Reality check

I sometimes dream about colorful pasts that I have supposedly had, and often end up in analytical deliria concerning how to distinguish ”real” memories from memories ”incepted” by dream content. Recently, I revisited a place where I had supposedly been a regular, and I devised the clever method of asking two trusted friends whether the place was real or not. These two fulfil a function of ”certified friends”, people I trust I will keep seeing also without any specific bonds or shared projects, and therefore, the logic went, they were an external point of reference, not involved in ongoing processes, could not have their own agenda, and were absolutely trustworthy. One of them confirmed the reality of this particular dreamt past, and added the argument that I had been having very fanciful plans about the surrealist group taking over the place, and such a poor connection with reality implies that it must have been a reality to be poorly connected to in the first place.

But elsewhere, such a ”reality check” is often more complicated. Sometimes the question is posed as simplicistically as ”what is dream and what is real”. If we approach this question empirically, not borrowing from various physical and psychological theories which we were taught as gospel in school or in textbooks, instead recognising that things do phenomenologically feel sometimes more real and sometimes less real immediately and regardless of our later intellectual interpretation of them; then what? We would first need a definition of the two states, which would need to be empirically based in our available methods of objectively distinguishing between them, thus we’d need to devise methods and reach definitions only in conjunction with each other, and only then empirically evaluate whether they are actually mutually exclusive.

Actually, modern fiction seems to have made this somewhat easier. With fictional ”universes”, there is always a question of which stories are part of continuity and which are not. This is in fact the same question that some of us keep asking ourselves about our lives in general. Stories that are part of continuity (”real”) are the ones that has consequences for character development, relationships, and long-term plot. In stories outside continuity anything could happen, people can act ”out of character”, do things they will never have to answer for, go on uninhibited sex and violence rampages, they could die, over and over again, the whole logic of the story could collapse and the characters or the writer start speaking directly to the reader/viewer, etc.

Something real, phenomenologically speaking so as not to have to get involved in metaphysical questions which will have to be based outside the investigation, is something that is vivid and ”makes sense”, and especially in the sense of coherence and contingence, something that takes part in ongoing chains of causality and ongoing life processes.

A dream, in a similar framework, can perhaps be tentatively defined as any course of event or other vivid experience which seems to have an inner origin and is experienced with the body at rest.

And perhaps only then we can claim without being misunderstood that surrealism has always been about recognising reality in its entirety, thus being somewhat polemical against all the narrow instrumentalist conceptions of the real which are based on nervously invented restrictions and oppositions. The ”realism” that was professed by vociferous advocates is typically characterised by attempts to circumscribe the real as narrowly as possible. No, all such attempts to represent reality with only a small portion of it (rhetorically a synecdoche) usually fails to convey the experience of reality, which is not the least the experience of a type of fullness and inexhaustibility of reality.

And we see that dream and reality very often overlap. There are of course many dreams that we return from with relief or reluctance that not only feel no less real than anything else, but which also connects with several major ongoing processes in our lives, and do get practical consequences. And, even more strikingly, there is a large portion of our waking life which has no consequences whatsoever, which does nothing to forward our desires or respond to our curiosity, so much time spent at work, or with extensive entertainment, or with various uninteresting chores, or alone at home, or with the family… (Other arenas for social interactions might be just as conventional or dull, but it is typical for the family that any showdowns or any resolution are quickly forgotten and then repeated again and again, and outside the family even conventional social relationships do keep changing at least in terms of the relationships.) Clearly, Swedenborg, Blake and Nerval were pioneers in recognising the ontological status of their dreamlife as real, and instructively, they were also good at making things happen based on this more inclusive, more full, sense of reality.

Surrealism, it has been argued, can be translated with the watchword ”more reality!”

Mattias

New York excursus 2

Dream 2: 
When I finally come to New York it is not at all like I have imagined it. It is just like Stockholm but somewhat bigger and with more limited options in terms of small shops.
    I am desperately looking for a Monica Zetterlund record (Swedish jazz singer), and when I finally get to the jazz section it turns out it is sorted according to composers and not performers, so maybe I could find some of her Bill Evans recordings but not anything by internationally obscure Swedish composers. Instead I look at dvds and find that there are plenty of more or less new science fiction films about alien fleets arriving in New York with allegedly diplomatic missions and ambiguous implications. All these small planes accompanying the big spaceships among the clouds over New York. That is more like a real imaginary New York.
    But I am hungry and have little money, I have indeed bought a hotdog but I didn't get any bread with it. Eventually I find a free table, just abandoned by some family who have not eaten much of their servings, so there are plenty of sausages and fries and things around, and I am thinking whether I should eat it all or not. I pour out a substantial slab of Dijon mustard on the table (I seem to be carrying Dijon with me at all times) and realise that there is still no bread.
    But I am leaving town soon, for a week-long trip a bit to the south, some localities in New Jersey I need to visit and then Philadelphia. I will have to be back in a week because I remember I have been booked for a poetry reading at an obscure New York venue at that time. And when I am packing my stuff, I suddenly remember Paul M (of surrealist nyc). I need to see him when I am in New York! Why had I forgotten? And there is no time to contact him now. Might he possibly be informed enough about what's going on on the New York poetry scene that he will see my name even though the venue is obscure and might just turn up?

Postscript:Then when I actually went to a Swedish second-hand recordshop and bought me a Zetterlund cd, it had a version of Take Five with Swedish lyrics, as "I New York"(In New York). I wouldn't really call this a coincidence, I probably listened to it as a kid and had just forgotten all about it... But then, what is a coincidence concerning New York at all? A city that has marketed itself as the cultural and economical world capital for many decades will show up everywhere. It is more a matter of seeing the layers of the city, and look for only the particular new york which is the "surrealist NYC".

Dream 3:
And this morning, I was back in New York, but couldn't find my way to a hotel. I was taking leave of my parents who were in one hotel, but as I was finishing their dishes and wanted to throw away all the tomatoes and badger hairs (from brushes) that were piled up in the sink, they said that it's only certified newyorkers who get access to a compost, just like in the case of phonebooks and libraries, only for certified newyorkers. I thought I might not need phonebooks and libraries to get around, as one of my surrealist "superpowers" were that I often find books and maps in the street, extract the information I need and then leave it for someone else to discover (utilising the particular method called "the floating library" by our friends the Kalvarium group in Malmö). But even if I do find some books in the New York street here, I still have no idea where I am, and I get completely lost when trying to move in a circle and get back to my parents' hotel. In fact I end up in what looks like an old hospital garden and the path ends blindly at a stone wall. I look over it, on the other side there is one pair of turkey vultures and one couple of humans making out, with a metro bridge and far away the sea as a backdrop.


