10. The enemy of dreams: writing/dreams/yoga
Dream diaries
Dreams remind us that there is a treasure locked away somewhere, and writing is the means to try and approach the treasure. And as we know, the treasure is in the searching, not the finding.
If I could, I would be jealous of my dreams: they are mightier than we are, greater in weakness and in strength. In dreams we become magic which is why if I could be jealous of my dreams – and I sometimes am – I would be. (Cixous 1993:88)
The first thing to write in the morning is the dream.
Or in the afternoon after the afternoon sleep, a snooze, a doze, a special kind of sleep, necessary to catch up on your dreaming.
I used to write my dreams in a separate notebook. A notebook kept by the bed. Sometimes an especially beautiful notebook, unsuitable for everyday jottings that are intimidated by beautiful paper: artistic covers forbid the uncensored spontaneous note-taking urges that everyday notebook writing relies on. But dreams deserve the special paper, the notebooks given as gifts, as if to defy or cure the dreams' ephemerality.
All these diaries full of dreams.
For some time now I have, instead, written my dreams along with those other jottings – a thought to record or re-consider, a quote, a reminder, an idea to work out, a moment to remember – in my regular notebook, usually a school exercise book I cover with a fabric scrap or brown paper or used gift-wrapping, or one of those black and red chinese notebooks you've always been able to get anywhere. But I write my woken thinking in this less often these days. Perhaps email has taken its place. Or I have less of the anguish and less of the ecstasy that demanded a pen. Or because my handwriting has changed. And so a larger proportion of my notebook is filled with the dream.
Still, every time I begin to write a dream, I know mine is only a clumsy and approximate translation; I feel I am betraying the original. Walter Benjamin says:
The narration of dreams brings calamity, because a person still half in league with the dream world betrays it in his words and must incur its revenge. Expressed in more modern terms: he betrays himself. He has outgrown the protection of dreaming naïveté, and in laying clumsy hands on his dream visions he surrenders himself. For only from the far bank, from broad daylight, may dream be recalled with impunity. (Benjamin 1978: 62)
'Betrayal', 'calamity': these words describe the feeling of trying to write, let alone interpret, a dream. Still, as a great deal of writing arouses a fear or suspicion of betrayal or calamity, to write one's dreams is to learn to face writing's darker dimensions.
The language of writing about dreams, the language of dreams
I am in this place that is and is not. Something like but not exactly. Like some kind of. The person is and is not. Now I think it was X but it was not. Just an image, my mother looking very pretty. Apparently. Seemingly. I wake making sounds of anguish. This weird unpleasant state. Something happens here. A sense of peaceful scented gardens. Some suggestion of. I was writing a sequel. In this dream I am asleep and dreaming.
Dreams of nakedness and of clothes: sarongs and a beautiful dress, silken. Dreams of loss and being lost. Of wonderful places, so very many wonderful places, places to remember and miss, places that are dream settings. Of children, and childbirth, many of these dreams over many years, the unborn and the newborn and the infants. Of old friends I am pleased to find turn up in my dreams. Of people I meet only in my dreams. Or a very creepy human-ish little creature I try to kill. Or yet another dream lover.
A woman who writes is a woman who dreams about children. Our dream children are innumerable (Cixous 1993:74)
Dreams about blood. Menstruating and blood everywhere, all over the stairs and splashing all over the walls, my blood.
Blood pouring from my eyes: a dream I record only with a drawing.
Looking at these accounts of my dreams. These wonderful phrases and images, marvels, marvellous moments. Yes, call it the poetry of the soul. No wonder writers want to publish books of their dreams. But don't. Don't tell your dreams. Please.
No one will experience your dream the way you did. You might say, no one will experience anything the way you did, but the re-telling of a dream is a stark experience of the limits of language's ability to communicate experience.
Dreams teach us
In order to go to the School of Dreams, something must be displaced, starting with the bed. One has to get going. This is what writing is, starting off. It has to do with activity and passivity. This does not mean one will get there. Writing is not arriving; most of the time it's not arriving. One must go on foot, with the body. One has to go away, leave the self. How far must one not arrive in order to write, how far must one wander and wear out and have pleasure? One must walk as far as the night. One's own night. Walking through the self toward the dark. (Cixous 1993: 65)
The self, then. What dreams teach you is what dreams are. How could you bear to never remember your dreams, as some claim? The self is a creature that dreams and meets itself in these dreams. Yes, this is mysterious.
What comes up when you start writing are all the scenes of impotence, terror, or vast power. The unconscious tells a tale of the supernatural possibility... (Cixous 1993:77-8)
You learn to write by writing your dreams. You try and find the words, watch the dream change from a dream into something written. Write without commentary or apology.
