It's hard to tell, but this notebook is title Morning Stars. The title -- I'm pretty sure -- comes from the first dream from March 8, 2007 -- my second entry in the journal, where levitating people are said to gleam like morning stars.
I don't want to guess too much at things. You'll see if you read further that many of the dreams transcribed from this notebook have been transcribed from my dream journals in 2017. But some of the latter ones were transcribed in 2013. In other words, I took a break of almost four years while transcribing this notebook. So not only are these dreams ten years old, but whatever narrative I was creating within these notebook "prefaces" has also been broken up by my taking a four year break in relating the narrative.
Nevertheless, there are some things I will say. There is a lot of sense, I feel, in these dreams of finding a place in my life, and starting to move upward in the world. This was, of course, in 2007, right as the financial markets were starting to collapse. And you can already see in some of the dreams in this journal my forebodings -- not psychic, just reasonable, though at the periphery of my understanding -- about the markets. So, as I think I've mentioned before, this was a strange period of feeling myself moving upward and also worrying about everything collapsing and me moving downward.
You can also see from these dreams -- partly from the settings of the dreams, but also partly from the notes on where I entered these dreams into my paper journal -- that I was still very close with my best friend R. The time period of notebook 12 is when I stopped talking with R. But here there isn't much of a sign of that break with R even being in danger of happening.
In fact, a lot of my dream journal entries from cafes in Brooklyn are kind of near his old house, in Park Slope. In some ways it was my neighborhood as much as it was his, because he was there and I liked him so much. But when we stopped talking I almost never went there again, and the neighborhood became a sort of nightmare neighborhood for me.
Some other things I'd note. Fighter jets and UFOs. I'd like to spend a lot of time going over these two motifs. I was heavily into UFO and psychic literature as well as Jungian literature during this time. And I think a lot of the UFO conspiracy literature I read bled pretty heavily into my dreams.
Fighter jets were also extremely interesting to me at this time. I actually read the SR-71 and X-15 manuals around this time. There was, of course, the allure of these sleek, fast machines. There was the fact that they flew so high. But there was also, for me, the fact that these machines were incredibly intricate, run by fuels that were very dangerous, but were so calibrated and precise and balanced that all of these fuel systems were kept in a working equilibrium. It was fascinating to me. I wanted to learn these systems of equilibrium, memorize them, if I could, so I could somehow create the same sense of equilibrial structure in my own mind.
There is also a relation, for me, between my fighter jet fetish and the works of Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim mentions how some autistic children identify themselves or other people with cars. I thought that maybe they did this because cars represent some sort of balance of forces that create motion. In the same way, for me, this is what jets symbolized. Feeling that I was in some way autistic, I took jets for my identification in the same way that I saw Bettelheim's children taking cars for their identification.
There is also some mention of Euclid in the early dreams, at least, of this notebook. There was a time when I spent my morning train rides memorizing the propositions of Euclid's geometry on the train ride into Manhattan from Brooklyn for work. At one point I had maybe the first four or five books of Euclid memorized, all from memorizing Euclid on the train. Then I stopped. I learned Euclid from the Dover books. I love Dover publishing. And those Euclid books -- I used them and dragged them around with me until they didn't have covers anymore.
One last thing I'll mention -- and maybe I'll come back and edit this and add more detail someday. But in March of 2007 I took a trip to Boston. On my last night in Boston I got horribly drunk and not only puked all over and destroyed a lot of the clothes I was wearing, but I also lost a lot of my belongings when I, in a drunken rage, threw them all over the place. You'll see Boston playing a role in some of the dreams in this notebook. And this is part of the reason.
I'm pretty sure one of the things I lost was a dream journal holding my dreams from December of 2006 through March of 2007. So it's probably worth mentioning that in January of 2007, I moved to the place I was to stay in in New York City until January of 2012, when I left New York City for good. The place I had been living in from May of 2006 through January of 2007 was broken into. Some of my stuff had been taken out of the house -- but honestly not much. But I'd faced a little harassment in the neighborhood. I felt like people were against me. And so when I had the break-in, I just decided, the very next day, to leave. I found my new place, which also ended up being miserable in a lot of ways, but apparently not bad enough for me not to stay there for five years.
All of these memories are now sort of flowing back to me. But I don't want to put everything down here. So I'll just leave it at that. Enjoy the dreams of this notebook.
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