And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5, Scene 1.
This text aims to investigate the practice of verbalizing dreams. I understand dreams as «pre-films» – a simulation of experiences that, while only seemingly detached from external stimuli, focuses on processing the dreamer’s «internal affairs» – which, if we wish to transmit them verbally upon waking, will always be generalized, adapted and (to some degree) censored. The verbalization of this «internal» dream material represents the history of their adaptation and externalization. Laurie Anderson gives an insightful account of dreams in her book from 2006 ‹Night Life›:
«One of the wildest theories about dreaming is a complicated process that occurs during REM sleep. In the first step of this process all sensory input regarding the head and body is suddenly shut off. Then something truly bizarre happens. The set of neurons that sends information to the brain about the location of the head and body opens two new channels – audio and visual. These channels send random fake information to the brain about the size, shape and orientation of your head and body. We then spend much of the night trying to process this imaginary data. So why do we invent this disembodied dream body and what’s the purpose of this make-believe audio-visual show? Some researchers propose that attempting to organize the fake information keeps the brain busy and that this activity is more efficient than shutting down every night, a type of power saving device. The brain in standby continues to work anyway – sifting through random chaotic images. […] Maybe dreams are the secret language of the body. The body which has been silent all day talks to us all night in its private language of images, puns, gossip, memories, dire predictions, fables and stories.»
It was recently discovered that we dream also in other phases of sleep, not just during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. But what the actual purpose of dreams is still has no definite answer. Eduardo Galeano describes in his book ‹The Memory of Fire› (1995) the function of dreams according to the Huron tribe:
«Like all the Iroquois peoples, the Huron believe that dreams transfigure the most trivial things and convert them into symbols when touched by the fingers of desire. They believe that dreams are the language of unfulfilled desires and have a word, ‹ondinnonk›, for the secret desires of the soul that wakefulness does not recognize. ‹Ondinnonks› come forward in the journeys made by the soul while the body sleeps.»
He goes on to note how the dream of a tribe member can lead the whole tribe to gather around the dreamer, asking him or her questions in order to interpret the dream collectively. This celebration transforms the internal projection into a ritual performance.
Dreams, according to Freud, are «the guardians of sleep» that keep the body from waking, while simultaneously serving as wish fulfillers (particularly for sexual taboos and fantasies). He presented them as coded phenomena (the manifest content or the dream as remembered) that can be decoded only by interpretation (through a dialogue between the psychologist and patient, based on his associations), revealing the latent content of the dream, its «actual» meaning or its unconscious desire, which the «dream-work» tries to censure – although a certain surplus of the dream always evades interpretation. The interpretation of the dream necessarily transforms the immediate dream-experience and becomes a form of fiction.
Contrary to Freud, Carl Jung tried to understand dreams within the context of a wider archetypal, transpersonal field of «the collective unconscious», although he also saw them as an «informative organ of oversight» for the entire organism and stressed their compensatory function. He was convinced that dreams reveal more than they conceal and are a «mythical narration» that serves to integrate the conscious and unconscious poles of the psyche. Dreams speak their own symbolic language and cannot be interpreted with a psychology derived from the waking state. A dream for Jung is a natural psychic phenomenon aimed towards a goal that remains unknown to our waking state: «a man does not dream, but dreams himself; we are the ones who experience the dream, we are the objects.» Jung also compared the structure of dreams to that of classical drama and defined dreams as a «theater where the dreamer is himself the stage, actor, prompter, producer, author, audience and critic.» According to him, each dream is roughly divided into four parts: 1. place, time, dramatis personae, the beginning of the dream; 2. exposition, the presentation of the problem of the dream – the main theme, question or core of the dream that the subconsious is working on and trying to resolve later; 3. peripeteia, which functions as the backbone of every dream – the entanglement of the plot, leading to its climax or turning point, which can as well be catastrophic; 4. lysis, the resolution – the result of the dream, a reasonable ending, its compensatory implication.
The Surrealists strived to capture «the immediate written experience of thought» with a method known as automatic writing and fought for an «art of absolute reality». As the Slovenian poet Miklavž Komelj puts it:
«The Surrealists wanted to confront that hallucinatory core around which reality structures itself. They were interested in the meeting of external causality and internal finality, the inscription of desire into the structures of reality. They investigated the driving forces, the mechanisms of reality.»
Even the French Surrealist André Breton – who saw the potential of automatic writing to open up a space of freedom by rejecting the censorship of the waking mind – soon realized that this experiment represented a continuous failure in the history of Surrealism. But it is exactly this failure to adequately transcribe the immediate flow of the mind that reveals how our mind structures unconscious impulses. The verbalization of a dream, as the literary historian Elizabeth Bronfen puts it, «permanently arrests, in writing, the difference between a dream and any retroactive reproduction of the nocturnal event», which provides evidence for the fact that the human cognitive apparatus often appropriates «the external world as a projection screen of an interior theatre.»
