Category: Dreaming

‘Were you really with me all this time?’ – ‘I was with you.’ – ‘Were you watching me all this time?’ – ‘I watched, and inside your own watching. I breathed inside your breathing. I lived for you, I dreamt for you, but now you must die for me.’

A kind of dream (a waking dream): that writing was a scapel along the skin, opening it, and opening a body like a book. It was to be my own entrails that I read, but I was hollow; and the pages were like pieces of the night turning.

Try harder!, my dad used to say to my sister when she complained she couldn’t sleep. As if you had to strain yourself and push in order to find sleep, when it is by surprise that you must come to it, or by surprise that it finds you, as when, walking through a wood, a clearing opens up, a secret vista – and I remember, now, a garden opened to our schoolbus that I would see again, years later, in Chagall’s The Poet Dreams.

Every time, it opened unexpectedly, and that is like sleep, which unexpectedly finds you, there around the corner you couldn’t turn by yourself. And then you understand that sleep was steering you to come to itself, that it was backed up behind you, and exerting a gentle pressure. Sleep calls you to itself, and what you want is only its wanting inside you. Sleep would like to join itself; sleep would like to lie down, turning inside you like a cat trying to find its spot.

That you wake up, like a diver surfacing – that awakening wants to waken in you, lightens you, and presses you upward to where the water’s bright – is the analogue of another kind of awakening. There is a state, says ancient Indian thought, of a deep sleep beyond sleep – and isn’t there an awakening beyond being awake? perhaps the two states are the same.

I can’t remember the Sanskrit term, but it is what is translated as the witness that is called from waking (or sleep): wake in awakening, sleep deeper: but it is the witness that seeks to find itself in you. To find itself, and to find you – for isn’t this, of the ancient Hindus, the truest self of all? Or perhaps it is only that it is joined to the self that sleeps or wakes that brings you to the edge of truth.

Joined – but as you fall deeper in sleep than sleep, or awake from your awakening, it also unjoins you from the normal course of your life. A relation in lieu of itself; a joining that is an unjoining: it is the witness that is the measure of you, looking for itself, seeking through your life and your dreams.

Borges has a story of the mirror people trapped by an emporer on the other side of the glass. But he says they are coming again, that the magical trap will lose its force. In the deepest mirrors of a certain province, says Borges, a fish can be seen. The same fish, I think, that Wolfe’s Severian sees in the mirroring pages in the House Absolute, gathering itself, obscure threat, to break the charm.

How can you reach the image in the deepest mirror? But it is coming to reach you, the witness, the one who would see with your eyes and dream with your dreams. Or it already roils in your dreams, turning there, hinting at itself, strange leviathan that withdraws as it comes forward, and whose scales are each larger than the whole world. And aren’t those scales what you see behind the sky, silvery blue within blue?

But it also turns in your own heart, and its turning is what allows you to find it everywhere, on the edge of your sight and the corners of your hearing. Isn’t it a version of the avatar of Vishnu that let itself be caught as a tiny fish, but then grew into its true, massive size – a fish as large as the universe – and announced itself the principle of all? Only this principle is not such, but is that withdrawal that undoes the structure by which knowledge might come to itself. Or is only undoing unleashed in that system, a fire in the forest?

The poet dreams: I remember that vista, and coming across it, always unexpectedly. A garden, and a wooden house, framed by pine trees, as though on the edge of a greater forest, a sample of immensity in our dull suburbs.

Singer, how is it I occupy your voice? How is it that it sings of me? One day, I dreamt, we swapped voices. I sang with your voice and you were silent with mine. I sang, and you listened, and my voice watched over us both. I called you, cousin. We had always been close, without knowing one other.

Which one of us sang? What does it matter? We listened, and the bower of listening became a forest, and where there was shelter there was only wandering. I thought, I am looking for myself, but I was only looking for you.

You: the word was as open as our wandering. I asked you where you were. Here, you said, but here was everywhere.

Dream image: an eye open in the middle of the palm of my hand. By writing it down will I make that image go away? Another bright day in the South. But I couldn’t sleep last night, and carry the night with me; the day has not really begun, or rather, it has not separated itself from what went before. No new beginning: the lost night voids the bright morning. The day is turned inside out. It is a photographic negative of what it should be.

