The title of this dream notebook is Last Night's Dreams. I had originally intended to title this notebook Last Dreams. I was pretty sure I was going to commit suicide or die in some other way during the course of this dream notebook. So I really thought these dreams were going to be my last dreams. However, I'd decided to hedge my bets, just in case I didn't commit suicide, and call this notebook Last Night's Dreams.
This dream notebook starts about one month after I'd moved into a rented room in Fort Greene in Brooklyn. I was in a great location in Brooklyn, just a block down the road from Fort Greene Park. But I was in a horrible space. I lived in a brownstone that was nothing but rented rooms. I want to talk in more detail about this place. But I think I'll save the stories for the notebook covering the time frame when I actually moved into the place.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure this notebook also runs through the time when I left this place and moved into something a little bit more like a real apartment in the Jewish part of Crown Heights in Brooklyn. That place ended up being a horrible place in its own right, though I've spoken about that in later notebook prefaces already.
This notebook also covers the time frame in waking life when I was made a permanent employee at my job, in the stock research department of a big bank. I'd started at my job in October of 2005, essentially. And in March of 2006 I was made a permanent employee. I was stayed at this job, even getting promoted, etc., until the financial crisis, when about 80% of my department was laid off, in 2009.
I think that, because of my move into being a permanent employee in March of 2006, I was sort of conflicted. In October of 2005, I'd finished a year-long project with Americorps in the New York City Parks Department. I'd really thought I was going to make a career out of the parks. But that didn't happen. I ended up getting a temp job on the stock trading floor at a big bank. I parlayed that into a temp position in the stock research department. I was made a permanent admin and research assistant in March of 2006. And suddenly that became who I was.
I was happy for myself because I found myself working a stable job and making decent money -- something I hadn't previously thought myself capable of. But I also felt like I was letting another part of myself die -- the part of myself that was devoted to working in nature and studying art and poetry and making that the real focus of my life.
I had never done anything practical in this life of nature and poetry. And I probably never would have. But I felt horrible letting it go. I really did feel like I was killing a part of myself.
At the same time, I actually was focusing on my writing more than I had done in a couple years. Throughout 2005 I'd been doing research on the Irish Saint Columba, one of Ireland's three great saints (along with Saints Patrick and Brigid), and the first person recorded in history to have encountered the Loch Ness Monster. Toward the end of 2005 I was building more and more on my ideas for the screenplay. And in the beginning of 2006, I wrote and finished the screenplay.
So you'll see toward the beginning of this dream notebook that a lot of my entries were made while I was in the Mid-Manhattan Library, where I would go at night after work to do my studies and writing. Judging by how often I was at the Mid-Manhattan Library after work, I would say I had been pretty devoted to my studies for the Saint Columba screenplay.
I never ended up doing anything with my screenplay after having finished it. There were a few reasons for this. But at the end of the day, I've never really ever worked very hard to get my creative writing out into the world. I did less with this screenplay than I did with any other serious piece of creative writing I've made in my life.
However, the Saint Columba screenplay was really important for me for a number of reasons. Almost every other piece of creative writing I'd done until then was based in some way or another on my own life. The Saint Columba story was really powerful for me because I identified so much with Columba -- he was hot-headed, he was a poet, he transcribed books, he had troubles with authority figures, and he had great devotion to mystical experiences.
But, despite the fact that identified with Columba, the Saint Columba story was based in historical narrative, separate from my own life, and I had to do research for it. So it was the first time I did extended and focused research on a single historical topic for the purpose of informing my writing. It didn't just encourage me to try to do more historical research for writing purposes: it encouraged me to take more of an interest in history in general.
At the same time, however, the mystical elements of the Saint Columba story really influenced my thinking and my research. And I had been, and was only getting more and more into, paranormal research, psychic research, etc. This led me to become more and more absorbed in things like UFO research and then conspiracy theories -- which really ended up gumming up a lot of my thought processes, probably through 2013, when my conspiracy theory fever finally broke -- I think.
The next screenplay I'd planned on writing was called Phantoms, which was a really convoluted story based on psychic research and UFO research, as well as on some conspiracy theory. It was a really strange story -- I can't remember the whole thing -- about a pilot of an F-4 Phantom fighter jet seeing a flying saucer, which actually ends up being a phantom of a young boy having an out-of-body experience.
I did a lot of research for the Phantoms screenplay. In particular, I did a lot of research into fighter jets, and even did multiple sketches of fighter jets for the story. But the notebook I did all this research for got lost one night when I was out drunk in New York. Getting drunk and losing my notebooks is, I think, a pretty common theme of my life in New York City in the mid to late 2000s.
