dreamreading (1)

A couple of years ago, when I was first getting into Jungian theory, a buddy volunteered a dream on me - a dream involving himself, violently and unremorsefully shredding people to pieces with a chainsaw. I was a bit unprepared. All I could say was, "Well, no one really believes in wish-fulfillment anymore. It's not that you truly, deep inside, want to chop people up... Maybe the dream just wants to tell you that you're not being creative enough..."

The truth is that dreams have at their most basic level no specific meaning. Think of a puddle of rain on the bare, naked earth. When the puddle is disturbed, the water coagulates with a swirl of gray, meaningless clay and particles of soil. The dream desire nothing more than to create, to show images, which distorted and incomplete, are only simply images.

Gilles Deleuze presents us with the amoral and matter-of-fact reality of the unconscious:

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id.

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The unfortunate by-product of a busy schedule is irregular sleep. Dreamreading is impossible for me at this point. I am so exhausted that I rarely dream, or when I do, there is no hope of making the dream into a lasting memory. I can’t wait for the summertime… please oh please.

Dreams naturally fade back into the nothingness from which they came. Unless we externalize the dream, by way of a written journal or by means of communicating them out loud to someone else, their memory will inevitably fail. Speaking a dream, that which is unspoken, fundamentally changes its nature. The dream gains a type of discourse. Words collide with images, associations are made, and meanings are ascribed.

I still agree with Jung - dream-discourse is important. Several weeks of collected dreams form a model of individuation, a path toward gnosis and personal development. No single dream considered by itself, however, can ever provide the solution for anything. After all, dream-discourse is the signifier, and the signified is necessarily something that is uncannily meaningless.