Today’s NY Times devotes the entire Science Times section to the latest insights into dreaming, the little-known mental process we all share. Little may be known about the mechanism and biological function of dreams, maybe. But psychotherapists and artists of all kinds thank their stars every day for their dreams of the night before, because without them, we would lack what amounts to an interstate highway straight into the mystery of the human soul. There are other well-travelled access roads writers use–freewriting, clustering, improvisational theater games, induced revery among them–but only the dream takes us, willing or not, into that unknown part of ourselves…where great narrative material hangs like ripe fruit, ready to be picked.
Would you like to see some current work inspired by the quirky power of the dream? Catch Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe while it’s still in the theaters. Or rerun just about anything by David Lynch (Mulholland Drive is a good one). Notice that the stories are trivial or heedlessly incoherent. It’s because stories, narratives, are constructs, a special frames we used to format the interplay of the unseeable and unknowable; our deep, non-verbal compulsions, urges, desires, fears, etc. so that the conscious, information-oriented, do-it-now part of our minds will get it.
For me, what remains after seeing these movies is not their endings, in which immense complications dissolve, rather than resolve, into a sweet soup of "Love, Love, Love"–not that but the purely visual audaciousness and distorted un-reality that speaks directly to my unconscious (home of the dream) because it came directly from another’s unconscious.
But how do writers, who DO have to write for people who are awake, use the dream as a tool or resource? Stay tuned. That’s tomorrow’s post.
(btw, the question of why the unconscious is not interested in ordinary narrative is for another day too–but it will happen, because it’s a question that’s ALWAYS fascinated me.)
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