Cormorant commons

Tonight I had a political dream of geography, which reminded me we need to start looking on dream space in terms of commons. Now, in the dreamscape, how does colonisation occur? What is private property and what is commons? How do we change a place from one to the other? Is the dream in itself a common, or a potential common which we share by telling and pooling our dreams?

Listen:

prelude:

I am walking home from Tumba station in the middle of the night. It's a noisy night, drunk teenagers everywhere, and pools of their urine. I am taking a shortcut through a vast sparse shrubbery. Many voices warn me against this route; it is supposed to be packed with flashers. That seems to me to be an effective quasireligious taboo rumour, because everybody knows it, nobody goes there, not even the flashers, so it is a beautiful abandoned free zone, without all this urine. But, as it is spring, the stream is flooded, and I can't cross where I want. I have to go back and find another route. I could stay on the railroad bank, the railroad tracks must make a bridge over the stream. When I reach the bridge, I realise this is where I have to climb the fence and cross within the restricted railway area. It is also a somewhat dangeous jump I need to do to get onto the bridge, but since it is winter there is a vast slope of snow that would cushion my fall if I wouldn't make it, so it is a good opportunity. But before I jump, someone greets my from below. It is a botanist friend. She asks me why I'm not taking the stairs. Well, of course I could do that, at least if it gives me the pleasure of her company. She is on crutches, and during our climbing the stairs I occasionally have to help her, and I enjoy the physical contact.

main dream:

There is a vast area of parkland outside the central city, which either has been, or will be transformed into, a commercial funfair, unless we present a good plan for how to use the space in making an open popular park, a common. The area is very clearly defined, it reminds me most of the Northern cemetery in Stockholm, or Crystal Palace in London. But just like any vast parkland, some borders are blurred, and that's those parts where there is neither public access nor clear walls or fences; the area with maintenance buildings, plantschools and large composts. In this case, it is the southeast parts.

We are studying the map. My idea is to structure the area in four quadrants, and each quadrant into three columns, thus representing the twelve months of the year. Other people have made synaesthetical suggestions for most months, but the problematic southeast corner (november-december) remains. I start working in november. I divide the column into rectangular slots and starts digging in them, like flowerbeds or large graves. I am "the digging man" of the old version of the official emblem of the swedish academy of sciences. But I still don't know what this amounts to. So somebody explains to me: November has to do with Incest. I am given a long phrase of wordplay which I don't remember clearly, something like "Inner conceptual sinister incense-gardens of incest". It only makes me think of Octave Mirbeau. Incest? But the only person in this dream that I've been attracted to was my botanist friend! Someone explains to me: no, it has to be incest, but it is not any incest, and definitely not the "nasty" kinds, no this is the "innocent" male adolescent pornographic fantasy, it is about consenting brother and sister, or consenting healthy son and young beautiful mother! I still don't understand the point.

postlude:

A major demonstration, with some serious plans to annihilate some buildings by spraying them with some magically corrosive acid. Thus it is imperative that we are not stopped by the police before we get there. Several of us are very nervous and start out in different directions, and the plans to intercept and join in with the demonstration develops into a cartographic delirium. We have started out from a southwest Stockholm metro station (Aspudden or Telefonplan), and the main mass of people may already have passed Övre Malmgatan (what?), but they will have to arc and get back south again at a particular broad triangle of park adjacent to the main park, be it Solna cemetery adjacent to Northern cemetery (Stockholm), or S:t James's park adjacent to Green Park and Hyde Park (London), but it is called Mala Straka (Praha), and we could take a shortcut just going straight east on Nevskij Prospekt (Petersburg), and I know for certain that we are still in Wien and not in any other city.

Question:

Interesting dream. While we develop tools to understand dreams in terms of commons (suggestions?) there is also a perhaps easier task: "Other people have made synaesthetical suggestions for most months": Please contribute with suggestions for general themes of the other months than the incestuous november!

/MF

On the sea of sound and vision, direction down

This dream displays the Cormorant Council in action, doing some mobilis in mobili dream-geographical thinking/discovery.

Noted dream geographer MF invites a group of people for a tour around the Stockholm archipelago on his yacht. This is all nice, but everybody agrees that we need a specific destination. A woman of the group then invites us all to spend the weekend in her parents´ home in Skåne, should we go there. In order to avoid an embarrassed silence following this more insolent than ridiculous suggestion, I try to joke about it by absurdly agreeing with her. "It´s in the north of Skåne, so it´s really only a few kilometres away from Stockholm." Noone gets the joke, so I begin considering if this absurd geographical assumption is actually true. Instead we enthusiastically decide to go to the Canary Islands.

The navigational chart on board the boat shows the vague outlines of a great sea monster that can be further discerned by connecting some dots on the chart with a blue ink pencil. This is actually how you navigate on this ship. There is no steering-wheel or rudder, just this chart and a pencil to set us going. As I start connecting the dots the sea monster soon appears around us, surprisingly in the form of intensifying sound. As the sound gradually takes the shape of a song or a melody we realize we have arrived at the Canary Islands. Again surprisingly, the Canary Islands are situated beneath us instead of somewhere on the horizontal plane - and to get there we have to climb down a lead line.

