“Give away all that thou hast,
then shalt thou receive”
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Gustav Jung, 1989
At our last encounter, in one of my alarming dreams, You suggested that I write down my new dreams. You gave me a homework assignment to keep a personal diary of dreams, accompanied by my initial interpretations. In fact, You gave me the assignment to create my “noctuary.” That is the name I chose for the dream diary. I didn’t find the assignment too hard because for a long time I had already felt the need to memorize my dreams, to write them down, and to try to interpret them. In 1989, I actually wrote and published a collection of texts that were mostly recorded dreams. I named this collection A Different Time: The Defamiliarization of Signs. Some of the dreams in the book were ones I had truly experienced. Yet, during the process of writing about them, I deliberately intervened in order to literarize them (I wanted them to give off the impression of fictions, short stories, figments of imagination). Other dreams were written as literary mystifications, meaning that, in those fictions, I only imitated that I was writing down dreams. Later on, even I could not say with certainty which of the dreams were real and which were not. Both were the fruit of imagination.
In my case, the urge to write my dreams down is accompanied by daydreaming about aesthetic principles and by playing with how dreams can be transformed into a literary art form of pure fantasy; playing with the transformation of one world into another. So in 2014, the act of writing down my dreams became a specific form of dream-writing; a creative act and a type of ritual; a form of dream-creation, if one may speak of such a thing. I think that this ought to be possible, since dreaming the dreams is one thing—it is quite poetic, metaphysical, visionary, parabolic, metaphoric, ludic, sometimes even mimetic. It is when the dreamer’s life is transformed into a series of moving pictures, into a seemingly illogical but scenic play or movie. However, to write down the dreams is something completely different. It is an interpretative act, and thereby, also an act of transforming the pictures from the dream into linguistic forms; into meaning.
The quest for our dreams is a quest for the meaning of our lives. An interpretation of the meaning of our dreams is an interpretation of the meaning of our lives. People have the right to dream. This right is inseparable from the right to interpret. Unfortunately, the right to interpret is often a duty, a willingness, or a need. That is, of course, if we do want to come closer to the meaning. So, the urge to create and to write down dreams may be supplemented by the urge to interpret them. The memorization of dreams in itself is not only a form of remembering but also an introduction to their interpretation. When I am writing down my dreams, I have the impression that I am looking at them in a different way, in a more rational and mirror-like way; the irrational is being copied into the rational, so I begin to understand the unclear dark spots, the black holes in the dream, the quasars. The language in which I am writing the dreams—and into which I am rationalizing the symbolic and seemingly alogical language of the dreams—is already a form of interpretation; it is an act of making the non-transparent places conscious; it is an “erminia” („ерминија“), as the Macedonians from the Middle Ages used to say—a message from Hermes (known here as Erasmo).
So now, I dedicate myself to these hybrid narrative texts, which stand somewhere between short stories, fiction, diary notes, memoirs, epistles, confessions, essays, scenes from plays, and even poems. I want to join these oneiric narratives together in a longer form. They might complete a single para-novelistic whole. To be fair, this extensive patchwork-text could also be a variant of hyper-fiction. But I will try to write the dreams down in a plain and photographic manner first, and simply turn them into text.
Transforming dreams into language, and into text, means creating distance, alienating from the initial form, setting foot into the conscious zone, into the zone of the artistic. It is a ritual of giving meaning to existence. One figure of speech transforms into another. The figures of speech of Hypnos transform into those of Logos. But the most important thing is that fantasy is another name for freedom and that it is unhindered in dreams. The unconscious is the daughter of freedom. It is a salvation from the moral exile into which we are thrust by the reality that is crusted with institutions, regulations, prohibitions, illusions, limitations, conventions, stereotypes . . .
In this context, if You would allow me to say, I do have my own archaic technique for interpreting these figures of speech, but for now, I dare not introduce it to You, let alone compare it to Yours. My starting points are the questions You ask Your patients when You want to confront their unconscious, or at least their soul; at the moment when You want them to confront their unconscious selves and to illuminate it with the Word. At the moment when humans cross the border between dreams and language, they enter the visible, from the semidivine and demonic regions of dreaming they enter the mundane regions of human existence, from the sacral they enter the grotesque. In fact, there is only one question You are asking, but in many different ways: “And now, would you tell me about a dream you had? What does that dream remind you of? What kind of associations does it evoke in you? How do you explain it? Is it important for your life story? Would you like to take an association test? What do you fantasize about? Do you have any fantasies at all?”
