Dreaming with Schop
Schopenhauer says there is no way to distinguish life from dream. I sense this as true through memory. In the present moment of living, though, there is something that feels… real—wirkend. Not only on me but also that I could reach out and touch, feel, any present object. This potential acting through volition seems to affirm my wakefulness and the reality of my being. And yet, I feel in my dreams, sometimes pleasure but, mostly pain. I didn’t know until I was 16 (or 17) that this was called hypnalgia (dream pain) and considered a psychological disorder. Might Schopenhauer have suffered (and enjoyed) the same affliction? How else could he have come to such a remarkable conclusion—life as a mere dream between two voids (and thus no reason to fear death)? But what consciousness recalls after the dream has ended? God, will, those left behind?
And you—do you dream in numbers? Shapes bereft of meaning, until it is 1 household or gatherings of 10? Those numbers emanating suddenly so much more than arithmetic form—now, instead, the potential for joy and, also, risk. I’ve begun to wonder where to draw the line between ethical relation to known and unknown others. For the public good, can I exist as 1—split as I am?
Last night I dreamt I went out in New York, forgetting my shoes. My socks were orange, the ones I wore yesterday. Walking with socken feet, I wandered and wondered how I got there; as I worked to avoid shards of glass and puddles of I-don’t-know-what. Then, an automated turnstile that sensed the fare on my Metrocard touch-free, even as I tried and failed to remove it from my too-tightly-packed wallet. Could that constitute a dream as wish? Free movement through the city without the worry of displaying the proper New Yorker training or of disease; the effortless swipe and push through the turnstile? The last time I was in New York, I felt a strange alienation (can one alienation be stranger than another?), a sense of my untraining from too many years away. Can one practice re-acclimation or de-acclimation in dreams? Do they materially cross into reality?
from Jessica Ruffin