Isn’t it in just such a negative that Mishima’s Toru finds himself? I remember the first pages of The Decay of the Angel, the last volume in The Sea of Fertility, as a series of horizontal lines. Short paragraphs, each a sentence or two sentences long, which precisely lay out a situation. The coast. A ship that comes across the horizon. Remembering, I say to myself: it is at this point Mishima knew the Absolute. At this point that he began to write as a dead man. For it was upon the completion of this volume that he took his life.

Toru: the photographic negative. Mishima, already dead, already seized by the movement of dying. It is as though he had cut his wrists, and his blood was already mixing with the horizon the ship crossed. The sea at the beginning of The Decay of the Angel is a sea of blood. Toru, the fourth incarnation, is only sixteen, but he is wise from a life lived three times over. Wise? No, not even that. He has seen everything. He knows everything. Later, in a botched attempt to take his own life, he makes himself blind. But there was nothing more to see.

Morning: my head is thick with cold. I cough, and blood from my nose spatters on the white sheet. It is the night coughing. The day has begun, but there is still the night from which it was unable to separate itself. Mishima, who wrote at night, would have separated night from day with a sword stroke. But just as in those grotesque accounts of botched executions, where the executioner strikes again and again at an unseverable neck, the night is part of the day, flooding it, I imagine, as an octopus’s ink runs into seawater.

Now I remember another dead man, another who lives as life-in-death: Tarkovsky’s Stalker, who, when he lies down in the Zone, is joined by an Anubian Alsation. The camera pans over water, and there we see items from Stalker’s nightstand encrusted with algae. How is those items have crossed over into the Zone? Or does it work the other way: how did those items cross from the Zone into the world? The camera pans. Is this Stalker’s dream? Is he dreaming? Or is it that the Zone dreams in him? Either way, I tell myself, he is dead. He has already died.

A final dead man, protagonist of Gene Wolfe’s Peace. Alden Dennis Weer: I should have kept the book here, in my childhood home. It was in this town I discovered it, the book with close type and yellow pages. The book with the uprooted tree on the cover. I took it with me when I met my friends at the pub. It was 1989; I was at the bottom of the world. The town was like the floor of a well. I read the book there. I reread it, and only gradually did I come to understand what it narrated.

And at that moment, I felt cheated, just as I did last night, upon rereading a childhood favourite: plot becomes all, plot becomes everything, plot sweeps up the whole story and the possiblity of narration. Is it any surprise that I came to prefer the horizontal lines of The Decay of the Angel? That I would discover books in which the plot was like a half-grown garden maze, whose hedges you could look over? I do not want to be lost in the labyrinth of a plot (with one exception: Kafka). I do not want to be led to the secret heart of the narrative, like the enchanted garden in Diana Wynne Jones’ Charmed Life.

Nostalgia for my first reading of Peace, for my second reading, when that book was as light and as open as Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Each episode was a tableau, each spread itself horizonally, moving across, with no forward rush of action. Still book, hovering book, book that suspended the world. Book like a low archipelago of islands from which one could leap from one tableau to another. Book like the jostling ice-blocks across which the child leaps in Pelle the Conquerer.

On my desk in my office, a few hundred miles to the North, is my book of Tarkovsky’s polaroids. Pressed between those pages, like a flower in a flower press, time reveals its juices, its sticky essence. The pages of The Sea of Fertility are sticky with blood.

Morning. The golden statue of Ganesh in front of the window. The pine trees behind the houses opposite. The brightness of the white garage doors, reflecting the sun. The spindly new plants planted along the garden border. What had you intended to write about?, asks the blog. To follow one dream after another, I said. To dream with books that dream inside me. The photographic negative: was that the thread that was to lead you through this labyrinth?, asks the blog. I dropped it; and besides I can see over the hedges. I want to get lost, not find the exit.

Fiction, non-fiction: did what I record here really occur? Did it happen to me? I am not sure, though I would say it had some place in my experience – that it was born there, and was not yet the walking over air I imagine fiction to require. It happened – but to me?

I have always wanted to write of what seemed to happen of itself and to no one – to remember when time seemed to lag behind itself, and space could no longer be kept to its place. It has always seemed that life never coincided with myself, that life was divided into what I could live and what I could not. How was it I was already my own ghost? 

Perhaps it is our bodies are our fate – that we live according to their dark law. Sometimes, it is true, I am alive, active – a great deal is accomplished. Who has more energy than me in the mornings? Who is more awake – as though awakening turned itself out, and the morning was inside me, and it was I who contained the sun?

