18/03/2014 On Waking... (after coffee)
I had an interesting dream last night. I call it interesting precisely because it was so enjoyable when it should have been anything but. It has been a common dream motif to date.
I believe it involves a breakdown of my core being into several interlocking dynamic elements, and the frustration and chaos of experiencing myself not as a cooperating whole but a as a feuding multitude. Of course, in reality it is and will always be both, at least according to some philosophies of the mind. Am I then an emergent property of these competing dynamic agents? I suppose, if so... then to venture down among these agents would be by definition an exciting and overwhelming experience. This is where this dream theory begins.
The stage of the dream was a sprawling multi-level building, no doubt a wealthy persons apartment. I cannot recall how I came here but that narrative had very little to do with the dream anyway. On waking I immediately identified it as the Museum of Old and New Art: the sprawling industrial museum of a billionaire recluse, the grand temple for intellectual atheism and science inspired art, and one of my favourite places on earth. I was there for my birthday earlier in the year.
The dream involved a variety of individuals, caricaturesque in their form... and perhaps on some deeply metaphysical level: eigenvectors of my own psyche. Old men in vintage suits bearing weathered firearms, narcotics addicts with long mains of perfect hair, models, corrupt politicians, the wealthy and the dangerous and the brilliant and the half-insane, all together as one. They appeared to be involved in a dynamic power struggle that assembled and dispersed networks of alliances in style very reminiscent of the TV drama House of Cards, which I was (little coincidence) watching around at the time.
Throughout this dream I was a nameless central protagonist, an empty form; a ghost that could communicate with the assembly of elements but play no physical part in what was taking place. I was an observer; albeit a dynamic one who was present but at once immune to and detached from the consequences of all around me. As I would drift around the sprawling complex, the artwork and furniture would update itself, a phenomenon that bore the internal dream narrative of "they are so wealthy they can afford to change their decorations every few hours" but was probably just standard-form dream incongruencies being rationalised to maintain the suspension of disbelief.
As I wandered around, I encountered the characters attempting to murder each other with mixed success. In equal proportions; I witnessed scenes of impromptu, manic lovemaking in hidden corners and discrete locations of the building by many of the same characters supposedly committed in political warfare. The dream continued for an extremely long time, as far as vivid dreams normally do... I lost track of how many times characters would form, align, betray, reform and so on... it just seemed to go forever. The mountain of corpses that accumulated were ever resupplied by new characters, at once completely new and individual personalities and at the same time, dynamic constructs from aspects of all previous characters too. Nothing every truly died: and nothing new was ever really born.
However; this was a dream I thoroughly enjoyed. It bore some semblances to the 'dream trap' descried at the beginning of this blog, but without any of the same anxiety, terror or urgency, claustrophobia or desire to exit the dream. It was an interesting and fluid performance, and the whole way through I was fully aware of how corrupt and comedic it all was. Likewise I seemed to enjoy it for what it had to offer, and derived no serious emotional attachment or empathy for the plight of the strange characters. At some intrinsic level, I believe I recognised it as what it was: an analogue of my internal cognitive processes.
The dream came to an end with a profound divide between the dream world characters. They had seemed to form to two stable sides and were at the precipice of an all out final battle for supremacy. For the first time in the dream, I was then transported into control of one of these constructs. It was an old man in a white suit, for reason I cannot attest to it was, at a deeply emotional level, the character seen in this production cell. I might have seen image this once in my life, several years ago but not long after the dream was able to track it back to where I found it. An old eBay listing.
As I took over this character, suddenly I had a name. I had a narrative, I had a perspective (albeit a very limited one) and I had a place in this world. I knew my entire story, I knew my entire spectrum of political affiliations with all the other characters and I knew the changing histories of the shifting political sands too. There was an old colt 45 on the table, it was mottled with oxidation, like a child's toy gun that has been left outside and forgotten; but it seemed to work. Upstairs a commotion was starting to break out. In this old man's form, I hobbled up the winding staircases to the top floor where the political titans were all congregating. Before I could get there, something dramatic happened and the entire complex was being vacated by running and screaming characters. It was like a fire alarm had gone off. Without exercising any volition, but simply observing my actions in the distant third person: I withdrew the Colt from my jacket pocket and begun selectively executing the fleeing characters one by one, according to some old covariance matrix that put a weight value on who was my enemy and who was not. Nobody seemed to care; they fled and fell to their deaths with equal indifference.
By the end of the dream, I was talking with some of the other surviving characters. We were discussing ourselves, out world, and what it all meant. We talked about the divided nature of our social systems, the way we would generate states of warfare just for the complexity it created only to go and fornicate with out worst enemies for the irony it would create too. We discussed the immortal nature of out existence, the way we could never truly die, as out information and our presence would come up in some form or some combination in a fresh cohort of archetypes no sooner than it was eliminated. By now the dream world was almost empty; it had a the distinct feeling of a cinema corridor at the end of nights sessions. And I was no longer the strange old man from the animation cell; I was myself. I knew I was dreaming. And I awoke.
What do I take from all this? I feel this was potentially a first hand observation of the very processes by which my consciousness and my cognition dynamically emerge from their many substrates. No one character or archetype was of any significance or value; not a timeless archetype in the Jungian sense but a mere container for a complex that would form and disperse as seamlessly as waves over a rock pool. The old man had a story, had a narrative, but this only survived as long as I gave it the gift of my attention. Otherwise, he would have been as obscure and abstractly random as the place he held in my real-life memory and real-life visual history.... which was essentially close to nothing.
Is this all we are, as living breathing and thinking humans? Those aspects of ourselves that would seemingly form by chance, and survive an elaborate political jungle among other transient archetypes just long enough to be noticed by the very entity they sub-serve? Do their dynamics emergent produce us, or does our observation and focus in turn produce them? This is an old idea, certainly and one not at all new to this blog. Just something to think about.
And think about it I certainly have. Perhaps, after all, that was all this dream was supposed to do.
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