My pressure points shirt on G4, as pointed out to me by @RedCrow7
Please Say Something and the quanta of dreams
I think it was Jung who disagreed with Freud as far as who gets to assign meaning to objects and events depicted in dreams. Freud makes sense on the surface, and then it falls apart as (it seems like) Freud exorcises his own demons within his theory.
I’ve been thinking a lot — more like worried, a lot — about Please Say Something, an animation by David O’Reilly. It’s deconstructionist in the same way the video game Braid is, but this film deals more with traveling down multiple paths and changing what happens, as opposed to Braid’s Memento-like revelation of a true past by letting things play backwards sometimes.
Please Say Something uses dreamlike repetition and an almost fractal-like theme that develops over the course of its ten minutes, but emotionally remains the same. In the earlier parts, it jumps around wildly — the duality of the mouse as both abuser and loving husband (the presence of which is noted by color overlay!) — and we don’t really know if we’re looking at a whole narrative or fragments of several.
What does it tell us about our perception of reality when our dreams are meted out in conceptual fragments the way they are? Whether a good dream or a nightmare, the dreamer is presented with some inconstant moment in time to deal with, and a powerful or evocative dream usually leaves us to deal with it only when we’re awake.
Consider the nightmare of watching a loved one die. That moment is completely discretized, self-contained — it’s non-evolving, unlike an event in actual time. It’s an impulse, a derivative of an actual event. You don’t get to see in the dream any progression of dealing with grief, moving on, the whole cycle. It’s just an implacable constant, an emotional quantum: they are now dead.
Even seemingly developed scenarios in dreams are presented in these digestible (and often in-) quanta. Imagine a dream where you need some note from home to go on the class trip, and you can’t find it. The dream doesn’t usually resolve to a state where you don’t get to go and your class leaves. If the dream is centered on the anxiety of being unable to find something sought after, you will be looking for that note in some fashion until you wake up, or the dream shifts to some other vignette.
The repetition of dreams themselves (and repetition within a single dream) is a powerful tool for the subconscious to subvert expectations. One of my favorite dreams from childhood was a nightmare, and it presented me with a scary robot that entered my room, harassed me, then left — only to signal the arrival of a much larger robot. The larger robot wouldn’t have been nearly as frightening to me without the implication that my subconscious was trying to set up that pattern, trying to make it go from bad to worse.
The scene in Please Say Something where the cat throws open the door to find repeated awful outcomes (the mouse has hung himself; he has gone mad waiting for her; he has moved on; his head grows inexplicably large) really resonated with me as an example of that kind of dream logic. Finally, the cat throws open the door only to find another door, and another, and so on — now she is denied even the unsatisfying “closure” of finding the end condition of these awful dream fragments. Now the quantum is the act of being unable to resolve the quantum!
That scenario also evoked one of my other long-held childhood nightmares, which was the inability to wake up from a nightmare. It’s not that there was a monster in my room and I couldn’t wake up from the dream — no. In my nightmares, I would wake up, and find myself in bed, with the light filtering in through the curtains as it would in the early morning, only to find that I had just traded one bad dream for a completely different one. I would “wake up” four or five times, each time being more realistic, but ultimately collapsing due to some detail that my subconscious had placed there to be discovered.
For example, I had woken up (three times by this point) and my mom was getting ready for work. I started to get dressed for school when I noticed a skeleton’s hand lazing beneath the edge of the covers. I asked my mom what it was, and her response was “that’s just the skeleton that lives there.” Up to that point I thought I had been awake.
Like I said at the beginning, Jung believed that it was in the hands of the dreamer to interpret his own dream symbols, and I think that’s largely true. Some elements seem to be more universal (examples: losing one’s teeth is common in bad dreams, or showing up naked is hard to define as anything other than anxiety over being unprepared and judged), but I don’t know of anyone whose dreams deal so heavily in metamechanics: the repeated false awakenings, the shifts to worse but otherwise identical situations, inability to convey thought, the existential horror that everything is fine but Something Is Wrong.
Originally posted in 2008
