Yet again, I dream an unwritten Dostoevsky novel
Yesterday, Leon told me about a movie called Choses Secretes. Then, at night, Anika woke me via the phone and we had a particularly enjoyable conversation about Art and Morality. Then, I went back to sleep and the two preceding events combined to make me have maybe the best dream ever.
Okay, it starts out at "St. Matthew's" Christian orphanage; the city is hosting a pagan festival and the orphanage encourages its wards to get dressed up and participate on the reasoning that the people should be allowed this minor indulgence in sin to keep them away from greater sin, because this big holiday is "all they have." An earnest young man rushes into the orphanage, breathlessly, wearing some kind of mask and cape and goes up to his "girl." She dons a cape also, and he pulls her out into the city, ostensibly for a big date! They go up to this big rock by the lake, and on top of it turns out to be this filthy latrine. They go inside and have tender, meaningful sex in the latrine, during which act a child is conceived.
Then the girl tells the earnest young man the story of why she, her older sister and her mother have to be in the orphanage: the mother has killed a man, and it's implied that this was one of a group of wealthier men who wronged her (probably sexually)! She was going to kill all the men in the group, but somehow became blinded and caught during the course of her attempt at a second murder. The state took pity on the woman, on the "poetic justice" of her situation, and thus put her into an orphanage with her daughters.
Then we cut to a scene with the older daughter, in a neighboring building. She is plotting to help set up a wealthy, older, morally reprehensible suitor with her helpless, blind mother. The plot involves taking advantage of the mother's blindness (like, the older daughter hovers nearby and makes signs to the suitor, telling him what to say). She is doing this because she thinks she knows what is best for the mother, that marrying this sleazy individual is the only way for the mother to be honorable again and for the family to rise in station. In her pride, the older daughter takes upon herself the burden of going "beyond" traditional morality; her plot meets with partial success and presumably the suitor is invited to call again.
She and the suitor then go to meet up with an entourage of their friends to have a celebratory dinner. However, a certain morbidity prevails at the meal; everyone is sort of depressed at the moral ambiguity of what they have done, at life's grim necessities that only the wealthy, only those in power, are aware of. The wealthy suitor grimly asks the older daughter if she would like a "time sandwich," and everyone asks what he means by this, ready for a sophisticated joke. I appear in the dream as a sort of pathetic hanger-on in the entourage, and I try to be witty and in on the joke by saying, like, "Oh, I have had many bad experiences with this type of sandwich!" thinking that it's like a straight-up metaphor for aging. Then the suitor says, "No, no -- I mean this" and he pulls out this piece bologna by itself. It is immediately understood that "time" is supposed to take the place of the slices of bread -- like, the bread slices are supposed to be missing so that the bologna would be exposed to the elements, making it rot faster (?). Then people are supposed to eat the bologna and pay attention to the subtle effects of "time" on it, gaining a delicate understanding of the nature of mortality. The entourage meets this with respectful silence.
There's a whole elaborate middle part of the dream that I don't remember well, involving the older daughter becoming more involved in futile intrigues and the (female) child of the younger daughter and the earnest young man growing up to be very strange, mainly silent yet precocious or whatever -- much like Alia-of-the-knife from the Dune series!
Okay, and then _I_ become the younger daughter and I start getting a sense of deja-vu. I am pulled out of the orphanage by the young man and go to the rock by the lake. It is known that time has somehow gone back to the first part of the dream. The young man encourages me to enter the latrine, but I am filled with mystery and wonder at the way history eternally repeats itself, compelled to explore the lake instead instead of letting events take their predetermined course. I go up into this tall building and in an empty room I come upon the future precocious child of "my" union with the young man! The girl-child chastises me for mindlessly fornicating in "depraved latrines," while my own mother, "blinded just as Oedipus was," is "deceived into marrying a suitor unworthy of her -- by her very daughter!" The child asks me how I could be so thoughtless as to want to reproduce and thus let the sordid story of my family repeat itself endlessly, in infinite permutations. Then this dog that had been sitting next to the girl, on a leash that was tied to a post at the other end, lunges at me. I try to stop the dog by tossing it out of the window, thinking that it would choke on the leash. However, because it is animated by the moral conscience of my unborn child, the dog jumps right back in and proceeds to maul me.
Suddenly I know what to do - I know the only way to escape being mauled by the dog and to end the cycle of sex and death. I put the leash around my own neck and leap out the window!
The last part of the dream is an overwhelming sensation of having done the right thing. First, a "chorus" of gossips appears, who gloat in the sense of their superiority to the disreputable family of the dream and talk about how the younger daughter was irresponsible to hang herself. However, a second group appears, which consists of mostly the older daughter and the entourage of the wealthy suitor, who soberly reflect on how fitting it was -- that the older daughter, in her pride, attempted to cure the world's cruelty to her mother by worldly means and failed, became only more embroiled in it; and only the meek younger daughter could save the world by dying, in a Christ-like fashion, see.
It is somewhat creepy, though, that throughout the dream the earnest young man and the sleazy suitor were somehow both associated at different times with, um, "wynand" and that the scheming older daughter was associated with Anika.