M Forshage

Meaninglessness of dreams

I read a currently popular pocketbook bestseller where an American journalist (David Randall, was his name) gives an overview of the subject of sleep. The first two chapters introduce some exciting basic facts about sleep that are not generally known, and I was beginning to wonder if this book was going to be one of those "popular revelations" like Krause's book on natural sounds, or Pretor-Pinney's book about clouds, or Johannesson's-Klingberg's book about Swedish extreme metal. But already chapters 3 and 4 are substantially weaker than 1 and 2, and in chapter 5 (only in chapter 5!) he comes to the subject of dreams, and reveals colours.
    First he gives a recollection of the Freudian way, a somewhat incomplete but far from unsympathetic and not very superficial account: he even examplifies with the famous analysis of the "Irma's injection" dream and gives the whole "broken kettle" argument!
    Then he comes with summaries and interviews of modern dream researchers, who all complain about being pariahs in science because everybody thinks dream research is necessarily about new age, but who have all stubbornly clinged to a cognitive program and thereby conclusively disproved Freud once and for all.
    One American professor disproved Freud by collecting 50 000 dreams and formalising their key elements, finding that dreams are not meaningful, symbolic, "surrealistic" or wish-fulfilling – because they are in fact meaningless, banal, standardised, boring, negative and anguish-filled! For example, if a stranger occurs in a dream, he will invariably start pursuing and attacking the dreamer. And when ex-partners, family members and dead friends pop up, it is only to trigger bad conscience.
    Another American research team proved that dreams are meaningless because they are totally random memory fragments, and just because of that, they contribute usefully to solving everyday problems because we can see things in a different constellation.
    The author of this popular book enthusiastically agrees with all this, and explains that dreams are so consistently negative and anguish-filled because they are fundamentally the playing out of worst-case-scenarios in our everyday worries, and the reason they are negative is not that they are meaningful in any way but they simply reflect that everyday life is mostly about worries.
    Any reader with a sense for irony will appreciate this elaborate parable. If dreams are meaningless because they are boring and anguish-filled, systematically negative and totally random, just a continuation of waking thought and entirely meaningless, does not this list provide a rather exhaustive set of self-contradictions that just once more illustrate the case with the broken kettle?
    So clearly, this is just a case of the classic philistine "hatred against the marvellous".
    Many aggressive common-sense views of the "cognitive" side of the spectrum typically postulate apriori that things are meaningless. They usually take sadistic pleasure in "debunking" the romantic views of the naively meaning-ascribing primitives around them; but as long as the lack of meaning is a postulate, it is also rather logically consistent and escapes counterarguments. You have to have faith in this meaninglessness, or it becomes just a hollow stance, a rhetorical trope.
    But then many of these haters turn to actively demonstrating the absence of meaning, a task that easily becomes self-contradictory, because formulating patterns and selecting examples are activities that in themselves produce meaning, and the absence of meaning can never ever be actually demonstrated. The closest thing to a meaninglessness demonstrated is perhaps an almost perfect mathematical randomness. But demonstrating this also requires the conceptualisation, circumscription, recognition, selection and naming of elements as well as the variables measured, and therefore involves meaning.
    Another aspect is this weird identification between the common and the negative, between everyday life and anxiety – clinically, I would say that anyone this eager to identify these two very different concepts with each other is simply a very depressed person.
    Again we are perhaps reminded of the broken kettle in this credo of miserabilism: the beautiful and the pleasureable are not something very attractive, and anyway they are very very uncommon, and when they do occur they are not real but only illusions.
    Yes, and by the way, the rest of the book is mostly bullshit, with a few scattered interesting facts about sleep biology, sleep psychology and sleep sociology. A popular science book is after all typically a compendium of small revelations and great prejudices side by side.

M Forshage

New York, excursus 1

I got into contact with the Surrealist NYC blog at approximately the same time I went to a film festival about New York, detailing some of the aspects of the "No Wave" film and music movement of the 70s, but also other aspects of social resistance, and even more of the general character of the city as a major exception to the rest of the United States, a weird and decadent satellite detached in space, a fenced zoo presenting a haven for the weird, troubled and mad, an analogue of what the floating island of West Berlin used to be to Germany. (But, for some reason, New York is also the place where all superheroes live and which all aliens attack.)
    So at that time, I was starting to have a series of dreams of New York. It surprised me, I had really never ever been particularly interested in the city before, at least not in my adult life.
    The first one was put to creative use by Paul McRandle at the time at Surrealist NYC.

Dream 1: 
I find it a bit disturbing that everybody is talking about New York these days. This little dreamstory after a rare night of sleep could be called "Mattias's little New York adventure" or possibly (after that Neutral Milk Hotel track) "Song against sex":

 

It is a romantic landscape but it is all grey and quite depressing
It is vast tidal mudflats, a city in the distance
Yes, probably this is New York
But I don't know and I don't care
I am not comfortable in the fully open landscape
I am standing there, with or without my sweepnet, but
There is no insect activity to see; I look at birds, mostly waders
I have to find a way to get onto the train and get into the city

It is a long trainride and I enjoy the company of a female friend
Could be some old colleague or perhaps old girlfriend of mine
But she is a very young black woman and I've never seen her before
It is just somebody's idea that we should have gotten together
In one of those experimental breeding schemes
So we're supposed to go live in a small apartment fornicating around the clock
But we pretend like we don't know; we are still friends
However the sexual aspect is tangible and at one point I snap for her nipple with my lips
At that time we are in a long dark corridor of some vast manor
A wing of a building as long as the very railroad line
And after a long walk we reach the reception
A very friendly old German female doctor greets and congratulates us
I am confused, and I am uncomfortable as it is only now that the perverse scheme seems unavoidable
And I wonder if any or both of them might be my dead grandmother having timetravelled to torment me
They are both very nice to me

And we head off to our sex prison

  
 
A series of adventures where I am escaping the breeding bed
I am leading an expedition into an English landscape, open and hilly
In a very strange light, nightly and full of contrast, yet dawn-like and fog-covered
We tread long sad dirtroads along sheep pastures, aiming for a rather steep hill
And it gets even steeper as we start climbing it, soon turning quite vertical
I know I really cannot go there with my vertigo, so I just continue slowly
Even if I have to reverse at times, and rest a lot, I never look down and it works
The biggest problem is in fact when reaching the peak or rather threshold of the top
To know at that point what is up and down; I'm afraid I'll go tumbling down some abyss believing it is horizontal ground...

(Somebody keeps talking about tergites (dorsal plates of abdominal segments) and we've seen them vividly, huge black plates like oven plates, roof-tile layered fluttering and clanking in the wind like an exit hole of some huge ventilation shaft, and this is supposed to be the tergites of a carrion beetle, and this particular carrion beetle also has a pair of motile cerci (anal appendages) just like an earwig; with these forceps it can pick up all kinds of objects and decide wether they are edible or maybe there is some other reason to gather them and store them in a vast anal vestibule; I see it handling pebbles that are thrown away and pieces of organic debris that are saved, and some that look more like archeological objects, old spearheads or something) 

On top of the hill there is a beautiful deep pine forest
Mosses and lichens and o so quiet
We walk around in awe, saying nothing
But I see several strange big plants scattered
In fact they look like monster plants from science fiction or horror movies
And there are hundreds of them in different developmental stages
Some have growing seedpods like the ones from "Invasion of the body snatchers"
It seems like the rest of the expedition participants just don't see them
I try to gather us all and whisper that something is wrong
In the corner of a glade I find one plant on top of which sits a mummified giant dragonfly
It lookes like a scene painted by André Masson or Max Ernst (the goube-avion!)

