infrequent dreams about being in Vienna or Saltsburg,
though I haven’t been to Austria or have any great desire to travel there.
Whenever I have spent all day reading or writing then the
story continues as I sleep and my dreams are filled with nothing but a typed
page that I read, except the narrative proceeds in the kind of fucked up way
for which dreams are notorious. If that sounds strange, a friend of mine once
had a dream that consisted entirely of a can of baked beans on a table. Static
image, no panning or tracking shot or anything. Just a can of beans on a table.
In the land of dreams it is the ordinary that is fucked up.
I also have a lot of anxiety dreams. I have dreams where I
have run away from work or friends and am hiding, but regularly emerging from
my hiding place to taunt them and run away and hide again. I used to have
frequent dreams where I’m in an elevator that starts to get smaller as it
ascends. Or works like an elevator in Star Trek, moving sideways and between
buildings like a monorail system. I also have dreams that I’m in Star Trek,
Deep Space 9, Red Dwarf, Community or The Office, depending which show I’ve
recently been watching in marathon sessions.
In fact, the one dream that I can’t seem to remember is the
one that I’d most like to able to recall. It is a recurring dream and a
recurring nightmare from when I was very young. I can only remember it in
snatches. It’s a disjointed dream. There are some grave diggers, which I know
for certain come from seeing The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes when I was a
kid. Something involving the army moving into position or something, but as so
often with dreams, it’s the sense of unease and terror that the dream used to
instil in me. It was the sense of time slowing down to a crawl. Where the sound
of speech is in slow-mo and lowered pitch. I would get these sensations in
waking moments too, of the world running at half speed. It used to freak me
out, but now I’d kill to be able to recapture that sensation. I’m 41. I could
do with some extra hours in the day. I had the dream once in a flu fever when I
was fourteen, but other than that, I’ve not had in since I was five.
Oh! là! là! que
d’amours splendides j’ai rêvés!2 Given such a broad range of
dreams, it is perhaps not unsurprising that I would become obsessed with
Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a novel which takes place during the course of a dream.
When Joyce was writing, it was the theories of Sigmund Freud and his
Interpretation of Dreams that held sway. Both men died long before the
discovery of Rapid Eye Movement (REM), first described in 1953, and it was at
the time assumed that dreams progressed in something like real time during the
course of sleep. Today we know that dreams happen in bursts of activity during
the night, identified by REM. What can appear in the dream world to last for
hours actually happens in fast forward and often only takes minutes of real
time. Perhaps this accounts for my feelings of temporal dislocation as a child.
Freud’s theories seem to us naive, even idiotic at times,
but no theory is ever entirely wide of the mark and some of what he has to say
is still valid. His theory that some dreams are nothing but wish fulfilment
holds true. A child sees a toy in the shops that they wish to own and that
night they dream that they are playing with the toy in question. I’d be willing
to bet that in these days of consumerism, self-entitlement, arrested
development and the cult of celebrity that more people have wish fulfilment
dreams than ever before.
For Freud, all phallic or quasi phallic objects represented
the penis and all womb or quasi uterine objects represent the vagina. Sex, sex,
sex, that’s all that Freud ever thinks about. Joyce employs some of the same
imagery in the Wake. It seems to me that in studying Finnegans Wake, which
contains allusions to a great many works of fiction, non-fiction and mythology,
some fall into the trap of assuming that just because Joyce references
something, it must mean he thinks of it as being worthy.
The Wake makes great use and reference to Giambattista
Vico’s The New Science, which contains Vico’s theory of history moving through
repeating cycles. Yet anyone who’s ever read The New Science should know that
while it might have some interesting theories about history and the etymology
of certain words, it is for the most part a poorly conceived piece of fundamentalist,
misogynist tripe, which tries to prove the literal truth of the Biblical
stories, especially the bit where Noah’s three sons, Ham, Shem and Japheth
travel out after the Great Flood to the three known continents and
singlehandedly repopulate each continent by impregnating the race of giant
women who survived the rising waters.