Sometimes the morning is my kingdom; I rise very early and by the time the world has arisen, I have already created the sun and the stars and set the day turning. But who has less energy than me in the afternoon? Now the stream that once cut its way through mountain rock and meandered across valleys now lost itself in a marsh that spreads as widely as the sea. I am lost in the afternoon – I do not live. How to write of such afternoons? How to summon them to me as ghost to ghost? How to press them into something real?

I will not assign them to a subject, to one for whom they occurred. That would be the fiction, and not the other way round. I will not lay claim to them, those experiences. Did something happen? Did an event complete itself? Or was it rather that what happened failed to happen – that experience did not come to itself and the event did not eventuate? Passivity without subject, without object, the indefinite: these abstractions do not help me. What matters is to give flesh to a phantom, to give what was experienced a definite outline.

Confine yourself to details, I tell myself. Write of what was seen and heard. Write of the world. But is there a writing that can speak of the undoing of the world? Is there a way of speaking of that? I have dreamt many times of the expanses of ice, a glittering surface and the stars in the sky and across the ice, the stars redoubled in the ice. Yes I have dreamt of that: the stars which flash out and the aurora borealis that flashes above the stars. Abstraction: when I hear these words, I imagine those stars, that ice, and the raw wind which passes between them.

Stick to details: write of what is seen and touched. Write of the monitor before you and the desklamp beside you; write of your television guide and your phonebill; write of the pot of moisturiser and the CD remote. But another voice says: write of what causes each item to fall apart from the others: write of what stops your hand from reaching them and your eye from seeing them. For that, too is necessary, even if it does not lend itself to the power of memory.

The world become ice. The body exposed, all along its edge. The body unravelled and flayed across the ice. What kind of images are these? Substitutes, allegories – but for an experience which will only permit allegories and substitutes: the sole content, I tell myself, of what is written here. I confirmed it this weekend, did I not, archiving all my posts, transferring them into Word? I saw it, didn’t I – it became clear how those thousands of ghosts seemed to condense into a single pane of glass through which I could not see but that seemed to look into me, pouring a gentle, glowing light into the room of my life?

For isn’t that, too, another aspect of the experience: at once, it is pain and dislocation but also comfort – the reassurance of a presence beyond me, as if I learnt the world was alive, the expanses, the sky and the ice; that we had merely exchanged places. But let me be more precise: it was that the experience voided me, flayed me, until my body was a single surface, occupying two dimensions. It was the ice-plain, it was the child’s idea of the sky in which the stars were pin pricks. In the end, ice, sky and stars were one – they were part of a single two-dimensional space that was twisted upon itself.

But it was also that when I was returned to myself – when the word, I, was mine again, I contained the same plain and the same sky; they burned inside my heart, where I was exposed. Instead of that beating organ, there was a hollow space, and that was what my body was, the same hollow container in which the silence reverberated and through which flashed the arctic lights. A container – but one whose inside was infinite in depth, extending in every direction. So was my body a shell that, when cracked, would let spill the entire universe, its light and its coldness. Every post I had written was a creature of that world – a ghost, but one of a horde of ghosts that, when pressed upon one another, let the outlines of another creature be seen.

What was it, then, that seemed to bend down to my window? What was it, this creature of light that crouched so it could peer at me through the window of this blog? I knew it was somehow also what I am, and that my hand, touching the window would meet his golden hand. How was it I also lived in that body? I was burning – but that was how I lived, there, on the other side of the mirror.

Night, and I can write again. A weekend has passed, and what had I done? Backed up the blog, that was true. Prepared some documents for photocopying. Did I know that there was gathering in me a kind of push? That my body, into which I’d poured a quarter of a can of Irn-Bru, was readying itself for ecstasy? It was a little after that, when I was cycling home from the station, that the pressure began. I thought, how will I write of this? And then, but this is only a prelude to writing – it is the push of writing, it asks for words.

So it was; that I write here, now – it is half-past nine, one hour later – is tribute to the strength of that push, which has borne me through these sentences and paragraphs. I will be doubly tired tomorrow, I tell myself. I can only bear so much! But what have I borne? Nothing that happened to me. Allegories, fictions – it’s the same each time. How to speak of what will not let itself be spoken? How to write of what bears all writing?

5.00 AM, and what I can see by day in the yard has not yet emerged from darkness. What do I see in the window? This room; the light from my desk lamp, the back of my monitor – this room, and behind it, the darkness of the night. This room and there am I, too, in the window, the light of my face, the green of my dressing gown filled with darkness as though I were already a ghost.