Again escaping the breeding bed
It is early morning and I am on the commuter train and it seems to be going the wrong way
I enjoy the landscape at this early hour, I feel a tinge of euphoria
And I hear a compelling soundtrack of 70s white funk
(whether it's Talking Heads, James Chance, or Gang of Four)
This is enough to make me abandon my original plans, whichever they were,
and go with the flow, and strangely I end up in Uppsala
And there is a new station building in Uppsala, looks very much like an airport
And it is not crowded and the morning light is really beautiful
There is a very compelling atmosphere of expectancy and that mild euphoria
It must be because it is so early, but how early?
I just can't seem to read the clock anymore
What hour is supposed to be at the straight south position of the clockface?
It is not that one, it is an hour before or after
So I may sit down at that characteristic little Gare de Nord breakfast café
and have my café double et un croissant s'il vous plait and just sit there for several hours
Looking at all these scattered early morning accomplices
Or will I go to my office, and surprise everybody with being there before them for once
and then leave for a long exploratory walk after that? Into the strange southeastern parts of Uppsala that I've seen only in my dreams?

 
Looking out the vast windows I am suddenly being dazzled by a sharp golden reflection
Tinsels and towers somewhere out in the harbor
It is a huge Turkish ship with a strangely ornamented skyline like a city
I have to walk out that pier and take a closer look
Most people are going in the other direction, it's like a migration wave
But there are a few shady elements like me struggling against the current
They may be plain harbor workers, or homeless drunks, or both
One of them calls my name; It is my old friend and office-mate Karolina
In a rubber overall and big sweater she looks like she's in the fishing business
I hug her with a desperate feeling, and the smell of her sweater is very intimate
It is not a weatherbitten iceland sweater,
it is an everyday sweater worn thin by being used as a nightgown
I don't see her very well, it's still dark in this part of the harbor
She's leading on and I'm following, we're happy to see each other but she has to keep working
But when I explain why I came out there, to see the Turkish ship, it's not there
I can see it in the distance, this long walk along floating bridges was a big detour from the main pier
I say I'm off track but I'm glad I found her and I enjoy the smell of her sweater
She pretends she didn't hear that and she keeps leading, now onto dry land
The plank path continues up a rather steep rise full of holes and bumps
And occasionally some very small houses, maybe for children or mythological dwarfs
And the rabbit holes are huge
I keep wondering whether the wooden path system permeates the whole hillside
And leads to subterranean abodes as well

 

I enter one of these houses, it's like a mountain cabin,
But it's full of people, listening to a pep-talk by a management consult,
Who keeps explaining that announcements should be made with awe, courtesy and a whole battery of pompous adjectives for the main acts, but for local support acts one should more like apologise for the philanthropy of giving the lesser gifted a chance; and when she gives an example of one of these pitiable local acts I don't quite hear what she says but I get the impression that the second half of the band name is my name.
Am I a musician? I could be.
Since she keeps repeating her message, I get a new chance to hear, and this time, even if its not the same as she said before, it was much longer and more opaquely hybridic at that time, this time she clearly says that it's "New York Forshage". What?
This gives me the impression that I'm something like a House or Techno DJ. Could I whip up a set of house or techno tracks until this evening? Possibly.
A child sitting next to me asks which ones of my big hits I am going to play. I say it's going to be all new material for the main set, and old hits only for the extras.
She looks very disappointed but I am starting to enjoy planning this performance.
Many of the others in there have funny costumes and make-up,
Some white clown faces, a lot of stylised flowers and spiral doodles.
They're talking to me about someone I don't know, and to demonstrate what she looks like, they go into the vast wardrobe of their paintings and dig up a whole series of portraits of this person.
It is actually an artist group who meet here at least once a week.
And they all keep painting, collectively and individually, while they are talking about various topics.
And they pile all their works in this wardrobe.
A surrealist group could be a bit like this, I keep thinking. I would like to be in a surrealist group that painted.
But now I have an engagement. I have to go off and make some music.
I wonder what I'm supposed to sound like.
Since the way out is through a shopping center, I stop by the record and comics store to see if there are any records by me, that I could secretly buy and get a hint from.
But a fat guy is occupying that section, and there is nowhere for me to casually stand except next to comics in Swedish translation. It's all Marvel, mostly Spiderman and X-Men as expected, but I've never seen all these editions before. There is even a special series for Spiderman's foe Sandman, absolutely not that emo twat Vertigo/DC's Sandman. In a shelf of oversized comics I suddenly see a big hardcover book that seems misplaced there: "How to draw the insect head". This is fantastic. But I had misinterpreted the price tag, it was upside down, the real price is 601 kronor, I can't afford that.

M Forshage

Matter in Dreams and the Matter of the Dream

The Madrid group is one of the more controversial surrealist groups, and one which we in Stockholm end up in contradictions and more or less polemical discussion with. However this is not because we have more actual differences with this group than with other groups, but merely because they too are fond  of critical thinking, investigating consequences of the conclusions, and communicating this explicitly. Some groups just never enter the discussion on that critical and explicit level.

We are happy to notice that also within the Madrid group there has been a recent focus on the dream, with the publication of Julio Monteverde's essay De la materia del sueño (Pepitas de calabaza ed.).

As your editor here have very insufficient language skills in Spanish, I am not able to go into detailed discussion about themes and questions from the book, and perhaps not even to give a decent overview of it, but I'll hazard the latter.

The book is structured as a tour through aspects of the dream. I sense a distinct change in perspective within the book though. This is most easily discerned in that the first half of the book lacks dream accounts and the second half has them, but I get the impression that this is not a mere superficial feature but actually correponds to a slight shift in perspective.

The long introduction and the first few allegedly concrete aspects seem less interesting as they (superficially) appear written in a faithful and rhetorical way; not posing any questions, not really recognising problems, nor providing concrete examples. I don't know exactly what is being said here but I see major risks: if we will be suggesting (as some has indeed explicitly done) a coherent surrealist perspective where all concepts loaded with our appreciation are analogised to the point of being equalised; the dream, poetry, desire, freedom; suggesting all syntheses are already acquired in this sphere, there is no internal problems, hardly any contradiction left, and consequently very little obvious movement or concrete potentiality; and we will have done little but to package our desires in a surrealist ideology. That is why we need careful empirical study of our chosen fields: to make them areas of passionate enquiry rather than just passionate projection.

So then, in the later chapters of the books, concrete aspects are actually concrete, based in empirical dream examples, acknowledging real patterns of dream formation, real images, real coincidences, real questions. That which actually happens in the dream is, both statistically and subjectively, different from that which happens every day – as well as from the sum of all possible possibilities (it's not like "in the world of dreams, everything can happen, and everybody is in there" as Swedish popsinger Robban Broberg once had it, even though he too had some picturesque examples); it tends to follow a particular dream logic and is structured according to the outcome of dream formation processes, which are a very distinct subset of poetic or imaginational mechanisms.

I salute this book, and wish for its translation into english so we can enter into very detailed discussion about these concrete aspects (on life and death)...


