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 j4 | |
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Just remembered I never wrote down the dream I had last night. I was in Switzerland with my family, and we were going up a mountain in cable cars -- my mum and I in one cable car, and my dad and my sister in another. [So far, so normal; except that normally the parent-child situation is the other way round, i.e. me with my dad, Lorna with my mum.] There was a coin-operated thing in the corner of our cable car, where you could pay to see the "original sunrise"; I was deliberating whether to pay for this (it was £2.50) when suddenly the sun came out from behind the clouds, illuminating the whole of the valley. My dad [yes, I know he was in the other cable car] said something like "Well, you've seen it now", but I decided I'd put the money in anyway & see what happened; so I put £2.50 in and the coin meter said "£3.60", and I worried what would happen if I put too much in; then suddenly the cable cars began to move up the mountain, faster than usual, and my mum started getting scared (she's not good with heights) and she clung to me and I kept saying "It's okay love, it's all right" and other such comforting-ish things; but I could see that what she could see was that the glass had disappeared from the cable car, it had turned into something more like a ski lift -- I knew this hadn't really happened, but I could see that this was what she could see, so it was no wonder she was scared (she won't go in ski lifts). Then it was almost as if we turned upside down, and the landscape all flattened out, it was all greens and blues lit up by the sun until it looked like it was glowing, and I couldn't tell which way up was any more. It was scary, but I wanted to carry on doing it, and I remember thinking "this is like being on drugs" -- both in the sense that the landscape looked all sparkly and over-bright and slightly syrupy, and in the sense that scaring myself with the view from a height was addictive [the two thoughts were sort of overlapping in my head [1]], but thinking I probably shouldn't tell my mum that. Eventually (after what seemed like ages) we got to the top of the mountain, and there was a house there, and I ran up to it -- I remember feeling some vague worry at this point about whether I should be waiting for the rest of my family, but I convinced myself that they were following on okay. The house was all wood inside: wooden floors, wooden walls, wooden pillars. We wandered through it and came to a room with a wooden balcony around a gigantic pit, and there was some kind of pillar in the middle of the pit, and somebody said that this was where the god lived. For a moment there was a huge man in front of us, standing the full height of this pit; then he was gone, and there was just a disembodied head in the middle of the floor, and somehow I knew that this was the god as well in a different form. The head was bald with piercings all over it, and chains joining up the piercings; suddenly it started running around the floor [don't ask me how a disembodied head can run, but it did] and gibbering, and then it started drawing all the chains from its piercings into its mouth, as if it was eating them, and this drew them closer and closer around it until the chains were wound tightly around the head's neck, or where its neck would be; then it shouted something, and disappeared into the floor. I turned to my mum and said "I don't feel we should clap a god, but..." because I felt I ought to applaud the performance but I wasn't sure if it was right. Then I said the same thing again to somebody else, because my mum didn't seem to appreciate the sentiment. The rest of the dream is more hazy, it involved a lock-in at some kind of goth pub/club in a cabin at the top of the mountain, and lots of people I sort of vaguely knew were there, and I can see images from it but I don't think I can put them into words. There was a lot of black and green, and music, and fighting. It didn't make much sense. [1] I've noticed that in dreams, and in certain other states of altered consciousness, it's not unusual for me to experience the ability to say/think more than one thing at once in a structured way, with some sort of physical/spatial element to the utterances/thoughts; e.g. I find that I can see the different narrative threads laid out concretely in front of me like forking paths, or that I can feel the different thoughts coexisting in my mind in the same way that I can feel which hand is on top of the other. It's awesome, whole new ways of representing information structures and narratives... the problem is they just don't translate very well to full 'straight' consciousness. No matter how hard I try, I can't keep my foot in the doors of perception; they clang shut like prison doors. ("...human voices wake us, and we drown.")Current Mood: high on dreams
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| From: kaet |
Date:
April 5th, 2004 03:36 pm (UTC)
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Kant has this rether reasonable sounding idea about metaphysics. He thinks that there are things that you know other than things that can be tested and confirmed from natural experience. He agreed that it was rather daft to think about things beyond experience (like heaven and hell and invisible badger armies) which many philosophers have idled away their time considering, but he thought that there was another kind of things known. They're things that we use to structure wherever objective reality comes from, turning it from sense-data into ideas and beyond. Things like causality, perhaps (that it's legitimate to ask "Why?"), or that objects are assembled into compact material, or that people are subjective experiencers, and so on. Discussing reason in terms of these means of structuring (a very post-structural thing to do) is often called transcendental metaphysics, by contrast to transcendent metaphysics: about God, how many demonic stoats can dance on an ironing-board, etc. Yeah I know, transcendent vs transcendental, not a good choice of words, he couldn't write for toffee, :). The difference is that these ideas that are used to structure experience, despite sensation always leading to the idea that they are true, are no more confirmed by experience than tautologies are proofs of things, they're true because they are how sensation and thinking works. It seems to me that the way hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, astral projection, dreams, and the like, are depicted in things like films and books, apart from in some of the weird shit which ewx has, relies too much on changes in the other kind of idea/verstellung, changes in sensational experience, but described in the context of pre-existing a priori or axiomatic notions of interpretting sense-data. I think that many hallucnations, particularly those of acid and shrooms hardly distort sense-data at all, but instead dislodge some of the Kantian transcendental metaphysical principles used to reason about it. It's folk wisdom that people who aren't able to comprehend their experience (perhaps through being immature, or unaware of intoxication) and also people who are strongly normalising "see" more hallucinations than experienced people in a controlled environment, who tend toward "experiencing" them, that inexperienced people tend to have more religiously structured experiences, and also that there's a kind of psychotic hallucinatory state caused by needing to seriously apply complex reasoning whilst in an intoxicated state. I think that these sensational hallucinations are things are largely a result of not being self-aware of, or resisting, the change of reasoning mode within the dreams, projections, or drugs and, in effect, reasoning about the self becoming non-reflexive, in that experience is being compiled in a different way to that which is being retold, internally narrated, or so on. The way that a concensus reality (meaning to me a reality supporting reflexive, transitive and symmetric communication of texts), seems to be relatively sparse in the space of possible transcendental metaphysics is, I think, the main reason that other peoples dreams can be so boring, it's like discussing the wallpapering of a room with no doors or windows, only a slot for text, vital to the person inside, largely irrelevant to the ones outside.
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I don't usually read what people write about their dreams, as although I can recognise the general sort of oddness associated with dreaming, I don't usually find any, um - foothold, if you like - to get into reading it. Which is to be expected, of course, in a narrative through random firings in someone else's brain.
I enjoyed this one though; firstly because it seemed to sound like one of my own sorts of dreaminess, and secondly because I found myself getting mental images of the things you describe, rather than just a jumble of words.
And will probably feed back into my own dreams tonight, which could be fun.
It's been a long time since I last tried to play with dreaming; I used to write down many of mine, and the ones I "caught" I have vivid memories of - which are pleasant, just because they have such a different exotic flavour from other thoughts.
I always meant to get a lot of people together, and try to dream for a weekend or so. Sleep sort of in shifts, and wake each other up towards the end of REM periods, then quickly talk/write about that and try to pick up some fresh thoughts to fuel things before going back to sleep again. It'd probably be a quick way to train yourself into lucid dreaming, too - which I've managed a couple of times, but not worked on recently.
I like what you say about simultaneous threads of thought. I wonder if you may actually be experiencing separate bits of brain (warning: handwaving) thinking different things in parallel.
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