Am I dead or alive? For myself, now, it is as though I surprised myself returning from the day – as though I had met myself returning from the future. I crossed myself here, before dawn; my future came towards me and my past rose up to meet it. And who was I, at the crossroads?

The protagonist of Peace by Gene Wolfe is awoken from his grave when the oak tree falls that was planted on his grave. He wanders through an old house whose rooms are joined across the decades of his life: it is the house of his life, the closed space in which everything happened. To wake up at this time, before dawn, is to wander through that house where everyone is alive but you.

It is said that everything is recalled at the moment of death – you remember it all again, your life. And at the moment of awakening? It as though you recalled your death – that it is death that remembers, like the night behind your image in the mirror. What do I remember? Death remembers itself in me; death – forgetting – destroys my memory.

I lost my place in the night; I slipped from my place and all places. I should be asleep; I am not asleep. I should be dreaming, and my dreams anchored by my sleeping body, but I do not sleep and if I dream, it is merged with my wakefulness. It is very late or very early; this is the crossroads of the night where the soul wanders from its home.

Hopelessness without hope – what does that mean? Hopelessness and no hope, without even the glimmer of hope – what does that mean? It is inconceivable – that you can think of hopelessness, conceive of it, already attests to the power of thought; to think is already to hope.

But what of an experience without power, where power drains away and you are immersed in the great marsh of the moment? You have lost your hold on time; you are beneath time; time gives you no purchase. But you cannot think of this, cannot conceive of it. To think is to find purchase, to move upstream of the great marsh; it is to discover the fresh movement of the river.

What is it to live beneath time? You cannot remember – to remember is to have grasped the moment and inserted it among others. Memory depends on the commensurability of such moments; it cannot grasp hopelessness, which is ungraspable.

Hopelessness: no purchase, no fleeing upstream or downstream. A wound in time; the wounding of time, imaginable as a wound in space – as the marsh on which nothing can be built and nothing began. What is it, hopelessness? The absence of time, time unworked. What is it, to lose hope?

True, I can remember nothing of hopelessness. But does it not insist, hopelessness, in my memory? Does it not insist, pressing towards me, as a non-memory within memory? As though forgetting were something tangible and present, such that it exceeded everything present and the measure of presence. As though forgetting brought to memory something more present than anything. As though it brought from the past the collapsed sun that consumes everything.

Now the past is the event horizon; now, across the past and the return of the past, disappears everything present, everything alive. Hope disappears; the past envelops you. Who are you, no longer alive, but not dead? The past has come. The measureless past has come close to us. It has returned, the past, but the past unremembered. It has touched memory, the forgotten past. And isn’t this the way hopelessness comes? Isn’t this the way it returns, hopelessness? It is the past come again; the stretch of marshes in which nothing is possible.

I am wounded; time has left great marks across me. Wounded, and the past has left claw marks in my flesh. I can’t remember; I’ve lost hold on memory. But the past remembers; it remembers in my place. Who am I, thus forgotten? I am buried deep in the earth. Who am I? The dreaming one, whose dreams are the aurora borealis. I’ve forgotten; forgetting happens in me and across me. The wind scrapes the marshes; the wind flattens the marsh-reeds. Above me, somewhere above, aurora borealis.

From R.M., I receive a copy of Leiris’s Nights as Day, Day as Night, a book of dreams. It is as important to know that such a book exists as to read it. Important to know that dreams can be remembered. Here are notes on three of my writing dreams (dreams dreamt while writing, not while sleeping).

Contorsion: image of the animal with a broken back. Image of the broken-backed creature crying out. I think of the teleported chimp in The Fly. What survives? Bones and flesh, twitching. Bones and flesh, grotesquely contorted, half-alive, still twitching.

Why is it that in bones and flesh do I see the truest image of the human, as though it was only in agony that a human cry could be heard? A human cry, and not an animal’s – a suffering, now, that is endured in bliss. For though the animal, like the human, comes close to death in that cry, it is the human who endures death and survives it. Who survives and love death like the salamander that would live in its flames.

What is this happiness, this desire for death? What is it, this desire, in which death is lived and lived by dying? How magnificently the human being turns on itself! How strange, and how magnificent, this turn into dying!