MF


PS another Spanish-language book of a similar format which appeared this year, which I might have taken up here as a dual review had this been a book review site, is Ludión Antiguo (Seriemusidora), collected recent essays from Juan Carlos Otaño of the Rio de la Plata surrealist group. Due to the form of collecting occasional writings, there are several good examples of real contradictions, ongoing discussions, and a fresh surrealist gaze on recent or forgotten themes. Most of the perspective is strikingly orthodox, expecting the devotion to a classic surrealist perspective to be the best safeguard against destructive compromise, conformism and mental laziness in every single situation. But it is not restricted to a defense but also stubbornly explores consequences of the surrealist perspective, and offers some very good critical thinking. And, it is partly easy to read, because there are some English translations interspersing the articles...

Inventing life, invading space

– Synthetisation of Life Experience

(a day in july)

Many authors claim that awake experience is coherent, continuous and unambiguous; while dream experience is discontinuous and just unrelated clusters of various possibilities. Even some friends of the dream maintain this dualism (this divorce as it is called), but preferring dream life, openended, seemingly consequence-less, free of the depressing demands from the laws of nature and pressure for plot continuity... I think this is a misunderstanding.

We have to admit that dreaming has a number of very particular mechanisms proper to it, but also that dreams will tie in with other spheres of experience, and in fact, often the fuller syntheses will be made in dream experience rather than in waking experience, because waking experience is of course still obsessed with pruning the supposedly insignificant and applying identity logic just to simplify.

Yesterday morning, half-awake I was remembering a dream, rationalising it within hypnagogic dream logic, and it turned out to be very very coherent and explain a lot of things I've been actually wondering about. It was just like in my dream about "my elusive Polish offices" that I communicated some time ago. Later in the morning, I was telling EL about it, and she noted that remembering a dream while still not quite awake often arouses memories of many other dreams, otherwise forgotten. I recognised this from my own experience. Ok, this dream element relates to this class of dreams that I used to have, this to this dream person that I have met, all things that one didn't know. When processing the dream before we are under the somewhat insensitive reign of awake rationality, it points out its connections to a wide coherent field of experiences. For all we know, they might possibly all be made up on the spot (but that would indeed be a massive mental achievement), or they might make an instant synthesis of a lot of stories of mixed status, past dreams, dreams
within dreams, possible dreams, forgotten events, possible events, etc.

I might even say it seems like this is the closest we get to an actual synthesis of life experience, an instant but gradually disenveloping interconnected multitude of stories.

There is a chapter in my novel "Konsten och dödsstjärnan" about "autobiogeography", the construction of a world for a meaningful past of oneself. Of all these different pasts that pop up, some of them can be unproblematically correlated with other events regardless of how picturesque or unbearable they seem (yes it seems I have spent a lot of time in Uppsala, yes it seems I was living in Florida, yes I was sleeping at the bus station in Bodø in northern Norway), others are not contradicted by other data even though they can't be quite remembered (they say I visited Bjursås in Dalarna when I was very small, I know I went birdwatching a lot with my friend Bo and with my friend Ola and with others though I don't remember any of this very well and I always imagine myself having been birdwatching all alone, I have notes from a weekend in a tent on an island in the archipelago in 1999 that I absolutely cannot remember), others still seem a lot more difficult to integrate in one's selfimage even though there is little to actually contradict them (did I actually have a relationship with this woman? was I really taking a lot of drugs with this guy as he claims? what was it about the Polish office?) etc.

All right, enough lecturing. This is the story that was revealed to me
yesterday morning:

All those parts of life that we are not supposed to remember. It seems there is an entire flora of previous lives, normally inaccessible. Only in the early morning one opens the doors to them.

First I unexpectedly meet a friend at a bus in Uppsala. I didn't know he had a connection to the town. I keep trying to deny I have one. I used to spend a part of my life there, and every now and then I go back to try to find new and more neutral ways of seeing it. He doesn't seem to know where he's going, and that suits me fine. We stay on the bus. The buses are uncomfortable, and mostly we can't speak to each other because the loudspeakers of the bus run an ad for the buses themselves over and over again, saying that more than 80% of the population of the city recognises the buses. Well, no big surprise, there is no other public transport here. Stupid town. I have to let others guide me so that I can get a new view of it.

But there are also other areas that seem biographically charged. This time, I had been to the dentist, in the small archipelago town Gustavsberg. I lived near there earlier, but only this morning I suspect the town was named after Gustav Meyrink, the author of Golem. It is a quick visit, and I wonder what I am to do, thrown out into the world at this early time of the day. There are vast open spaces, a rural market site, with very few people, but I go sit down at a long wooden table stretched out on a temporary lawn in the middle of a meadow. There is a big kiosk along one side of the table. I should go buy a cup of coffee and some candy. But I remain sitting there, looking at my phone, trying to remember what I'm supposed to do and when I've seen this place before. I realise there is a big west asian kiosk along the other side of the table. I should go buy a cup of turkish coffee and some baklava. But I remain sitting there, now vaguely remembering that I've been here before, with my friend Bo, birdwatcher and ambulance driver, and maybe we have been planning something for today too? I send him a text message, saying I am now on site, and he could join me or direct me elsewhere. It does not matter that I haven't seen him in ten years.

Because now it all gradually reappears. He and I used to travel widely at the time, and wherever we went he had some old friend staying in some old vicarage or rundown mansion that he wanted to pay a visit. But here, south of Gustavsberg, at a place called Beatelund near Storängsudd, just near Lämshaga where the major capitalist Peter Wallenberg, the de-facto king of this part of Stockholm, rebuilt a mansion for a school for his grandchildren and apparently wrecked an important birdwatching site (but I haven't been here since to see), here, I get a strong feeling that this is not just a story or a dream, it is in fact a memory that has been inaccessible, and that is why I have been mixing up the names Beatelund and Storängsudd already in my notes from the time, I couldn't remember that I've ever been to the mansion or big farm, Beatelund, only to the beautiful pastures on the peninsula, Storängsudd; but this is it, this is the one time I was there.

So back when Bo and I was there, it was all a bit uncanny, it felt like intruding in a real 19th century home, maybe they were ghosts, or just because they were wearing so much white cotton, it's too bright, it hurts my eyes, the priest's daughter desperately looking for someone to marry, just to get a successor at the farm. What was it that my friend had done there before? Actually I knew some of this. I remember, back in 1964. Maybe someone may object that this is before I was born, and he would have been a small child. Nevertheless, in 1964, one fine morning, Bo realised that he was in love with his housekeeper and asked her to marry him. As they could get no children (maybe they realised that already before this while living in sin) they instead conjured forth a Golem. It was named "the Space Invader" because it assumed space out of nothingness. Later this character has been reinterpreted and a video game based on the reinterpretation. The Space invader was a sad apparition, in dark rough clothes (wadmal) with a big slouch hat, roaming the beaches and killing cattle. It also managed to catch, and infect with an immortal virus, the red parrot Almara (ok, I get it, alma ara), which up to then had been a local helper spirit, like a sprite, but now instead became more of a truth-telling ghost, always fluttering around making fun of people who were getting themselves into accidents.

