three aspects of identity

Three dreams (from two nights) in the genre of subverting the self as a fixed reference point for orientation in dreams:

memory continuity identity

A noisy mediterranean canteen/bar, which I claim is one of my favourite places, because they have a big photographic print on the wall of the memorable evening when I was the bass player at a reunion show of the 90s punk-ska band "Monster" (I was fat and barebreasted and happy). But at the bus stop outside, where I'm seeing my friend off, some evil truthsayers calmly inform me: that Monster show has never occurred, it was just a dream. First I completely deny it, it just has to be true, it is one of the few really bright moments in my life the past few years. Then I slowly start accepting the possibility, which is even worse. Since I remember it so vividly, and have been so sure it has happened, well if it is a dream, how can I be certain about any part of the entirety of my life experience? I wake up in panic. Even awake, for five minutes I don't know if I've played a gig with Monster or not. I fall asleep again and only after next awakening I have no problems accepting it's been a dream and I've had no close connection with this band.

gender identity

A boring suburban square north of Stockholm, probably Täby, all my friends or fellow students are pushing themselves into a premise looking like an old tobacconist's, but is a very small education facility, it's going to be cramped, we're going to have to listen to a talk about incomprehensible computer/statistics stuff, there is going to be obligatory physical exercise, and I'm panicking about it. I just can't endure it, I have to leave that godawful place, I can't wait until my classmates are ready, because then it will be late afternoon and dark, and people will ask me why I've skipping school, and we will have to wait for so long in the dark for the crowded bus and not know which is the right one and it will probably take us not into the city but to some other far-off bus terminal where we must change again, etc etc, it is unbearable and I have to get away immediately. My best friend (female, though I don't remember whom) comes along with me, and we catch a bus which is probably the right one. But we don't get the seats next to each other; in front of me there is a teenager in heavy make-up and next to her my friend. My friend starts slowly singing "I'll be your mirror", to soothe me and cure the neurotic teenager at the same time, she sings with a clear and steady soprano; I join in with a deeply resounding humming bass, and the fact that I have a male voice is such a surprise, it seems my womanhood has been magically removed as a punishment for ditching school.

life identity

I am struggling to somehow reserve a place for myself in a summerhouse where several people live but all equally vaguely as me, under all kinds of conflicts. One old wino is coming in regularly, whom it seems I was the one to first invite and voucher for him, one of those guys who walks around swearing and ranting but is basically harmless. But this time he has a big black blotch over half his face, and it seems to be an indication that he is going to die very soon.

The rest of us go bathing. With a couple that is just almost part of our company; someone's careerist brother who spends most time abroad and his american girlfriend. And the killer whale (big, beautiful and rather scary) that turns up is most eager to play with them. It swims around them, barely touching them with its back and its fluke. I am sitting on a small raft with some girl, and I am saying "just wait till it gets the idea of playing around with this raft", and of course soon it does. Mostly it just places its chin on one end of the raft, making it stand up vertically out of the water, my companion and I are struggling to remain at the top end. The killer whale likes this trick and repeats it several times. It also realises it can swim around with us in that position, and eventually it swims forth to present us to a giant emperor penguin, who embraces the raft with us in its small flippers. "Ok, I think now is the time to take a very deep breath" I say.

Next thing were all sitting in our collective house again, my companion from the raft is sitting next to me, she is one of these thin intellectual redheads, she is saying she likes a cartoon of mine (supposedly a political cartoon, an allegory about the nobility), I get horribly flattered and almost embarassingly so and I realise I am probably in love with her. But then I also start mixing things up and just because she mentions a cartoon about the nobility I suspect she is of a noble family. Yet I am primarily worried about the gap in continuity, and I ask "but what happened after we dived down with the penguin? Do you have a memory of ever resurfacing? Or are we perhaps dead?"

MF

A Foreign Land

The night before a journey, with uneasy sleep and the mind already on the way, projecting a generic foreign country:

* I am the only one who walks along the beach in a foreign coastal city; many walk along the road a bit up. I don't mind appearing as the pedagogic madman, so I holler at the children and ask them to notice the strange big pufferfish/crabs/horseshoe crabs living in the very surf zone, and may be mistaken for old plastic bags if one doesn't look carefully, or rather old canvas mail sacks, or fragments of seal mummies.

* At some camp in a foreign country, I am sitting in a cafeteria in a big cottage in an opening in the forest, waiting for all the others to wake up and have breakfast so we can commence today's activities. An asian cook is working in the next room. One by one people drop in, and eventually I wonder if I remembered to eat anything myself; obviously we get freshly made thai food for breakfast here.