By transcribing a dream at the moment of waking, the way in which memory structures the flow of dream-images into a narrative is inscribed into the text itself, while simultaneously being forgotten at that very moment. The record of the body’s nocturnal surplus or mental secretions is a protocol of how memory structures the process of forgetting. It does not represent the flow of the subconscious, but rather the way in which the waking mind organizes this mass of disappearing images. The breakdown of causal and temporal relations is mirrored in the architecture of the text. A dream protocol or verbal reproduction of mental nocturnal secretions simultaneously reveals how the «externality» of geopolitics and the violence of the political unconscious are already inscribed into the deepest and most intimate processes of the dreamer.
The first phase of successfully capturing a dream lies in the necessity to write it down immediately upon waking up, as 50% of dreams are lost within five minutes, and a full 90% disappears after ten. Each dream seems to structure itself around a black hole or vortex of oblivion that can never be translated into words. The dream-text structures itself by analogy around a silent or ineffable core of experience. The dream is the cue for the dream-text, which the mind, while externalizing and verbalizing it, transfigures into a previously unimagined simulation.
Freud wrote against the immediate writing down of dreams upon waking in his ‹New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis›, which was later met with serious criticism: «We often see the dreamer acting against the forgetting of his dreams, by way of putting them down in writing right after waking. We can tell him that this is in vain, because the resistance, from which he was able to snatch the dream text, transposes itself to the associations and makes the manifest dream inaccessible for interpretation. In these circumstances we shouldn’t wonder, if the continued escalation of resistence represses the associatons altogether and thus thwarts the interpretation of dreams.»
I agree with Freud that the very transcription of a dream changes its content and (to some extent) even distorts it. But on the other hand I believe that noting down a dream upon waking calls into being a flow of associations that might serve as its final realization. A dream-text that interprets itself becomes the incarnation of a dynamic and dialectic synthesis between the dream state and wakefulness, a transitional object that mediates between the interior and exterior while recording the history of internal processes at the moment of their externalization and materializing the absolute difference between the dream and dream-text. In this manner it can achieve that «independence from interpretation» so obsessively sought by Heiner Müller, e.g., in ‹Krieg ohne Schlacht, Leben in zwei Diktaturen›:
«The entire effort of writing consists of achieving the quality of one’s own dreams, as well as the independence from interpretation.»
An adequate «transcription» of a dream could be made possible only with a yet-to-be-invented neuro-optical interface that would enable us to record and translate the entire psycho-physical experience of a specific memory, as depicted for example in the movie «Strange Days» (1995) or «Minority Report» (2002). But until technology evolves to that degree, language remains our only medium to relate verbal simulations of memory, experience, thought experiments or mental secretions. We can understand dream protocols as attempts to mediate a «relievable» simulation of a seen/lived experience – an attempt to transplant sight (or the psycho-physical state of a certain body) with verbal media. To record a memory in the process of forgetting is an experiment: an artificial reconstruction of a natural, yet ineffable phenomenon. A dream protocol is the attempt to verbally simulate a dream, an attempt to verbally photograph a preverbal state of mind, where the difference between immediate and mediated experience is clearly revealed by the very attempt of mediation itself.
A literary simulation strives against the physical destruction or repression of experience because it furthers the preservation of memory. It is a virtual architecture for the verbal reliving (or at least reflection) of a simulated experience or someone else’s mental experiment. It doesn’t seem to matter if a text deconstructs the so-called «inherent violence of language» or if it just presents it in a clear or veiled manner, for it is made manifest either way. What do we actually mean, if we claim, as many popular poets do, that the purpose of a text is to reveal the very limits of language or to enact a rupture by revealing the very mechanisms of language as such?
An additional key factor and possible appeal related to the publishing of dream protocols is a certain depersonalization caused by the publication of something so intimate and brutally sincere, for it simultaneously deconstructs the logocentric construction of the author to the point of deliberate self-mockery, while stripping the writer naked before the world. It quite simply represents the embodiment of the conviction that art should make the invisible visible, while revealing, by any available means necessary, everything a given environment deems forbidden to pronounce.
Art seems to serve its purpose if it manages to cause real consequences by symbolic means, and to create a micro-change in the body of the receiver, be it goosebumps, a tear or a smile. If it succeeds in enacting this micro-change in the state of another body, creating a future memory in someone’s flesh to act upon, it has successfully turned a body into words and words into flesh. A brutally sincere dream protocol might accomplish such a feat.