Dreams teach us. They teach us to write. (Cixous 1993:79)
The writing lessons of dreams, says Helene Cixous, are these: 'Without Transition. Speed. The Lost Mysteries. The Magic Word'. But of course. You learn these first by writing your dreams. There is no explanation to take you from one scene to another, you do not need permissions or reasons or visas to enter the dream territory. You are there. Write like that.
In dreams... the feeling of foreignness is absolutely pure, and this is the best thing for writing. Foreignness becomes a fantastic nationality. (Cixous 1993:80)
A dream does not need to introduce and explain, does not need to set it up before it begins. You are there and it is happening. Write like that. There is an experience of the mystery you have forgotten how to see in everyday life. There are the magic words, the images or sounds that are the force of the dream, never mind why. Write like that. It ends when it is over. Write like that.
Dreams remind us of mysteries. (Cixous 1993:89)
Human existence, experience and selfhood have a dimension of mystery that the writer is well-advised to be well-acquainted with, so that the whole of her reality, not only the obvious and easily expressed, has a place in the world of her writing.
Dreams in fiction
I have found that in the world of dreams the complexity of characters as aspects of oneself are revealed.
I begin to write a new draft of my novel and I know. My novel will have dreams in the title. My novel will have dreams in it. My characters are dreaming their dreams and they are in my dreams. And then I read this arresting passage in an impressive new novel (Eucalyptus by Murray Bail):
Descriptions of dreams have a dubious place in storytelling. For these are dreams that have been imagined – 'dreamed up', to be slotted in. A story can be made up. How can a dream be made up? By not rising of its own free will from the unconscious it sets a note of falsity, merely illustrating something 'dream-like' which maybe why dream descriptions within stories seem curiously meaningless...turn the page... (Bail 1998)
And a friend comments 'this is the perfect statement on the problem of dreams in fiction'.
What problem of dreams in fiction?
Well, there is what Robert McKee calls 'exposition in a ballgown...usually feeble efforts to disguise information in Freudian clichés', there's the dream as messenger – answers, guidance and revelations handily popping up to solve a plot problem, and worst of all there are stories that end: '...then I woke up and it was all a dream'. So, yes, there are problems with writing dreams in fiction.
But that does not mean dreams in fiction have al
ways to be problems. How could there be fiction without dreams?
Some authors will not show their characters dreaming, not even when they have acknowledged how large a part dreams play in human lives. E.M. Forster (one of my favourite novelists on writing novels) says:
On the average, about a third of our time is not spent in society or civilization or even in what is usually called solitude. We enter a world of which little is known and which seems to us after leaving it to have been partly oblivion, partly a caricature of this world and partly a revelation. 'I dreamt of nothing' or 'I dreamt of a ladder' or 'I dreamt of heaven' we say when we wake. I do not want to discuss the nature of sleep and dreams – only to point out that they occupy much time and that what is called 'History' only busies itself with about two-thirds of the human cycle, and theorizes accordingly. Does fiction take up a similar attitude? (Forster 1955:49)
I begin to make a note whenever a novel I am reading includes a dream. Nearly every novel I read includes a dream. It is more unusual for a novel not to include a dream. While I am thinking of this I begin to read Salman Rushdie's novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet: it opens with a dream:
On St. Valentine's Day, 1989, the last day of her life, the legendary popular singer Vina Apsara woke sobbing from a dream of human sacrifice in which she had been the intended victim. (Rushdie 1999:3)
Dreams make fictions out of our lives. Fiction is necessary to our lives as dreams are: it's as if that is what dreams prove. If we are deprived of dreams we go mad, this is science. All mammals dream, even before being born we dream, a foetus in the womb dreams, we dream before we experience the world. I am interested to discover that among the universal facts of dreams is the difference between big dreams and little dreams. Little dreams are the identifiable remnants of the day. And the big dreams: prophecy, knowledge, guidance, wonder. (A vast literature on dreams attests to these facts: see, for example, websites like The Dream Zone or The Dream Library.)
Old stories and bible stories were full of dreams. An angel spake unto [Jacob] in a dream; The Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream; A dream cometh through the multitude of business; Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions; An angel of the Lord appeared in a dream How can we write stories and characters and life and not include dreams?
Ganesh wakes and stretches, stretches his four arms and stretches his trunk, his elephant trunk, and plays a few notes on his flute, walking and stretching and playing music beyond the wall where he hangs. Pandora watches herself submit to her dreams. Look who's here, oh no. (Neem Dreams)
I allow my characters to dream and allow my novel to be about their dreams and I allow my narrative agent to speak of dreams and of dreams in novels.