* My colleague wakes me up in a hotel room in a foreign country, rather tenderly but not suggesting we would have an affair or so. But she is obsessed with something, jolts around looking for something, half-dressed; her presence is so vivid, rather uncomfortable, somewhat obscene and magnetic, intimate and rather incommunicable; the different smells of her are sharp and unresting.

MF

New York er eyja í Atlantshafi

The plot is set. Years after my father’s death his top secret research project coincidentally is being revealed; and the intrigue evolves in a familiar thriller fashion:

In our family’s summer house a hidden door has been found. After making the decision that it should be opened, it leads us down to an unknown basement where we make the discovery of a clandestine archive, full of dust and documents. The research material maps out the mysterious circumstances of the disappearance of a number of important persons. Now, unexpected facts come to our knowledge and formerly unknown connections of historical events emerge. As we study the material, including some shimmery, blurry images of old video tape recordings from the seventies, on which different, obviously nervous (and perhaps frightened) people appear, talking about strange matters, we slowly become aware of the proportions and the magnitude of our discovery, which leads us to the conclusion that—yet to hesitate—we must travel to New York.



Stanislaw Lem's Futurologial congress as percieved while being riddled by a nightmare


New York. A gigantic cosmopolis, even bigger than what the latest records show (apparently not quite up to date); it has failed to seize growing throughout the years, indomitable and heedless, in spite of governmental restriction programs, continuously striving upwards in celestial vain. Within this urban dream shape we experience an overlapping city landscape with ground floors reaching higher grounds and street levels interconnecting through exquisitely engineered pipe-tunnel roads enclosed with chrome and glass, spiraling their way through the sky. We stay in a luxurious hotel, thousand stories high, surrounded by equally high buildings. Our hotel room, at first glance, has a modest design—less furniture than space, more room, less gloom—yet exclusively ultra modern futuristic; the room shifts in colour, blending perfectly: from white to beige to grey, with a slight resemblance of mosstone. The shape of the room, not easily to define, could be described as a trapezoid semi-superellips and has an entire wall section consisting of a large window glass, and thin white draperies. The room goes with an Italian balcony; un letto matrimoniale, a royal wedding bed; and an original Steinway, white and shiny. Built into the walls is an intricate system of small rippling rills of water flowing through lightly lit panels of frosty glass. A surround speaker system is part of the interior architecture as well: down from the beautiful cupola roof different sound environments and atmospherics are spreading out and filling up the entire room, mood by listener’s choice: Scottish highland, German forest, African savanna, Mediterranean coast, Catalan monastery, Swedish midsummer, misty moor with dancing fairies, deep ocean life on Mars … We fill our glasses with champagne and drink a toast to the bride and groom. The wedding cake is made of love, hope, cream and strawberries.

Out in to the Jungle. Since we are newly married and hypersensitive, we are overwhelmed with the enormous traffic intensity; but what strikes us even more is the fact that the air is clean and that we can joyfully breathe. We fill our lungs and blank our minds—from that moment on our mission is forgotten. At first relieved, but then suddenly troubled again, it seems that what now is at stake is our marriage. However, that is a worry we chose to ignore. Futuristic figures of all sorts pass by, among ordinary 21th century people, as we stand there on the sidewalk, in sunshine and gazing amazement. The street, so it appears, is a reconstruction of S:t Eriksgatan in Stockholm. Not knowing what the next step should be, we decide not to make up any plans but to submit to the spur of the moment, and so it happens: we found ourselves involved in the rather dodgy act of following a queer-looking gentleman wearing white clown makeup, a red and yellow-striped sweater and purple trousers with blue suspenders, who is riding a 16 feet high unicycle northwards … in the direction of Brooklyn! Soon we are confused; the lack of bridges and water is what puzzles us, while the biking clown disappears around the corner of a fashionable and impressive brick stone building. As we compare reality with our own map, we come to the conclusion that we are no longer on an island in the Hudson river, called Manhattan as we presumed, but that this future version of New York city actually consists of a conglomerate of islands, a pseudo-continent, like a reversed minor Pangea. As a matter of fact, large parts of the North American east coast has been torn off from the mainland, melting together with other parts and nearby islands and then been drifting away, out to the sea. All of a sudden I remember the first line that I learned in Icelandic: “Ísland er eyja í Atlantshafi”—“Iceland is an island in the Atlantic”.

At this point there is a shift of perspective: high from above, while the sun is setting, we look down on our dream named New York, where it lies like a tiny dark spot in the grand shiny ocean. One long, single railway bridge leads out over the water, away from the black island/continent.

