I usually don’t remember my dreams. Very often, in conversations with friends who recall and share their dreams, I stay in a corner quietly, grasping the images that they invoke. Lately, as images begin to appear, the words that they use do not fully reveal them, and I get impatient. I get suspicious, and I begin to doubt both about the words and the tone, mistrusting their inclination towards becoming bad copies of their vigils. And don’t get me wrong, I get the need for release, the need to alter the situations that do not fulfill one’s desires in life. But yet I wonder what are those folded lives doing, ironed and packaged into dreamlike replicas of what we already know.
I remember the first time I became a bank account holder, my name attached to a list of transactions, income and expenses. I remember the absent feelings of my first payment, the lack of adrenaline. An abstract nothingness, while the card’s still-fresh plastic remained on the sidelines of what I imagined to be an initiatory experience. My fingers on it, like the hands on a steering wheel, blurred the world outside into a passing abstraction. It was the opposite to something divine, a harsh experience that reinforced the gesture of detachment, the moment when the perception of the self is not allowed to evaporate into the doubt of not even knowing who I am. I believe it is such experience of abstraction as a material burden that is behind my unease when I listen to other people’s dreams lately. Scenes of death and violence pass from mind to mind, from bed to bed, from dream to dream. A kind of advertising campaign for the homogeneous subconscious, fascinating and horrible at the same time. In his diary of dreams, Theodor Adorno wrote: “Our dreams are linked with each other not just because they are ‘ours,’ but because they form a continuum, they belong to a unified world, just as, for example all Kafka’s stories inhabit ‘the same world.’ The more dreams hang together or are repeated, the greater the danger that we shall be unable to distinguish between them and reality.” As we pass through the threshold of “the more dreams hang together or are repeated” to brutal homogeneity, this “inhabiting the same world” is the omnipresent death that connects the dreaming and the not–dreaming of the world.
On DEARS magazine’s Instagram account, a series of posts link to a collection of experimental writings on the disordered, poetic nature of experience; sometimes on the experience of death too. These texts erase the distinction between form and content, between reality and dreams. And for the past months, some of them have helped me resist the commodification of the senses in the face of the genocide in Gaza, as well as the homogenization of the Western subconscious, thus confronting the difficult task of thinking through the unspeakable and the inadmissible. But language often fails and leads to paralysis. When this happened, I’ve been listening to William Basinski’s album The Disintegration Loops.
The familiarity with images of death has become an object of recurring anxiety, and its sprouting into the collective dream, led me back to The Mystic Writing Pad, an essay by Sigmund Freud that has accompanied me for years. To witness how the sedimentation of my friends’ dreams reveals the pain of history, is perhaps one of the main reasons that this text is back on my life. Death does not appear in dreams as a space of individual fear, but as a symptom of collective failure. From a psychoanalytic perspective, dreams expand a reality that is not present enough. However, death’s ongoing, recurrent presence in them reveals its resistance to domestication, thus altering the subconscious of our time.
The type of writing, reading and music that I’ve been engaging with in the last few months, might seek to make room for another kind of subjectivity, for non-identity, for fog. What Adorno felt as the “language beneath the helpless language of human beings”, seeks to disintegrate the dying of the malfunctional into the dreaming of what might eventually work. This pulsion brought me to Ghayath Almadhoun’s poetry. As the synopsis of his first book with Divided already announces, I have brought you a severed hand, he writes love poems in the shape of nightmares. Heartbreaking.