However, that my mind can just automatically generate this stuff clearly means I am becoming a real writer!!!!! Clearly
Okay, it starts out at "St. Matthew's" Christian orphanage; the city is hosting a pagan festival and the orphanage encourages its wards to get dressed up and participate on the reasoning that the people should be allowed this minor indulgence in sin to keep them away from greater sin, because this big holiday is "all they have." An earnest young man rushes into the orphanage, breathlessly, wearing some kind of mask and cape and goes up to his "girl." She dons a cape also, and he pulls her out into the city, ostensibly for a big date! They go up to this big rock by the lake, and on top of it turns out to be this filthy latrine. They go inside and have tender, meaningful sex in the latrine, during which act a child is conceived.
Then the girl tells the earnest young man the story of why she, her older sister and her mother have to be in the orphanage: the mother has killed a man, and it's implied that this was one of a group of wealthier men who wronged her (probably sexually)! She was going to kill all the men in the group, but somehow became blinded and caught during the course of her attempt at a second murder. The state took pity on the woman, on the "poetic justice" of her situation, and thus put her into an orphanage with her daughters.
Then we cut to a scene with the older daughter, in a neighboring building. She is plotting to help set up a wealthy, older, morally reprehensible suitor with her helpless, blind mother. The plot involves taking advantage of the mother's blindness (like, the older daughter hovers nearby and makes signs to the suitor, telling him what to say). She is doing this because she thinks she knows what is best for the mother, that marrying this sleazy individual is the only way for the mother to be honorable again and for the family to rise in station. In her pride, the older daughter takes upon herself the burden of going "beyond" traditional morality; her plot meets with partial success and presumably the suitor is invited to call again.
She and the suitor then go to meet up with an entourage of their friends to have a celebratory dinner. However, a certain morbidity prevails at the meal; everyone is sort of depressed at the moral ambiguity of what they have done, at life's grim necessities that only the wealthy, only those in power, are aware of. The wealthy suitor grimly asks the older daughter if she would like a "time sandwich," and everyone asks what he means by this, ready for a sophisticated joke. I appear in the dream as a sort of pathetic hanger-on in the entourage, and I try to be witty and in on the joke by saying, like, "Oh, I have had many bad experiences with this type of sandwich!" thinking that it's like a straight-up metaphor for aging. Then the suitor says, "No, no -- I mean this" and he pulls out this piece bologna by itself. It is immediately understood that "time" is supposed to take the place of the slices of bread -- like, the bread slices are supposed to be missing so that the bologna would be exposed to the elements, making it rot faster (?). Then people are supposed to eat the bologna and pay attention to the subtle effects of "time" on it, gaining a delicate understanding of the nature of mortality. The entourage meets this with respectful silence.
There's a whole elaborate middle part of the dream that I don't remember well, involving the older daughter becoming more involved in futile intrigues and the (female) child of the younger daughter and the earnest young man growing up to be very strange, mainly silent yet precocious or whatever -- much like Alia-of-the-knife from the Dune series!
Okay, and then _I_ become the younger daughter and I start getting a sense of deja-vu. I am pulled out of the orphanage by the young man and go to the rock by the lake. It is known that time has somehow gone back to the first part of the dream. The young man encourages me to enter the latrine, but I am filled with mystery and wonder at the way history eternally repeats itself, compelled to explore the lake instead instead of letting events take their predetermined course. I go up into this tall building and in an empty room I come upon the future precocious child of "my" union with the young man! The girl-child chastises me for mindlessly fornicating in "depraved latrines," while my own mother, "blinded just as Oedipus was," is "deceived into marrying a suitor unworthy of her -- by her very daughter!" The child asks me how I could be so thoughtless as to want to reproduce and thus let the sordid story of my family repeat itself endlessly, in infinite permutations. Then this dog that had been sitting next to the girl, on a leash that was tied to a post at the other end, lunges at me. I try to stop the dog by tossing it out of the window, thinking that it would choke on the leash. However, because it is animated by the moral conscience of my unborn child, the dog jumps right back in and proceeds to maul me.
Suddenly I know what to do - I know the only way to escape being mauled by the dog and to end the cycle of sex and death. I put the leash around my own neck and leap out the window!
The last part of the dream is an overwhelming sensation of having done the right thing. First, a "chorus" of gossips appears, who gloat in the sense of their superiority to the disreputable family of the dream and talk about how the younger daughter was irresponsible to hang herself. However, a second group appears, which consists of mostly the older daughter and the entourage of the wealthy suitor, who soberly reflect on how fitting it was -- that the older daughter, in her pride, attempted to cure the world's cruelty to her mother by worldly means and failed, became only more embroiled in it; and only the meek younger daughter could save the world by dying, in a Christ-like fashion, see.
It is somewhat creepy, though, that throughout the dream the earnest young man and the sleazy suitor were somehow both associated at different times with, um, "wynand" and that the scheming older daughter was associated with Anika.
However, that my mind can just automatically generate this stuff clearly means I am becoming a real writer!!!!! Clearly