Disparate locations blend in the settings of dreams where disparate characters unite (old schoolmate, TV celebrity, someone you were reminded of yesterday). Dreams take place in their own landscape which you remember from other dreams (that same city that you pass and circle and sometimes even enter, over and over in years of dreams). (Neem Dreams)
In my novel I repeat the other novelist's warning that dreams in fiction are 'too fictional'. And the narrative agent, or author, of Neem Dreams comments:
Meaningless decrees an author who does not realise that the dreams of fiction arise from the same single source.
And, in my novel, as Pandora and Andy and Jade wake from their dreams and move around the Hotel Chandra and confide their plans and take leave of each other, the author's attention switches between the urgency of keeping an account of their significant movements and an urgent impulse to keep intruding, exercised by the question of dreams:
You wake glad to remember dreams of moment, strange emotions and queer occurrences and singular juxtapositions. Poetry! A dream is the poetic language of your soul or do you think of it as the clearing of mental scraps and garbage? Do you ever have real nightmares? Wake screaming, terrified, and must sit up and sip some water until the hideous dream has given up waiting for your return and finally slunk away and it's safe to go to sleep again. How about the terror of not being able to wake, not able to re-enter the world through your own body, have you had that one? And what about the way you can wake and know something you had not known: you realise or remember, solve the riddle fill in the blank space see the solution? A novelist counts on it. Do you ever know you're asleep and then can you direct your dream, compose it? Have you dreamt the dream of others, fictional others, as the author of a novel wakes to say that was not my own dream? (Neem Dreams)
It happens to me with every novel I write: the characters appear in my dreams and I feel affirmed. And then I have a dream and it is not my own dream but theirs, and this makes me convinced that I know, create, am this character, have access to their inner life, their unconscious processes, all that makes them 'real'.
Why your dearest friend shuns you, why you copulate with strangers or people you know far too well for that, why you wear clothes you do not wear, know people you do not know. Suppressed desires, some knowingly explain, a code for your unconfessed wishes. Or consult the dream books with alphabetical entries of literal and universal translation, so that anyone might look up shattered blue glass and see that it means the denial of your happiness or the end of your hopes for peace. Or the dream was entirely composed of aspects of yourself and you are to tell your therapist how you feel as the blue glass, the city street, the mislaid passport.
The novel reaches out to embrace the dreams dreamt in its writing. Dreaming for the novel and writing the novel become, if not exactly one, part of a oneness.
Do not interpret
'The dream's enemy is interpretation.' So Cixous reminds us, agrees with us.
The dreams interpreted by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams are all alike: ...the dreams are written by Freud. ...We must know how to treat the dream as a dream, to leave it free... (Cixous 1993:107)
Interpretation can also be the enemy of yoga.
It is not understanding that is the enemy. Yoga is the attainment of understanding. But understanding does not depend on interpretation, in yoga or in dreams.
In my novel Pandora goes to yoga school in Sydney and begins to trust her teacher Barbara:
But she wants a development and it comes. The muscles in her groin scream and her grief pours out of her. Barbara makes her do passive restorative movements. And she has to submit and do these during menstruation. What an outrage, to work 'on the side', she has always carried on as normal. But she obeys. She is made to feel her abdomen opening, her groin opening, to feel the internal stretch and the unlocking.
But I don't know why, she gasps through her tears.
That's all right, says Barbara.
Why not understand? Pandora thinks, I believe in understanding.
Because this is yoga, it means to experience griefs locked in the body, let them go. You don't have to tell stories about them, you don't have to analyse it, you know that everyone dies.
This was one of yoga's interesting lessons. I gave Pandora my memory, in the early years of classes, of a sudden pouring grief. And to my 'Why? Why? I don't understand' came the enlightening instruction 'That's all right'. Because what I had meant was 'I am not able to interpret this'. And then I did understand. And later tried to say it. There were all these therapies where you told stories, constructed meanings out of the stories you told about yourself, and there was always an explanation which stood for a reason which stood for your understanding.
The yoga body re-makes itself out of a deliberate practice of action and thought.
In yoga we sometimes have to work passively. We understand the difference between motion and action. There can be action without motion. Sometimes there is neither motion nor active action, only passive action. You must lie, for example, with your spine supported by a bolster and your legs bound in a lotus for a passive matsayasana. Surrender, let go; passivity is required, and is the experience of the pose. This is a form of nega
tive capability, the necessary ability of a poet not only to act and create, but to be acted upon, be created.
As the impressions and images of the world might later be crafted into language, so might those of dreams. As the passive actions in yoga do their work to recreate the self – the dreaming, writing, understanding self – so might those of dreams.