I realise I have to get away. Wherever I go there will be stories of my journeys with Bo, and of the old lore of each that place that will be connected with either his or my life in an uncanny way. I should get back to where I live ("bo" in Swedish), if I only had a home. There is a long wait for the bus. I get to know the other people waiting, an old Iranian woman, a clumsy young hippie couple, a gay couple who live at the top floor, who walk around in sandals and have a deadly fear of bugs and birds and germs, and who told a long story about their recent holidays on nothern Öland, which were such a disaster, because as soon as the went out of the car, the ground was just sand, it was like swimming, you had to struggle to get anywhere at all. I am very relieved when the bus arrives to cut their story short. But then I seem to have had no overview of my luggage, I have to run back and forth to see which bags are mine, I dont remember, it seems a lot of this equipment are actually Bo's, a lot of cameras, maybe also lighting and sound recording equipment? Can this really all be for birdwatching, or is it his ghosthunting equipment as well? The busdriver seems relaxed about waiting for me, but I make very quick decisions about what's mine and not, and I leave everything else there on the sidewalk.

(M Forshage)

Of heaven and hell, and good life

A long dream April 2012:

I am in a hurry rushing through Western Stockholm to keep an appointment with JE, supposedly at half past five, I'm going to be late (the landscape is a hybrid of several parts of the outer city and inner suburbs of Western Stockholm; it's occipitality is supposed to be indicated by its hilliness, in fact a poor indicator). I should have taken the metro instead. I see the platform of Thorildsplan station, a lot of people are standing waiting, but all the signs are unlit. Finally a train comes, but just rushing through; the station is actually closed, but they have failed to keep eager passengers out.

South of the main street the style is more continental, small irregular streets and picturesque small stores. I am climbing a steep hill where JE's school is supposed to be on top (I remember plenty of schoolyards on tops of hills). I find him up there and it is somehow part of my mission to drag him from courting a female colleague or student.

We go on a walk with the surrealist group. We find a strange old tower, some kind of medieval museum (like the alchemical tower on the west end of the Charles bridge in Prague), but the only thing they exhibit is toy cars of iron scrap. Apparently I'm distracted and lagging behind, CA comes back to drag me along, encouraging me to come along "out on the other side" to look how NN and JE "are fooling around and making laughing-stocks out of themselves for the whole city". The "other side" thing refers to the fact we pass under a valve, a small tunnel, to come out on the seaside (like those London tube station just north of the Thames, where you get out to the riverwalk on the south side). Not very eager to see NN and JE fooling around, I still come along.

And it's actually a sensational view. It is just like a large back alley, but one which is a part of the sea, a fiord arm, but the sea isn't there just now, the tide has drawn back. It is all just like an open cave, the ground is fantastically amorphous, delving organic forms mixed together like in a surrealist painting – the colours are dusky yet obscene, it looks a bit like internal organs but nevertheless mostly like modelling clay covered with drying slime (or when excited furniture architects have gone wild with a plastic spraygun...); just like in a normal maritime scene it is all evenly seasoned with small pools, tufts of seawrack and mixed human garbage like shopping carts, old dolls and plastic containers.

It makes me wonder if maybe these dramatic tide landscapes are in fact a condition for surrealist mentality, and this is why there never could have been a surrealist group in Sweden, only in for example Norway and Galicia, because there has to be a fundamental vision of a landscape without homogenity or onedimensionality, based in the experience of the tidal coast, where one had to wade around and collect mussels and stuff as a poor child laborer, in order to be a surrealist...

So I am standing in awe, thoughts and admiration before this landscape (remember that even if grandiose it is not bigger than a larger back alley or a theatre prop); only after a while I notice NN and JE have climbed up the gushing rock- and wrackformations and are sitting squatting each in a small niche, I think they are trying to imitate birds, skuas or albatrosses, or maybe dodos. CA stands laughing next to me, he finds it unambiguous that their squatting positions proves the've gone aside for a dump and actually are sitting there each in their little cave pushing. Admittedly there are single turds to be distinguished in the richness of shapes and litter around us, and just like any "worthless place" of more or less remarkable beauty it's unavoidable that one of the most popular "uses" will be to simply dump waste of one or the other kind, which will contribute to richness of forms, and to the deep emotional ambivalence for the place... Still I am not convinced by CA:s interpretation, I think our friends look philosophical and simultaneously blank as they crouchingly look out over the little alley, indeed with the same combination of wisdom and utter lack of thinking (with a dash of cruelty) as a big bird...

Then I find a dead dog, it arouses much compassion in the other tourists, because they think it's a harmless pup, they can't see that it's on it's way transforming into a sea monster which will be a crime against its phylogenetic position, in fact it already started to demonstrate some characteristics of a sea urchin, and others of an octopus...

We should continue our walk, I'm lagging behind again, thinking I should go to the toilet in the museum in the tower first. Toilets are upstairs, but when I get there the whole floor is empty, it feels like an old bomb shelter, a homeless person's lair, but there is nothing at all there, no toilet, no furniture, just empty. Maybe it is just an obsessive thought but I think I can hear them turning the key in the door behind me; so have I finally ended up in my prison on water and bread for the rest of my life?

It is an american house where I live together with a woman and her brittle old parents. Just for fun we have hidden the telephone in a cookie jar, so when it's ringing the signal comes echoing eerily from an indeterminate place in the room: the old man can't find the phone, looks through the entire house in panic, he's losing it and going mad in the process. In the interrogations much later I said he could have ignored it, if it was important they'd probably call back on his mobile later anyway. My dead grandfather, apparently interrogation leader, soberly explains that old people do not always have cell phones.

An old girlfriend of mine comes home in the evening, I'm telling her enthusiastically that I am going to bed early because it is a very important day tomorrow. And I tell her about the closed metro station at Thorildsplan. I try to explain to her that I would prefer to sleep alone, but I do it so politely that I actually happen to suggest that we should sleep together; so I push together two plastic sofas so that they together form a big square pink plastic bathtub, and I start making the bed; it's always a little uncomfortable to sleep in bathtubs. Actually I was planning to go to bed very soon, so I go down to the kitchen and order some pancakes separately before dinner.

So it's some kind of hotel? or rather a holiday village? at least some kind of holiday resort (a bit like the main tourist building on Stora Karlsö island). In the main part of the building there is above all an art exhibition, an installation that makes no sense, but it is also the major dining hall. It's not half past five yet, long before official dinner hour, I have to go to bed, I dont know when my pancakes will be ready. And since I didn't remember to tell them it was only for me, I will probably get pancakes for the entire family, and I will have to ask for a bag to bring the rest with me – in fact I've never asked for a "doggie bag" in my entire life (I can't remember that I would ever have not finished my food) and it's going to be slightly embarrassing and quite exciting. The artist and some suspect character (the hotel manager?) are sitting talking very quietly in the middle of the installation/restaurant hidden in a labyrinth of sheets of transparent plastic. If I am the only one eating at this hour I suppose they deliver the pancakes to my room instead. I go out, and find the surrealist group again, and my brother. My brother is getting into a fight with NN about the artwork, my brother claims he understands it because he knows the artist, NN says he understands it because he knows something about art. It's just two ways of approaching the matter.