What does the image of the salamander tell me? Is it a dream? I wonder whether it is possible to dream in writing, to let myself, by writing, be brought to this dream, this dreaming. Salamanders, the contorted beast: each is an image, and an image among others. Is it the beginning of a reflection – a kind of root, from which new growth could take hold? Or is it, instead, the bloom of a marsh plant, the result of a refusal to begin (the marsh: the place without beginning; the shifting earth that never permits the beginning-place)?

Another dream. The water locked in the ground, in the permafrost, is melting. Above: the flash of the aurora borealis, and each star is as though drilling into the darkness; each is a stigma in the body of the night. Disgusting flowers bloom from the damp earth. Disgusting insects swarm around the flowers. The earth has become fetid; there is no death, only dying. What creatures live here? What creatures survive here, in the midst of dying?

Below the earth, the dead are dreaming. Below the earth, as the earth is unfrozen, the dead dream. But they were never dead, only frozen. The dead were never dead: this is my third dream. I am among the dead in my third dream. I never died, in my third dream. And then I know that sleeping is a kind of dying, or a survival of death. That to dream is always to dream with the ones who cannot die. And writing, what is that? Writing: awake when every animal is asleep. Writing, awake even beyond death. Writing: the salamander, the marsh flower, the dreaming corpse.

Is the dream over? I used to have a nightmare – a nightmare daydream (for it would come to me in the day, too, when my attention was drifting): the wasp with half its body missing buzzing in a glass. It was a real memory – a trapped wasp which by the rim of the trapping glass I had accidentally severed one part of its body from another. Distress: the animal divided in two, not dying, but still alive, buzzing against the glass.

That was my nightmare. One day I wrote about it, here – one day, when, I don’t know, I wrote about a trapped wasp with half a body and the nightmare disappeared. Isn’t this what Tarkovsky said of Mirror? By Mirror he spoke of his childhood, of his childhood home, even sowing the seeds around the house with the crops he remembered. But by Mirror he lost his childhood; this film about dreams was also the end of dreaming.

And here at the blog, when I write of trapped wasps – and of other obsession-dreams? The dying cat, for example. My friend the drunk for example. I have not thought of them since. So do I forget by writing, by way of writing. Plato was right: I have delegated memory to writing, and by that I have lost it. But how welcome the dark waters of forgetting! How welcome this great forgetting-flood!

Is the dream over? Is there nothing else to write, now I’ve lost the thread which carried me from day to day? It’s true, there’s no momentum here, the blog’s becalmed, and there’s no wind to fill the sails. I am content; there is no hatred. But contentedness is not joy; the days turn – the days accrete, one on top of another, forming a coral reef of weeks and months and seasons. If I stay in this city, my life will be this gentle laying-on-top; years will pass, and there will be nothing to write.

Pleasant days; my living room floor is covered with candleholders and beer glasses, an empty bottle of Sake, a full bottle of Tequila. And can’t I imagine, one day, the whole of my life will be similarly marked by a few objects? – the whole of my life in remainders of a life lived, known by its evidence. So will I have lived. But will that have been life? Death comes like the waters of forgetting. But what was it that was forgotten?

It is winter; I haven’t opened the curtains yet, but perhaps I will see snow. Isn’t the desire to retreat into warm rooms – to leave behind the world, and everyone else – a sign of winter? Retreat. Hold out against the cold. And isn’t each post at the blog a warm room, a habitation at the beginning of the day? I would like so say each post marks a stage on the journey, but there is no journey. Only each day to forget – to release memory into forgetting. By each day comes forgetting – this is welcome. Each morning, a dream is forgotten – this is welcome.

And on the day when there is no more to write? I’ve opened the curtains; the blizzard did not come. The sky is blue and far. And when you’ve written enough that your own life is likewise blue and far? You never will have lived – you will have rubbed out your traces as you went. There is writing instead. Writing will have remembered for you. Writing remains – but what remains?

I have always marvelled at those books, those voices, which seem to issue out of themselves, like the scarf pulled from the magician’s mouth. A speaking of nothing in particular, a writing held together only by its own volubility. How marvellous it would be to find this babbling voice! Marvellous to write without particular topic, to drift through memory and to forgetting!

Sign of this writing: a path of forgetting through memory. As though memory were a block of snow and writing-forgetting the tunnelling that leaves great, hollow absences. As though writing opened a tunnel in the snow: forgetting and what is written is written on the ice beneath the sky. Who remembers? Writing remembers for me. Unread, open to the sky, writing remembers, but I have forgotten.