Perhaps I give James Joyce too much credit, but most of what
I have read that was written by him or by the people who knew him leads me to
believe that he ultimately came to see Vico’s theories as being as misogynistic
as I do, especially once he’d read James George Frazer’s counter theories in The
Golden Bough. The phrase, ‘a commodious vicus of recirculation’ contained in
the opening sentence of Finnegans Wake seems to me to be Joyce calling out
Vico’s theory as a vicious recycling of the same old misogynistic shit. Similar
denunciations occur throughout the Wake.
The same is true with Freud and with psychoanalysis in
general. Joyce’s own daughter, Lucia, muse to Finnegans Wake, suffered from
what today would be probably diagnosed as manic depression and simply treated,
but then, in the dark ages for feminism and psychiatry, was ministered to
extremes and left languishing in mental institutions for forty years after her
father’s death. Only Joyce kept faith in Lucia that she was not disturbed, but
took her to see the Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung. The consultation was not
successful, especially after Jung tried to get Joyce himself to undergo
psychoanalysis. The conversation and Joyce’s witty retort is replayed in the
Wake:
I can psoakoonaloose
myself any time I want (the fog follow you all!) without your interferences or
any other pigeonstealer.
At one point in the Wake he refers to ‘Jungfraud’ to
describe just what he thought of psychiatry. He believed that Vico had
anticipated the work of Jung, Freud and others, but often the language of all
three men in the Wake seems to be used as a weapon to strike back at them. The
fall of man at the Garden of Eden and all the subsequent falls and returns,
deaths and rebirths that play out through the Wake use Freud’s phallic dream
symbology to symbolise sexual excitement and release. Death in the Wake is
really la petit mort, the little
death which is said to occur after ejaculation. Once the giant HCE has shot his
load into his wife, ALP, he will sleep and she will be left unmolested until he
is priapically reborn to rule over her once again.
Is all that we see or
seem but a dream within a dream?3 Today there are two competing
theories on the purpose of dreams. One is vastly more woolly headed than the
other, but neither quite catches the essence of the landscape of dreams. The
prevailing cognitive scientific view is that dreams don’t really mean anything.
Dreams are simply what happens when the governing conscious mind is suspended
through sleep and neurons in the brain fire to trigger random memories that have
no higher-self to give them direction. Freud said that every image in a dream
is based on something that the senses have recorded in the real world, whether
we consciously remember it or not.
The other theory on dreams come from the New Age community
(New Age is such a fine example of Orwellian language: nothing even slightly
new about any of it). Here, the theory holds that every symbol and image in
dreams has some very definite meaning, as if all dreams are a Renaissance
painting or a Modernist novel. Here’s a few of random examples from a fairly
typical online resource:
To dream that someone
is hacking into your computer or files symbolizes your vulnerabilities and
weaknesses. The dream may be a way of telling you that you need to work on
building up your self esteem.
To dream that you are
eating macaroni symbolizes comfort and ease. The dream may be trying to
bring you back to a time where things were much simpler.
To dream that you have
rotting or decaying teeth implies that you may have said something that you
shouldn't have. You may have uttered some false or foul words and those words
are coming back to haunt you.
Sometimes satire writes itself. I’m sure that there must
have been some evolutionary advantage to dreams, probably developed when our
ancestors still lived in the trees. I don’t imagine our ancestors dreamt about
their computers being hacked very often. The middle quote is so inane as to
require no further comment. I often dream about my teeth falling out but that’s
because I have rotten teeth. As Freud never actually said, sometimes a pipe is
just a pipe. New age dream analysis, from the school of thought that brought
you astrology.
That said, I can’t quite bring myself to fully endorse the
scientific view either, because it fails to take account of the human
dimension. Whether or not dream imagery is
just random neurons firing in the brains neglects how we as humans interpret
the world. It’s like looking at the slide show on someone’s computer screen
saver. To the objective observer, the images may seem random, but every single
image will be of significance to the person that put the slide show together.
The same is true of dreams. We as human beings find meaning in random patterns,
as you see from every tortilla chip or toasted cheese sandwich that is said to
bear the image of Jesus Christ (funny that he always looks like a white
European, never Middle Eastern or Jewish).