I return to my living quarters. This time the apartment is not directly in the corridor, instead the doors in the corridor open towards a big porch facing the forest edge where all private quarters are in the form of small cottages. And the pancakes have arrived. What pancakes! They cover the ground, they fill the entire space between the porch and the cottage. Each pancake (rolled) is big like a log, and I have got at least twenty of them (difficult to say because it seems my neighbor has ordered some too). This is food for a whole polar expedition. It is incredibly beautiful. What does it matter that the pancakes are lying directly onto the ground, it is a fresh forest landscape, there are just twigs, leaves and needles, it's not like that formless and dirty tidal landscape, in which you would not want to eat food straight from the ground. I'm sitting looking at the pancake landscape for some time. The pancakes are glittering, their patterns of moon landscape and the interference in the transition between individual rolls where they are lying pressed against each other, it is so beautiful and at the same time so profound. They are sorted in rows according to filling. Strawberry jam seems to dominate, but some are more golden in colour, I tear of an endpiece to taste, as small as I can, a little piece the size of a grilled chicken – it is full of apple sauce and it's trickling with syrup, and the taste is exquisite.

Later I am walking on a country road in a dull autumn landscape (looking entirely like southeastern parts of Swedish province Sörmland), realising it is a long way back to Thorildsplan. Some cars pass, yes indeed during the long and actionpacked way here it happened a couple of times that people stopped their cars because they found it suspect to see someone walking and thus offered a ride, just as a social control measure masked into "plain decency" – as usual in the countryside. So maybe I should actually hitchhike back. If I can do it without raising too much attention.

I have to turn across an open ruderal field with tiny sharp edges, probably a small household quarry turned into a parkinglot turned into a junkyard. There I meet an american family, I am a bit nervous that they would find me strange and report me to the police. But I can keep a superficial conversation going in the american manner, yes I can. But as we go through the sparse grass someone bumps into an old hay bale, and under it there are a lot of beetles. I even find a bolboceratid (horned fungus dorbeetle), fantastic! And since we are in eastern US it cannot be the single north european species Odonteus armiger. I get very excited and demonstrate the creature's horns for the ladies; who react with alarm and disgust. Ok, maybe I lost my chance to interact smoothly and unsuspiciously there...

 Gotska Sandön

Røst (in the foreground)

Interpretation:

Ok this maybe contributes to atopos theory, to clarifying material factors in the geopolitical distribution of surrealism, to the analogy between beetles and horses (which IÖ also dreamt about in response), and provided an elegant one-sentence-shortstory. "Just for fun we have hidden the telephone in a cookie jar, so when it's ringing the signal comes echoing eerily from an indeterminate place in the room: the old man can't find the phone, looks through the entire house in panic, he's losing it and going mad in the process."

But the major point I see myself is the two surrealist landscapes, and their relationship based on primitive dualism: back and front, hell and heaven, anus and genus.

Maybe I should say that I recently reread the great recent Marvel comics miniseries where Dead Girl and Dr Strange do a teamup heading down into the deepest regions of hell to fight a band of dead villains (lead by "the Pitiful One") who found a way to take revenge on the living. Dead Girl and Dr Strange get romantically involved, and Dr Strange cures his painful hemorrhoids. In this story the anal morphology of hell is emphasised, and the bad smell is frequently mentioned.

Thus it is not difficult to see the fiord arm/ back alley as hell/ anus. As it's obviously among other things an alley in London (declared by more than one author to be "hell on earth" and likened to a rectum) and being "on the other side" as CA emphasised. There is a lot about crapping and turds. The morphology of the place is gushing, thronged, endless, surrealist, even the dog cadavers are transformed and transgress their conditions.

Equally beautiful and surrealist but in quite another tone is the pancake landscape. Being in a forest edge is significant, as is my association to the Baltic island Stora Karlsö. In fact, in my associations, Karlsö is just a more biographically recent available standin for Gotska Sandön, a more isolated island, just a little flat sand area in the middle of the Baltic, which more than one author has likened to a pancake. So have I, even though I've been interpreting Gotska Sandön as the more domestic variety of Røst, the outermost island in the Lofoten chain of northern Norway, which is also one of these flat, pancake-like islands, but with a quite labyrinthic outline, like a maze or a failed pancake, I did describe it as a pancake in a novel, and there and elsewhere I have attached hopes to it as the "dream landscape on earth", a sort of utopia in the middle of the Norwegian Sea. Now of these three islands it is in fact only Gotska Sandön which has coniferous forest, but the forest in the dream is probably a generalised forest representing the dream landscape as such, the forest as well as the isolated island is simply a privileged dream place. The origin of the particular conjunction of the forest and the pancakes was the anecdotal conclusion from my recent experience of calling in sick from all meetings an entire weekend on the verge of collapse - by cancelling all appointments I finally had an occasion – o so long wished for – to 1) take a walk in the forest and 2) make pancakes. Especially in its imbecil simplicity it becomes a rather beautiful image of good life (eudaimonia). And in contrast to the unambiguously anal character of the fiord bowel, the sexual symbolism of the pancake landscape is interesting. If we shouldn't refrain from picturesque clinical details we can acknowledge how the the hairyness of twigs and needles do not stand in the way for the exquisite pancake taste as a cunnilingal fantasy. Yet still the rolled pancake is hermaphroditic in its sexual symbolism (it is obviously a log, and at the same time a soft juicy nexus of folds) and may transgress simple sexual dualism already there? By being "contradictorily" genital it is nevertheless reinforcedly genital and non-anal, yet still it foremostly contrasts something celestial and utopian against the infernal and dystopian in the bowel fiord alley.

But also, once again, that the two landscapes are equally beautiful. But I recall now that it was only the tidal inferno that was called surrealist already within the dream... pancake heaven was perhaps more dreamy, more romantic, certainly surrealist but less specifically surrealist? Is this just the old fundamental aesthetical question from Milton onwards? Why did Swedenborg become such a bore, and who gave a shit about heaven when there was hell to sing about? Already as romantics and hegelians and even more as surrealists we would already initially dismiss the sterile choice between the two poles in a given dualism? Both do indeed seem equally productive, and the contrast between them more like forcing a blunt logical structure onto two actually autonomous fields, like one between earth and air in bachelardian terms? Not the least to point out that aerialness is still a material category and nothing "pure", mental, cerebral or abstract; and it is obviously here in the heavenly world that one focuses on banal earthly pleasures like good sleep, being in a pair, exquisite food, jam and sex. Yes indeed. Just not take sides. "It's just two ways of approaching the matter."

Mattias Forshage

Dream geography

Some of the theoretical foundations of presently ongoing studies in dream geography by the Cormorant Council, and often presented long time ago at the cormorant council blog in swedish only, if openly at all; are now available in a neat pdf in english at the Bibliotheca onthoplanctorum.

Direct perception

One of these negative sleep epiphanies; this time connected with awakening and nausea.

On my way home in the evening I eat a sandwich with an old date (*). It tastes stale but not really bad.

In the middle of the night I awake and think of the sandwich in my stomach. I am not really feeling sick, but I feel the place of the sandwich in my stomach, and my nervous system is slightly stressed: I am potentially sick. But then it feels like the ground is being pulled from my feet when I think of how extremely strange it is that I was mentally focussing on the eaten sandwich in an immediate way! Isn't it the case that the details assume their meaning by their place in the geography, their place in the narrative and grammar of the text? Don't I have to read the whole landscape, the whole story? Is "direct perception" (direkte Anschauung) actually possible? My head keeps spinning, I am scared. I am convinced that epistemology under normal circumstances rests on a reading of geography as grammar, but that one can be capable of direct perception if for example one is going crazy, or extremely sick. And all the time that eaten sandwich is keeping me reminded of itself, without me having to imagine the entire gasterointestinal system – the absence of the entire 9 meters of it is so dramatically striking, a blank book, a blank map. Is it extremely sick or crazy that I am becoming? Then I fall asleep again.

