Dreams

I have been having truly disturbing dreams lately. Full of violence and brutal sexuality and disconcerting images of my past and present interwoven in bizarre and unsettling ways. Most of the time I cannot remember much of the "narrative" of my dreams. I am only aware of the aftertaste of the distress when I wake up. For about three months now, I really haven't had very many good dreams.

George gave me a book for my birthday. Man Walks into a Room by Nicole Krauss. I asked for this book because I vaguely remembered some of her stories in The New Yorker and because she is married to Jonathan Safran Foer, one of my favorite novelists of all time. I hadn't been able to put the book down all day, until I was inspired by a passage to revisit my recent distress with dreams and dreaming.

The book is truly beautiful, not only in its story (a man who loses all memory except for memory of his childhood), but also in its prose. Krauss was trained as a poet and it is easy to see the poetry in her narrative, where a simple sentence evokes complex feelings and memories in the reader. A few passages have made my eyes misty, not only out of empathy for the characters, but also because of the evocative writing that brings to mind some of my own most treasured memories.

However, the most affecting passage so far has been a passage about dreams and memory, or more properly, forgetfulness:
"You told us about an angel in the Talmud or something, the Angel of Forgetfulness, whose job it is to make sure that when souls change bodies they first pass through the sea of forgetfulness. How sometimes the Angel of Forgetfulness himself forgets, and then fragments of another life stay with us, and sometimes those are our dreams."

Upon reading this passage, I immediately thought of the painting "Angelus Novus" by Paul Klee. Benjamin (my thoughts seem to keep returning to him), did an interpretive essay on Klee's painting, claiming that the angel was the angel of the progress of history. He claimed that the angel's eyes were looking back onto a past history, onto all of the sad and devastating events of history.

The synthesis of Benjamin's interpretation of the Angelus Novus and Krauss's narrative depiction of the Angel of Forgetfulness has created in my mind an entirely new way to evaluate my distressing dreams. Perhaps my distressing dreams are not indicative of any present unhappiness. Perhaps they are not even, as Freudians would likely assess, indicative of my own unconscious and subconscious childhood unhappiness. Perhaps these dreams are instead my way of interpreting and filtering the elements of a collective history, a history full of violent change and revolution. This history, of my past life, or of the past life of humanity, is rightfully distressing. Human history is so wracked with violence and volatility, that perhaps the only way to get through it properly is to work it over in your dreams. Perhaps the best way to progress as a human being is to experience the worst of life in your dreams and pursue the best of life in your wakefulness.