In Your odd autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which is very dear to me, You write that the soul (animus or anima) does not own its own “speech center” as humans do, so it uses the speech center of humans in order to express itself. Does that mean that the soul needs a human in order to be brought to the light of day; because otherwise, it sinks down into the abyss of the unconscious, and it only appears from there in the shape of unintelligible but powerful images and destructive actions that are attacking human personality? When split off by people, the soul produces things that are its own exclusive and nonhuman creations, opposing humans with its own psychic tools. When things are birthed by the soul—when they are diasporic, in exile, and not understood—then they gain an almost superhuman power, they simply stalk in the darkness to avenge themselves upon the pusillanimous creature that didn’t have the willpower to face its own self, the creature that refused its own dreams. They have the knowledge and the power to oppose the people who didn’t recognize them, and who didn’t try to recognize the images from the dream, the people who (although still unconsciously) decided to be overpowered by a panicking, obsessive fear. That which we chose not to interpret, that which we refused to understand, that which we drew no lessons from (“ethical conclusions,” You say?), that which we hastily suppressed in the inaccessible chasms, it all comes back precisely to cause a panicking fear. This fear suffocates all until it completely suffocates the subject that feels it. It seems to me that, with its entire “being” of a forgotten and mutilated consciousness, a being that at first glance resembles chaos but is not chaos, the soul creates an ambiance of a free world, a world in which we are living freed from the strict rules of notional and moral projections. It seems to me that the mortal and the immortal are directed toward each other exactly within the human soul, so it becomes the battlefield for a war that is unnamable and unbelievable.
You say, Carl, that there is a hidden intent in the soul, similar to the law of life. This hidden intent of the soul appears as destiny and is felt much more strongly than it can be understood or expressed in words. If the human language is powerless to express this secret openly, then the dream has the power to hint it with its encrypted speech, with its symbols and parabolas, its paradoxes, allegories, metaphors, synesthesia, and oxymorons, with its disrupted and discontinued syntax that ought to be renewed afterward, through analysis.
The world of dreams is sensory, carnal, physical, visually powerful, and allusive. It seems to me that the composition of the human personality is similar to this; as if it were a keyhole for turning the key of transformation, as if our creation is never quite finished and we never entirely become human. There is always something that needs to happen again, an extra effort that needs to be made, so that people may cross the gap between the pre-human, arche-human, or semi-human and the human—between the demonic and the divine—in order to become human, to become a person, to become the creator of one’s own life and of a human environment.
You say, Carl, that man is his own God; but I see very often that man may be a cruel and merciless tyrant to himself and the people closest to him. Man knows how to torture himself and others, to divide himself and others, to demolish and destroy. So, the questions arise: What kind of God is the God in the human? Where does this powerlessness to be good come from? Where does this lack of will to do good to others come from? Where does this beastly urge to conquer what belongs to others and to govern with it come from? The question ought to be: Is man Satan to himself, is he his own devil?
A large portion of the dreams don’t cross the borders of their home and don’t turn into conscious images and words, not even for a moment. We only feel them in the waking instant, we carry them inside us like a burden, not knowing if they are sweet or bitter. We sense that they have happened, that we have stepped into their territory, but we don’t remember them. Maybe some other time we will dream about them again, and then they will be intended for remembering. Those dreams were simply meant to be a secret, to be beyond the Logos. They are just a flash of the shadow and not a shadow that transforms into the light, because the light transforms into a world. That is the magic power of the dream! And it all happens with the help of thought, the help of energy!