/μσλ


Paul in Paris (syrup and carbuncles), 1978

Watch out for the pelican council

On the childhood island, I want to take a bath, or I am just convinced that the water is a good place to be, but it is frustrating that the main jetty points to the northeast, which means that when standing in the water next to it, spying out eastwards, one is standing in the shade and it gets cold. I'm standing there anyway.

A coot comes swimming towards me, and I notice common coots are beautiful birds. The next bird is a grebe, calmly sailing by me very close, and I'm thinking it's a good thing with the shade after all, when I stand there rather immobile I become like a heron and form a part of the general environment. When the grebe passes it changes, grows bigger and darker, eventually it becomes a cormorant.

I am standing there in immobility and shade. Around mere there are huge birds, continuously and diffusely uttering a low uninspired cackling, indolently yet threatfully, like when one has to make way through a crowd of lazy large gulls occupying the jetty. I thought these birds were cormorants, but they are actually even bigger and have very long beaks; they are pelicans!

A small company of my relatives comes down to the beach, and walk out into the water next to me. It makes me angry, the pelicans won't stay calm; pelicans smell so bad, and they can be so aggressive, they will raise hell for this. But my relatives have a strange ability, in their resolute hostility, to drive the pelicans in front of them, they are just swimming away, towards the northwest in the strait. A beautiful cousin forms the rearguard, she is somehow the prisoner of the others, at least she can express her dissent by keeping her distance while slowly walking through the water. I keep her company, and tell her about the danger of the pelicans, but it is so pleasant so I'm thinking that if I could wade through life with her I could stand the pelican smell. Cormorants do smell worse after all.

/MF

In Arcadia

To complete my posts about pastoral landscapes, I once dreamt about the mythological / utopian Arcadia. The sketch above depicts a water-terrace arrangement on the slope of Mount Helicon, which the dream situated there. I have written more extensively about the dream here.

" /.../ at the vast terraced slopes of Mount Helicon (as I´ve seen it depicted in alchemical illustrations) with a bewildered look of concentration on his face, while the well-springs of the rock´s inspirational muses were bubbling and forming huge dandelion-like water globes behind him."

/NN

The coastal life of tomorrow

In the future, when the sea level has become prone to changing back and forth by tens of meters within just a few hours, the most convenient way to move along the coast – or indeed live by it – will be by kayak. The only situation bound to cause some confusion, is when you have stayed the night on a very narrow shelf in a vertical rock wall. You may wake up to find the sea surface has dropped by several meters, and the kayak, tied by its handle, is hanging straight down the granite wall.

/ IÖ, 9.9.10

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

Diagnostics at the waterline

A seashore, two friends and I. Further away, there's a man working in a garden or an orchard. He is far away enough for us not to ask him where we are. We have been suddenly transferred to this place while reading aloud and discussing a text depicting that very gardening activity; in a children's book, perhaps, or some publication concerning food.
We don't know where we are, and we can't ask the man. The landscape is restless and varying, with great contrasts in altitude, and a rich, unfamiliar vegetation which indicates we're not in Scandinavia (not even the Norwegian coast, despite the steep cliffs). I look at the sea.
"What if this is the Mediterranean", I say.
The others become silent and ponder the possibility. In my head I try to picture the coastlines of France and Spain, because if the sea is the Mediterranean, this place surely would have to be within that region.
I think of a combination of three characters that would be diagnostic:
1) To confirm this is a sea at all, we'd have to taste it. But for some reason I don't feel like tasting the water.
2) If this is the Mediterranean, its surface should have a distinctly green hue. It does, partly, show a blue-green shade, but I'm not convinced it's enough.
3) I feel the temperature of the water with my hands.
"It's warm", I state. "That means this really could be the Mediterranean."
But I'm not yet thoroughly convinced. I think it feels warmer than the Atlantic would (and that's the only alternative sea), but my experience may not suffice.

/ IÖ

Sinusiniri Bay

I’m living at a hotelroom by the coast and I’m just about to go to bed. Kalle and Mattias look by, and point out that it’s full daylight outside, and it would be nice to take a walk in such a bright night. We start to do that. The news reach us that there’s an attack on an American naval base at the “Sinusiniri Bay”. The name comes from the fact that the bay is formed like a sinus curve. We want to go there to see what’s going on. Mattias gets his Mac up and starts to do different searches. We use a searchprogram where one can place out different ships etc to search for their specific formations. We are, however, a bit uncertain as to what should be included in the American naval base. A square platform, some battleships? The search program suggests different areas: A map over London (with a possible sinusformed bay), Venice, a map over the “solar observatory” in the middle of Africa. Nothing suggests the place where we want to go. Niklas joins up and we go to a restaurant to eat. The food portions are too small, everyone returns them, except for me who is happy with ham, ananas and rice.

JE