The dream that followed was obviously geobiographical, and so can be read on the Cormorant council page.

(*) the ambiguity of this formulation became an element in the interpretation of the material. Originally it was just poor linguistic skills, I didn't know the best way to refer casually in english to a slightly old sandwich, the best-before-date of which had already passed.

Diary from a journey in my chamber

(soluble locus 2)

There has been some travelling going on in my apartment lately. A remarkable apparent chance chain of distinct little forest glades, hills, parks and squares. When writing this, I just noticed that Breton referred to surrealism as a new way of travelling in "Lettre aux voyantes" 1925. The story is, I've been digitizing a few longer texts (more or less mindless keyboard work) and so had an occasion to notice not just how but where my thoughts are straying when in an extended absentminded state. In such work, focusing on some actual lines of explicit thoughts would make the smooth execution of the work difficult; following the text mass that should be copied is in fact rather close to hypnotic suggestion; one is supposed to let the present text flow through oneself and out in one's fingerwork without reflection. I suppose a lot of what people are getting paid for doing is such systematised mindlessness and it is one of the standard modes of wage labor... There is a certain interval of intensity of associations where work goes smooth and chain of associations is entertaining – whenever it becomes more subjectively involving than just entertaining (practical worries and neuroses just as much as exciting stories or sexual fantasies or new solutions or poetic momentum) it slows work; and the opposite, the actual focusing on the task at hand or the actual extinguishing of thought seem just too boring, seem like voluntary death. To me, at least this time, basically three lines of "neutral" enough imagery presented themselves, images of some past periods in life, images from comic books (actually read or similar to those actually read), and more interestingly, images of places.

I have been travelling some, at least in recent years. Thus, there is a selection of views and ambiances from at least some hundreds of cities and towns that has been fed into my memory. Even more importantly, as I have been systematically checking out biological habitats as well as wandering environments within public transport distance of wherever I have been staying, as well as in many places where educational and explorative interests have taken me, producing is a plethora of several thousands of forest views, thickets and glades, ponds and beaches, etc etc. All fed into the system of memory and there left to associate with each other according to whatever internal associations might be established while being preconsciously "treated".

An obvious trivial application is the associative cascade every new place triggers: - Oh, I've never been here before. It reminds me of this, and this, and this, like a twisted version of this, has a similar ambiance to this, has identical vegetation to this, the light is similar to this... etc. However, an even more common application (every night) is the synthesis of dream geography. All dreams take place somewhere. Often in a significant sequence of different places, spatially distributed according to the narrative of the dream, ordered and in fact often overlayered in significant patterns that merit analytical response, both in the poetically realist (surrealist) way of mapping this landscape, and in the psychoanalytical study of the origin of the images.

I have been having, through the years, a recurring, paranoid, very interesting compulsory thought. Just because there are so overwhelmingly many similar "natural sites" that I am acquainted with and feel just as home in as the city streets I'm walking down – but significantly differing in the sense that they have no street signs, no other people, and almost no other obvious artifacts whatsoever that could provide quick information of location; I keep imagining what would happen if I suddenly lost short-term memory. I'd know all the places I know, all the techniques of reading the landscape I know, I'd only not know where the hell I was and how the hell I got there. Would I be able to deduce the location or are there just too many places that are too similar? Would I want to deduce the location and return to my life or would I grab this handy opportunity to "disappear from the world" and keep hiding under spruces from the searching helicopters?

I have been trained in available methods for reading landscapes: geomorphology, soil, vegetation types, species assemblies, small-scale climate, agricultural history etc, so that landscapes are objectively classifiable. Not that I do keep consciously sorting geographical images. It just helps me orient when I'm there, and to interpret the image when it resurfaces. In fact, it seems impossible to make a comprehensive and user-friendly classification of places, because so many of them are objectively and subjectively equivalent, differing only in that part of the "spirit of the place" which is the surrounding associations, the musings over the name of the place, its purely geographical relationships to other places, the particularities of the way there and the way back, previous experiences and expectancies. In fact, such associations that involve all previous knowledge can easily be argued to be a major part of the "spirit of the place". I'm not denying that there are places which are objectively depressing, exciting, enthusing, calming etc, (remember the beach episode in Breton's "L'amour fou" , I had a similar experience on the island in Budapest) but this is a very crude spectrum of basic emotional responses and all the subtleties of geography are dependent on the interaction between the totalities of associations and observations and thus dependent on conscious knowledge of location.

Of course I didn't write down the actual chain of places; I was busy. I could pick a few examples and start interpreting them, but for now I'm happy with having written this introduction.


Mattias Forshage

THE MEMORIES OF A LOCOMOTIVE

Niklas Nenzén


I´m with a group of people watching a movie made by Merl which is narrated live in english by Emma, who impresses us with her broad theatrical texan accent, similar to how Dolly Parton or the actors in "Gone with the wind" speaks, or maybe even Elvis. She has an overly educational intonation, in the style of old children´s programmes.
 
The film is shown in a room where a lot of glasses are standing here and there on the floor. Each glass has a toothbrush standing in it. We get a little uncomfortable as we realize that Emma and Merl have stolen our toothbrushes, mixed them all up and placed them in this room and in the movie. Film starts.
 
FIRST SCENE: A room with a lot of glasses standing here and there on the floor. Each glass has a toothbrush standing in it. Camera focuses in on a train-set for kids among the glasses.
 
EMMA´S VOICE: Do you know what memories are? Do you know that sometimes they have never occurred, but that they´re still memories? Let´s look at what this locomotive remembers.
 
As the camera focuses in very close on the locomotive, the picture turns black.
 
SECOND SCENE: Camera sweeps slowly (from left to right) over a darkened room in a doll house. We see a dining table and some empty chairs.
 
THIRD SCENE: Winter in a village in northern sweden. A bit from the above (as from the second floor of a nearby house) we see where the main road is crossing the railway. The gates are down. A train passes by with A LOT of noise. Crashing sounds.
 
FOURTH SCENE: Same view, later on. Gates are still down. Some policemen walk about as if investigating the scene of an accident (implying an overrun car out of picture to the right). Something´s wrong with this. The policemen are walking a bit above the ground, they are passing the gates as if they´re not there and they generally don´t seem to relate accurately to their actual surroundings. It becomes clear to us wathing the film that the policemen are superimposed on the first scene artificially, them being a transparent layer from another film entirely.
 
FIFTH SCENE: The policemen are not policemen anymore, just a group of people walking about. The camera follows them as they cross the railway and follow the main road out of town into the snow-filled countryside. The group is aware of being superimposed and out of synch with the visible landscape. Their reaction to this is healthy and experimental; they try out new ways to walk, new paces, new angles of walking and so on. The creator of the film ingeniously helps them out with this, by moving their filmic layer about, adjusting it to - or distancing it from - the underlying layer. As she´s eschewing their layer, the group is actually moving like parallellograms!  I comment to my fellow spectators about Merl´s skills in doing this: She´s driving them like a car!
 