I remember a lot of dreams while I am waking up; for a short while they are as clear to me as when I finish reading a story, I could retell them, I believe that it is impossible to forget them, I repeat them to myself as if I am trying to learn them by heart, and then, I fall asleep again (the night is long), or I get up and start with my daily routine. Then silently, unnoticeably, I forget them. This stirs up both wonder and rage in me, I am discontent with myself for not writing them down. At times, some very brief insert will pass through my consciousness—as an image, a name, a feeling, an ambiance, or a specific space—but it has no flow, no development of the story, no context, no whole to which it belongs. So, these dreams soon fall into oblivion. They did not pass the test of life. My memory failed. But I am so troubled, upset, and haunted by the nostalgia for these lost dreams, as if they were aborted children. They could have been our children, but we suffocated them ahead of time, or in time, depending on the angle from which we are viewing. I often change the angles. Sometimes, I can be in two or three places at the same time. I carry the angles in me. I become angular. A circle full of angles.
We remember a very small portion of dreams because we wrote them down right away. Dreams retold are remembered dreams. They are signs on the road. Pebbles dropped in the forest to find your way back. So, if we get lost in the oblivion, we have a reminder, we will follow the dropped pebbles, and we will find our way. Later on, we may do whatever we want with them: keep them for ourselves as a personal diary, publish them, give them to others to read, change their identity, make them into fictions, retell them for therapeutic purposes, or edit them as literary texts.
These dreams are our saviors, they give us something along the lines of suspending the sentence, defocusing away from death, extending life, giving a chance to be saved and amnestied, or putting in a deposit for being pardoned. They remind us that by the mere fact of being born, we are susceptible to abuse—any given factor may suddenly rise to a “higher” position, from which it may judge us, punish us, and torture us. So, by retelling the dreams as fictions, or by retelling the fictions as dreams (who can notice the difference between them any longer!), we gain time to redeem ourselves, to preserve ourselves, to save ourselves, to transform ourselves, to change one's level of existence, to climb one step higher . . .
Some dreams are pure pleasure; we simply enjoy remembering them, repeating them, making them a ritual, and making them into nothing else but a point for propping up our consciousness, a starting point for entering a state of meditation or ecstasy.
Some dreams repeat even against our will; they have their own will to be and to warn us, so they become inevitable. They remind us that we are dreaming in a similar way to others, that no matter how different we are, we still share the same things with other people, and that humanity is what we all are. Those dreams are shared, they are clichés and general places that we all experience in our own way: we fly like birds, fall like angels, tumble down bottomless pits like sacrifices, quiver from fear like children, get paralyzed, go mute and lose the power to speak, lose our heads, run from monsters, agonize to climb some hill or to cross an abyss, are late for a class or a lecture, miss the last train, hold on to a straw while drowning, descend to dark basements, face the underground, dig out a hidden treasure, talk to animals, turn into children, communicate with the dead, or die in our dreams, oh, we die many times.
And if we die more, does that mean that we live more? What does the dream tell us? Does it remind us of our previous materializations? Does it prepare us for the next incarnation?
I was writing this “noctuary” during one such preparation, at a time when I was nailed on the cross between two lives, and I was fully aware that one day I will be reading it as if it were not my own. Maybe I will see something in it that I didn’t see while I was writing it. Maybe I will get to know myself in a way that was not possible without it. I don't know anymore where the dream begins and where it ends, or where this life began and where it ended. Remembering is a great mystery. While building with our blocks, we see that many blocks are missing from the whole, that the whole is unreachable, and yet, we continue to build. While building, we sense that it is possible to fulfill the empty spaces fictionally, and to imagine the whole. And, is there anything better than that? What more could you ask for?
We have been a concept and we will be again. So, let’s conceptualize, let’s imagine! Dreams are conceived, and memory is conceived, so writing down the conceived is building with blocks. It is playing with blocks, playing with tiles, cubes, dice, or squares, hopscotching, playing dice with the Lord, postponing the loss, preparing for the loss . . . And I am not the one who sets the rules of the game.
To narrate, ergo to dream. To dream, ergo to exist. It is not important in which life. The dream is a little theatrical play of inverted, hidden, and poetic projections; it is an arrangement of hermetic incidents, so it may be dreamt in more acts and in more scenes. You can’t interpret it from the viewpoint of crippled “common sense.”
Someone had said, “Life is a dream.” I say: “Dreaming is living.”
So, let’s move on to the dreams.
Yours cordially,
K.Ḱ.