The dream to me signals two themes and their possible interrelation.

First, "sound-geography", which could account for synaesthetically percieved journeys or landforms, possibly derived from music or other sonorous structures.

Second, "vertical geography", which could retell hell-visits, rabbit-hole plunging, abyssal exploration and the like.

NN

THE STUFF THAT CLOUDS ARE MADE OF

It has been foolishly suggested that there is no such thing as weather in dreams, but many of us have taken great interest in experiencing dream weathers.

Intentions have been referred to of introducing the concept of dream meteorology at this site, paralell with promises to introduce the concept of synaesthesia. Waiting for the proper introduction of the former I cannot refrain from calling attention to an early morning hypnagogy poem of mine, posted (in swedish) at the Biografier åt okrossbara hälleflundror site, where I experienced a synaesthetic dream weather.

It is one of those half-awake syntheses of desperately struggling to deliriously rationalise an incoherent set of remembered and strongly felt minor dream fragments.

The sky was becoming overcast, a disjunct cover of altocumulus or stratocumulus was painted on the sky as I watched, consisting of the sound of breasts.

This image seems to me simultaneously ridiculous and effective, and I really enjoyed experiencing the reality of it.

We would like to see others' experiences of how weathers are manifested (and what they are actually made of) in dreams-

MF

THE GIRL WHO WAS THURSDAY - Investigating a week of personificated nights

New research on synaesthesia has been presented, where especially the synaesthetic cognition of time as a spatial arrangement was exemplified.

In a study of synaesthetic children Dr Simner has showed that "synaesthetic associations (e.g. a = carmine red) develop from chaotic pairings into a system of fixed, consistent cogno-sensory responses over time". This study and other related research suggests that the neurological basis for synaesthetic cognition is open to change through habits, choices and efforts of systematizing.

In this type of studies a distinction between being a synaesthete (which only a few are) and being a non-synaesthete that can have synaesthetic associations (which most people have) is made.
A developed synaesthetic condition consists in the ability to perceive spontaneously and consistently connections across the separate senses.

Researchers into this field have often repeated that the synaesthetically cognated colours for musical notes or for vowels are specific to the individual synaesthete, and does not represent an objective substratum of reality.

A lot of this research is about measuring activity in neural pathways and comparing the two test-groups. Nevertheless, "full-blown" synaesthetic phenomena are to some degree open to anyone´s experience under certain conditions, for example during periods of insomnia, in hypnagogic reverie or in fever dreams.

Also, non-synaesthetes can have synaesthetic associations in ordinary states of mind. Such synaesthetic associations are of a more ephemeral nature, where social conventions and mental effort play in. Mnemotechnical methods that utilize mental images of spatial arrangements would be an active example of this. Everyday cognition that makes use of visual metaphors to make sense of the world would be a passive example. Synaesthetic associations of this kind are usually not perceived as vividly as the eidetic imagery of non-ordinary states, neither do they occur with the certainty about the correlation that proper synaesthetes seem to experience, but rather take place within thinking (if such a distinction is meaningful).

A reasonable interpretation of the research presented here, is that the neurological basis for synaesthetic cognition is open to change through habitual choices and efforts of systematizing even for non-synaesthetes.

The surrealist group of Stockholm once conducted an experiment in the intersubjectivity of synaesthetic association, where abstract concepts were imagined systematically, in a joint effort, as if they were concrete objects possessing sensual traits. The focus for this experiment/game was on poetic materialism; thus an emphasis on material qualities such as texture, colour, morphology prevailed. If you want to, you can read about it here.

Naturally, an investigation into the concrete dimension of the abstract could be taken in other directions too.

One of the aspects of synaesthesia of space-time was for example called "ordinal-linguistic personification". Example:"You might not have a colour for Thursday, but you know that it's a young girl who has spent too long kept in the house and wants to break out into the world."
This type of animistic thinking resembles mythological imagination, for examples:

Kronos: greek god of general time.
Aeons; immense successive units of time, that were personalized in gnostic mythology.
The Four Riders of the Apocalypse.

(Arguably, modern anthropomorphic personifications from everyday language and scientific jargon, like Planck time, indian summer, the wolf hour, the Gaussian year (365.2568983 days), also play a part of mythic imagination.)

According to present-day metaphorical standards time is usually conceptualized as a journey. But this also implies the traveller; time is crawling, flying et c.

So, what types of moments of time can be "ordinal-linguisticually personificated"?

Taking a lead from the swedish author Göran Palm, who once asked, through a book title of his, "Why don´t the nights have any names?", I´ll ask:

- Who is the night before monday, which person or entity personificates the night before tuesday et c? Let´s fill out a week of personificated nights.

Any method will do, of course, but perhaps finding the answer in a dream from the particular night which is being investigated lies close at hand.

/ N N