EMMA´S VOICE: They´re searching for the house of luuuv!
 
SIXTH SCENE: Arrival at a big old house. Emma stands in front of it, gesticulating as she speaks.
 
EMMA: Do you know who lives there? A woman with long black hair and ten dark children... Do you know what they´re all doing there all day long and all night long? Theyre miiiiining for luuuv! (she pronounces it "meaning") Yes they are! And do you know what they´re eating, this woman and all her children? They´re eating white chocolate and nougat and nothing else, yes indeed! Because that´s what GOLD is all about! It - will - melt - your - TEETH - down! Mmmmm... Do you know what that meeeeans? It means that there ain´t enough straws in the whole wide world to fill an old BUCKET!
 
SEVENTH SCENE: During her last sentence the picture of an old tin bucket with some dry grass straws standing in it is gradually superimposed over the previous scene.
 
(The word BUCKET is voiced explosively and in an intentionally vulgar way, which makes me wake up.)

THE SHIP OF FOOLS AND INFLATED FLOUNDERS

preface:
Stockholm surrealist group: polemics over dreams

Some of its members revisiting some questions of largely academic interest whether the surrealist atopos is closely related to Foucault's heterotopia, whether the latter is closely related to the ship of fools, whether Foucault's ship of fools is Breton's ship of fools, an interesting debate took place in the Stockholm surrealist group based on the interpretation of a dream each by a couple of members.

MF started out harshly with a dream about himself. "Now I am going to bore you with a rather dull and painful dream. The sadism of the act follows logically from its subject. Because: in a Stora Saltet issue I reread the other day, Niklas and I had each written a text about our own person. Bizarre, I thought. Immediately thereafter I ended up in an uncomfortable position in a written discussion with a significant person, where a long line of thought I developed was interpreted as if being about myself. I still haven't come up with a way to correct the misunderstanding, I overreact, I repeat to myself antipersonalistic ponderings, from reasonable ones like 'I don't exist, except as a relay station for associations' to highly doubtful such as 'The single common denominator of all the important events in my life is that there is one factor which could always be subtracted from the picture without chainging its meaning: myself'. And at night when I'm asleep that famous 'old man inside me' punishes me by bringing up the subject of my birthday, which is the annually recurring event when one is allowed, even in the most selfsacrificing duty ethics, or even supposed, to focus on one's own person.

/.../ I leave out the dream itself here, but when awakening I heard a ridiculous little glockenspiel tune being repeated over and over again (I often wake up to these repetitive audial hypnagogies); after a while I recognise it as John Cale´s 'Ship of fools'. Poor me. How I resent the sweetly witty, and how I prefer the harshly unreasonable, like yesterday, when I couldn't remember a single dream image but during my entire breakfast I had PJ Harvey's growling going on in my head 'I wanna bathe in milk!'"
NN quickly replied "Isn't the Ship of fools and the Milk bath the same method, that is idealistic selfpersuasion?", which may have made sense as strategies in the dream visavis the birthday setting and other complications, and cited Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj saying "The self is so self-confident that unless it is totally discouraged it will not give up. Mere verbal conviction is not enough. Hard facts alone can show the absolute nothingness of the self-image."


The next day or so, NN replied with a dream of his own. Only part of it is cited here: "A coherent sequence about some kind of marine creatures, obviously belonging to the same mythological family as the siren and the sea monk. They were intelligent, had their own language, and their appearance was almost spherical, with a narrow hindbody and tail like on an anglerfish or a flounder, and were sparsely pubescent on the head. They were called SOMS, which made me associate to SEAMONSTERS while the capital letters gave the impression of being an acronym. Somebody has a suggestion what SOMS might mean?"

MF went on about personal associations and film reminiscences, and made a serious attempt to understand the word, supposing it to be "of greek origin, as in chromosome, allosome, autosome, which all are derived from Soma = body. But it could also be from indoeuropean soma, a mythical drink giving much pleasure and knowledge, or from greek somnus (sleep), somnium (dream) or somphos (spongy, porous). But if an acronym I would guess an english-language one (english uses acronyms more); something so-to-speak sticking out its chin, like Sexualrepressed Obsession Matrixes? Sons of Mothers? Or, in order to avoid bad feelings, something descriptive and uncontroversial like Somnimarine Obese Monsters?" Then he went into stingy polemics against the apparent denial of the sensory concrete aspects of the milk bath in focusing on a symbolic aspect.

There came in some other suggestions as to what SOMS might mean, based on "Sound of Music" or "Swedish Oral Medicine Society", personal associations, google searches, or jokes; or all three.

Next morning, the phrase waking up MF was "HALIBUTS DON'T BREAK", connecting to the possible flounders of NN:s dream. An interpretation of the phrase was offered, which is of minor importance here.

NN duly thanked for the suggestions and associations. He went on to defend the symbolic interpretation by a general defense of psychoanalytical methodology. Then for a short time arguments got nasty, before a need was felt to displace the discussion into some more constructive efforts, where NN first offered a poem, claiming among other things that "sensuality six weeks a year/ is transformed into an ugly family just like others/ on the beach" where it "hands out icecream with slaps in the face and insights with intentions/ concretions with artifacts of nothingness/ abstractions with boiled potatoes and currant jelly". JE, sitting on the top of a canarian volcano studying the sun and reading Novalis' "Disciples in Sais" outlined a needed "archive of representations" by way of a mathematical series of operations between latent and manifest; an archive that would track the transformations between latent contents and manifest dreams and make them available for games. MF stubbornly felt he needed to specify why milkbathing is interesting considered as sensory experience and wrote en essay about it (to which JB reminded of a few significant aspects missed).

Multiplying the dream sciences

We made a lot of friends in hell. We promised we would try to replace some of the current sciences no matter the consequences. We'd focus on dreaming. We have been working a lot recently with dream geography, and as surrealists we have always been busy with dream phenomenology and dream poetics, occasionally with dream interpretation (Traumdeutung), dream analogies and dream->waking life dynamics, there have also been some efforts in dream demographics, dream geobiography, dream metereology, dream zoology, and external conditioning studies (which is of course just a branch of dream construction theory and therefore of poetics and mythogenesis). The latest vanguard attempt in the latter is made with a statistical approach applied on what - as far as we know - was the first surrealist antarctic expedition, which just has succesfully ended and is more thoroughly chronicled elsewhere. This is how JE introduces the report on this particular topic:


A general and interesting question in relation to dream research is in what
way changes in the external environment influence the imagery, intensity,
geography and sequences of the dream life. In order to investigate such
changes one would have to take careful notes of dreaming each night for an
extended period of time prior to, during and after the change of
environment. Dream life would then have to be scrutinized by statistical
analysis in order to facilitate some objective conclusions. If no
statistical analysis is made, it is easy to focus on and compare only those
dreams that have a high emotional intensity, with striking imagery. This
would, however, obscure a comparison of the more common dream elements
that populate the nightly experience without carrying too much weight in the
daily reminiscences. On the other hand, the statistical analysis should take
into account the differences in the imagery without consideration of the
intensity of the images, as well as comparing peak images with one another.

JE