Am I dreaming of a butterfly? Or is a butterfly dreaming of me? Michel Leiris recalls a dream of a dream which comes to an end not because the dreamer has awoken, but because he has been invited to exit this dream by entering into a sleep which is yet deeper and more hidden. As if there were a sleep somehow below sleep, or a dreaming which plunges the dreamer into the dark waves of a sleep without shores, without end.
Who dreams? In this other sleep, it is not just the waking life of the dreamer which is placed between parentheses, but his sleeping life – it is his life as a dreamer who would stand beneath and as it were support his dreams as the Cartesian thinker is there beneath its thoughts which is now suspended. It is as though the other sleep only watched over itself and in place of a subject of dream there was only a dispersal, a vigilance without subject which can never wake into individualised consciousness.
Who dreams? No one in particular – not this dreamer nor another. Who is the ‘I’ of the dream? There is a distance between the protagonist of the dream whose face and name are those of the one who sleeps and the sleeper himself – a distance which is the correlate of the distance between the sleep which provides rest for the one who will rise to work the next day and the sleep ‘beneath’ such sleep from which no one ever awakens. Or, again, between the dream which is part of the course of ordinary sleep and the dream of that other sleep which takes dreaming itself as its object. But then one wonders whether such a distinction can be drawn at all – whether indeed dreams are ever just an interval within sleep which leaves that sleep undisturbed.
Perhaps every dream is dreamt by another in me and that this is why we are eager to recount our dreams, speaking them to a friend, a lover as though to proclaim them our own work, the product of a nocturnal labour (‘I had a strange dream last night’). Yet this eagerness is only evidence of a kind of fear. It is as though the dream was something we came across by mistake – as though we were the voyeur of a scene we should not have seen. It is not ours – whence the attempt to grasp it and make it our own; it does not harbour a secret about our particular psyche so much as about the secret heart of the world.
Who dreams? Neither you nor I. What shows itself? Nothing that is bound to either a subject or a substantive. Dream without centre, eccentric – dream from which we cannot say we are absent either. But how to write of the exposure of the dreamer? How to write not of the thinking thing, res cogitans beneath the cogiatones, but of a thought without a thinker? True, there are figures with whom we can identify in the dream (‘that was me’; ‘you were there too’) – but this work of identification belies the uncertainty of their presence (is that me? is that you?) Are the dream’s protagonists identifiable with particular individuals in the world like the real people who appear jumbled up in Dorothy’s dream in The Wizard of Oz (‘you were there Aunt Em – and you – and you –’) or does something stranger occur?
Perhaps the dream places particular identities in parentheses, granting a familiar face to the figure who simultaneously introduces a difference between that face and itself – a kind of haunting whereby we are made to unrecognise the ones we knew. It is akin to that experience wherein the passerby on the street resembles someone we know and yet is not that friend – wherein the face of the friend is sent on a peculiar detour. So too with those we think we recognise in the dream – even the protagonist we identify too readily with ourselves. A dream that dreams itself, which turns back on itself such that it is not the dreamer who rests beneath each dream, but a place of opening and exposure. A dream that dreams of a difference that haunts the work of identification – in which that difference presents itself as it is woven into the coming to presence of the world. A dream in which difference dreams of itself.
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