I remember a poem where the narrator is ill, perhaps dying, and says his dreams wander on without him. So writing – that strange body that is not ours, strange prosthesis we do not own. Of what does it dream? Now in my dreamscape I image that above writing there shines the aurora borealis, sign of the dream of writing, of writing as it dreams of my life without me.

How long have I been unemployed? In my room, this morning, I will always have been unemployed. How long have I been unemployed? The day is still the day; the same is the same.

I dreamt the other night of a friend I haven’t seen for twenty years. Who did I see? Was he my friend, or someone else? And you whom I greeted on the street, taking you for someone else – who are you? The double of my friend, or one who shows my friend never to have been the one I knew?  Whose dream was this?

Tarkovsky: unsettled things, the bottles that fall from the table in Stalker (what moved them? – the rattling train? Stalker’s gifted daughter?); and in Mirror: water and plaster fall from the ceiling, and who is she, that monster, whose long hair has fallen in front of her face and her arms flailing? A bell is ringing, and now, above the bed, a body rests in mid air. Is she asleep? Whose dream is this?

A scorpion that stings itself. A soul that wants not be a soul. A sickness happy in its sickness. An interiority that longs to give birth to the outside. A wound that dreams of being cauterised by the sun.

I dreamt about you, but of whom did I dream? Was it you? Yes – you were present, you were there more strongly than you ever were: there, but with a presence which exceeds all presence, as though there with your presence was also the presence of everything understood now as a kind of shadow of the world, a shadow that spreads from each particular thing to join itself in a greater darkness. Not the night behind the day, but the night in the day, the day’s opacity.

I dreamt about you; I woke early and thought: why her? why now? and then: but you were only a mask the shadow wears. More: there is only the shadow and only masks and the world, the visible world is itself only the shadow of a shadow. I knew that the dreamer only resembled what, in me, escapes that self-relation which brings everything back to the same. The dreamer, the one who remembered ‘you’ had already forgotten ‘me’. Or the other way round: I had forgotten you in ‘you’ and remembered what is lost in the unity of the one who lays claim to his experiences, who would have it that life is lived in the first person.

In the end, the dreamed encounter repeats the encounter which occurred outside the dream. As if it was in the failure of a relationship – failed friendship, failed romance – that one learns of what hides itself in a relationship’s success: the encounter which takes place away from the world, which calls another forward in me as it calls another forward in you. Who is this other? What reveals itself in failure? The precarious encounter which tends to reveal itself when we are up against the most crushing power: the power of political oppression, of shared misery, or the power of death (as one of us comes close to death).

Ghost of the ‘successful’ revolution (the seizing of the Winter Palace, the storming of the Bastille): the encounters between us, protestors, demonstrators: ‘between us’ such that each is no-one in particular, that each, encountered, is the shadow of the man or the woman of power – of the one with a name and with a job, who bears his or her identity on the card of identity. The revolution’s ghost awoken when, as Benjamin remembers, the clocks are fired upon by revolutionaries. Do not entrust yourself to failure, Blanchot writes, for that is only to evince nostalgia for success.

Broken clocks: do not think of a future any other than that of the encounter. Graffiti on the wall in May 1968: ‘it is forbidden to grow old’. Become young again in the space of encounter. Forget me and I will forget you; forget the event which disjoins itself from the present.

I dreamt of you – I dreamt thereby of that common presence the revolution will awaken.

(Common presence – this phrase, title of an anthology by René Char, is the title of a book I would one day want to write.)

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.

In a diary entry for January 26th 1973, Tarkovsky distinguishes between ‘two kinds of dreams. In the first, the dreamer can direct the events of the dream as if by magic. He is the master of everything that happens or is going to happen. He is a demiurge. In the second, the dreamer has no say, he is passive, he suffers from the violence done him and from his inability to protect himself’ (Time Within Time, 66)

… I have woken from several disturbing dreams over the past few nights. They were of the second kind.

The Sumerians used to recount their dreams upon waking, believing this dispelled the magic of the dream. You are not the protagonist of the dream you think is your own. It turns itself from you and turns you from yourself; it is as though you gaze into a mirror and do not see yourself. Beware then another legend: that the dream, ‘your’ dream – the one you seek to possess – belongs to the first interpreter, the first one to whom you narrate it. But you already know the dream cannot be unfurled; there remains, at its heart, something enigmatic and closed from you. What resists interpretation? The fact that the dream is not yours, but the night’s; you, dreaming, are as though turned inside out, and it is not you who dream, but the night.