Magritte's Portrait of Edward James 1937
Hello, it’s Mango-has-gone-off-Monday! (well it was yesterday when i wrote this and forgot to post it)
So YESTERDAY i could make no mango smoothie because the mango had as you now know, completely gone off. Is it obvious that i’ve already stopped trying with these posts.....?
I came across this article today in the guardian on mental illness as a occupational hazard for poets. Mostly, i just enjoyed this part:
“Batty and Wardle have both 'done time' on psychiatric wards and written resonant, gutsy and humorous poems about their experience”
Here we are, blistering evidence that mental illness in the long term increases everyone’s ability to be a creative tour de force (but conditions apply) on a mission to an ultimate utter lack of creativity (suicide). I’m not going to lie, among all the sadness of this month including Goody’s cancer-hit-and-run, i have undoubtedly found it difficult to keep the frown upside down. Getting as little sleep as possible allows me to avoid the point of contact where my unconscious finds ‘expression’ in the animated and illusory world of dreams. However, the past few days, an unbearable slumber has over ridden my otherwise unfailing adamance. The outcome: Teething Nightmares.
I’ve been having repetitive dreams of being shot, and always in an act of cowardice. i.e. the shooter will ask me to hand everything over, and tell him the whereabouts of my family and all my personal details, and if i do, he will leave me alone. Inevitably, i tell him everything, and then he turns around and shoots me heartlessly. Mostly, this occurs in the first person, but the other night, i dreamt that once i was shot, i realised i was a little girl and not myself. I had unwittingly walked into someone else’s body, and now enduring their pain. Then i had to watch the little girl being placed on a foreign hospital table, spurting blood; the bullet had hit her in the stomach, yet all this while, it was me who was feeling the pain, like i had replaced her soul with my own.
Even more bizarrely, the rest of the dream continued with me switching roles between myself, the doctor and my grieving mother, like some tireless schizophrenic. A sort of "Doppelgänger effect’ from the inside out (since i don’t tend to remember whether these people looked like me, but they all definitely were me in spirit). This was the only part that i was really interested in; the various infestations of me within different characters or ‘roles’.
The point of me saying all this is: i believe that a recurring dream must be something of significance. By the by, i came across a book entitled ‘Psychoanalysis and Cinema’ the other day. Normally i wouldn’t have the will to read something like this, but felt less compelled to rebuke it when i realised it was a well disguised coffee table reading handbook to the interpretation of dreams.
On cinema:
“ If you only knew how strange it is to be there, it is not life, but it’s shadow, it is not motion, but it’s soundless spectra”
Maxim Gorky (cited in Popple 1996:97)
The book was basically trying to address the fact that dreaming as the epitome in psychoanalytic interpretation is directly comparable to the big screen, in terms of both cinema and dreaming act as a type of ‘psychical apparatus’ in learning to tell the difference between what we perceive and what we imagine. Mainly so we don’t end up like Uncle Josh:
Josh here is unable to distinguish between the film and reality. This is a crude example, really.
I think uncle Josh is hallucinating, and it has nothing to do with the fact that he may be an idiot and can’t tell he’s watching a film. It’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time to hallucinate and have someone interpret that as your inability to perceive. Uncle Josh is a kind of ‘mirror’ that unites the external picture to the internal, his emotions are manifest in the screen, similar to how i felt mine were manifest in the other people in my dream. Again, i take this to be the inability of my self to distinguish between other people’s emotions and my own...
This is ultimately ‘doubling’/ idea of establishing an ego etc, which the book references to ‘Der Student Von Prag (The Student of Prague) using the idea of a ‘double’ where in the footprints of Faust, impoverished scholar Balduin gives up his reflection to a sorcerer in exchange for wealth. Silly boy. Balduin finally drives himself to suicide where he shoots the apparition of his double ultimately killing himself. Rather like that scene from Fight Club right at the end.
Der Student Von Prag...
So ultimately, i am no longer inclined to analyse my dreams in terms of Oedipus or the individuating ego because i am not that insane yet. Freud aptly implies that dreams show that a normal capacity for hallucination persists in us all: in other words, i should go to bed at a decent hour until furthur notice..
Next psychoanalysis and film installment will probably be on Hitchcock. Just kidding! Actually it will. But maybe first on inter-group processes...
Popple, S. (1996) ‘The Diffuse Beam: Cinema and Change’, in C. Williams (ed.) Cinema; in The Beginnings and the Future, London: University of Westminster Press, 82-99
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