The scientific view of dreams has as much wrong with it as
the New Age view, because both fail to take account of a personal
interpretation. Look at night terrors, where people wake up during sleep, but
are still also dreaming. Sleep paralysis, which stop us acting out our dreams
during sleep is still in effect, rendering people helpless and they start to
hallucinate figures in the room. What form those shapes take is entirely
predicated on their personal belief system. Some people see alien abductors,
other see the devil. An ex-girlfriend used to say that vampires were sucking
her energy, because she reads Anne Rice novels and watches too much True Blood.
My mum see angels, because she’s a New Age type and her house is covered in
angel trinkets. We see in dreams what is personal to us.
Why does the eye see a
thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?4 Dreams
take any significance we chose to place on them. They can be mere
entertainments or the revealers of great personal truths. Some nights I go to
bed with as much excited anticipation as sitting down to watch a new episode of
Community. Other nights I don’t want to sleep at all. Clearly dreams are more
than just memories randomly doing as they please while the conscious mind
sleeps. The conscious mind never completely relinquishes its control, as
evidenced by wish fulfilment and anxiety dreams.
I have yet to experience lucid or directed dreaming, the
Holy Grail of the dream world, where you are conscious as you dream and able to
affect your surroundings. However, I have had semi-conscious dreams, semi-night
terrors, where I dream that I am alone in a room but aware of some other
presence being there. I take the view that what I am aware of is my own
conscious mind removed to a distance from self and I believe that this is where
our idea of a higher power comes from. God is really just ourselves. It’s like
when any politician or schizophrenic (same difference, am I right?) tells them
that God speaks to them, I think, no, that’s just your inner voice, we all have
that, because it was evolutionary beneficial to have some part of you to shout,
“Hey! Lion!” than go through the process of conscious recognition and evasive
action taking. It just takes a different form when we sleep. Same with night
terrors. They’re probably just unconscious substitutes taking up occupancy in
the bit of the brain usually inhabited by the conscious mind.
As with dreams, so with Finnegans Wake. I have a personal
interpretation of the Wake, probably as shaped by my own views on the nature of
the world as anything else. Yet what Joyce intended to say in writing the Wake
is to a certain extent irrelevant. Given that it describes an event that is to
a greater or lesser degree subconscious, it is reasonable to assume that a good
deal of the Wake was written by Joyce’s unconscious mind. Any writer will tell
you that there are times when they are compelled to write something in a
particular way and only later, when reviewing their work, does the significance
of what they have written become apparent.
As Joyce was writing the Wake his eyesight was failing. He
wrote in gigantic letters to be able to see what he was doing and had a series
of secretaries (including a young Samuel Becket) to help him transcribe the
streams of word in his head. Much of the Wake he never saw written down, only
spoken, and so even he may have missed much of the significance of his own
masterpiece. Yet by virtue of that fact that it hovers somewhere between the
Freudian/New Age and the scientific version of dreams, the Wake succeeds in
sketching out an accurate version of the dreaming world. It may not get it
right all time, but hey, see impressionism, pointillism, cubism or futurism and
tell me they are less valid artistically for their inaccurate interpretations
of the world. Go on, I dare you (<my dreaming self seeping through).
I would close by wishing for all of your dreams to come
true, but I wouldn’t want my zombie dreams to come true, nor that recurring
dream where I’m wondering around town in my pants, wrapped in a quilt, trying
to masturbate in public without anyone noticing, so I will merely end by wishing
that you dream interesting dreams. Dreams rock. I’d take my own dreams over 95%
of the shit that’s on TV any day. Listen to what they are trying to tell you,
but don’t take them too seriously either. There’s no hard and fast method for
working out what dreams mean. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe. Sometimes a dream is just a dream.
[wakes: Whoa! Hey
Babe, I dreamt I wrote this amazing article on dreams. Ah shit, how did it
start again?]
Footnotes
1Hamlet, act 3, scene 1
2Ma Boheme (fantaisie) - Arthur Rimbaud (‘Oh, of
what splendid loves have I dreamt’)
3A Dream Within A Dream – Edgar Allen Poe
4The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci Volume 1
Get it done.
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