Anyway, I think a lot of this conflict between my old self -- devoted to working in nature and working toward developing my poetry -- and my new self -- trying to become a responsible person who can make money and live in the world like a normal person -- shows in a lot of the imagery of my dream. There are times when my office is in the forest, the desert, trailers where I lived while working at previous Americorps programs, etc. But there are also times when I or other people die and are reborn -- which I'm pretty sure is pointing to my own personality's death and rebirth.
But I think the screenplay writing and the studying for my screenplay shows a lot in these dreams. Screenplays, screenplay writers, and authors in general play actual roles in a lot of these dreams.
This notebook also covers the final time I went to the hospital because of alcohol and mental issues. In the early summer of 2006 -- not sure when -- I got really drunk at the bar at the Boat Basin, right off the Hudson in Riverside Park. I was out with one of my teams at work. I'd actually planted some of the trees in the part of the park near the Boat Basin. So, while drunk, I went out and lay by the trees I'd planted.
I figured I was going to kill myself that night. So I called the police. I really wasn't aware of this until the police told me -- I was so drunk -- but I'd basically pulled out my cell phone and called the police and led them on some huge wild goose chase for me, all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, telling them I was going to kill myself at various different locations. Finally I felt like, just because of the booze, I really was going to die. So I had them come to the park to take me to the hospital. Needless to say, the paramedics were angry as hell at me.
I woke up in the hospital the next day. The nurse told me that I was going to have a huge ambulance bill and a huge hospital bill. She told me I could make the choice to get checked into the psychiatric unit of the hospital and get charged even more money, or that I could just grow up, act like an adult, walk out of the hospital, and not come back. I decided to cut my losses and leave the hospital.
This was the last time I went to the hospital. But it wasn't the last time I thought I was going to kill myself. Pretty much every time I got drunk between 1994 and 2010 I thought I would kill myself. I also did stupid things -- such as try to crawl up the Brooklyn Bridge -- in order to kill myself.
In July of 2011 I had a huge nervous breakdown and thought I would kill myself. My plan was to kill myself when the lease on my apartment ran out in January of 2012. But instead of killing myself, I just left New York City and came back home to Denver.
But, again, in mid-2012, I had another huge nervous breakdown, probably even worse than the one I'd had in New York. I hardly even left the house. But I snapped out of it when my mom started having really bad heart problems (which led to her having a quadruple-bypass) and when my mom's mom started having the physical problems that led to her death in March of 2013.
However, what my hospitalization in 2006 also led to -- of my accord, not the hospital's -- was deciding to start seeing a psychiatrist again. I'd seen psychologists and psychiatrists on and off throughout my life. But I hadn't worked with a psychologist on a steady basis since 2003.
I'm pretty sure I started working with my first New York psychiatrist, RB, in June or July of 2006. She thought that it was funny that I had called this particular dream notebook Last Night's Dreams instead of Last Dreams. I'd told her about this title, I remember, in the context of having told her about the title of my next notebook, New Dreams. RB thought it was funny and cute that I "didn't have the guts" to call this present notebook Last Dreams and that I'd compromised by calling it Last Night's Dreams.
I think this interaction highlights a misunderstanding and miscommunication that persisted through my relationship with RB and through all of my relationship with my next psychologist, AS. At that time, I took RB's statement to mean that it was funny and cute that I hadn't had the guts to kill myself like I'd thought I was going to while making dream entries in this notebook. But I'm pretty sure nowadays that RB really meant that I hadn't had the guts to stop having dreams.
I came to RB because she was a Jungian analyst. And I continued my work with AS because she was a Jungian analyst. In fact, AS was probably one of the foremost Jungian analysts in the United States. However, both RB and AS seemed to be so dead-set on stopping me from talking about my dreams and even having dreams. AS was very active in forcing me always to talk about my daytime life -- the day-to-day aspects of my life.
It always frustrated me, because I felt like what was going on in my dream life was really important to figuring out what was going on on the most important levels of my psyche. I never felt like I was really being listened to by either RB or AS. In fact, I felt like I was actively not being listened to. And I really feel like this made my interaction with RB and AS -- as much as love them, even still -- mentally damaging more than mentally helpful. I'm really happy I got to know both RB and AS. But I still feel like I probably would have ended up in a lot better shape mentally had I stopped my work with AS, or with RB.
This isn't to say that I didn't benefit from my relationships with RB and AS. They were both really caring people. And I still feel like they were both great friends to me. AS helped me feel less and less afraid to get involved with the CG Jung Foundation. I ended up doing a lot of studying at the Foundation's Archives for Research into Archetypal Symbolism. That led to my work on my (also completely unpublished) 2009 screenplay Arachne and Athena. And AS helped me get started on work with my first and only writing coach, GW. Besides that, RB and AS introduced me to other interesting Jungian writers, such as Erich Neumann, who gave me so much insight into archetypes and symbols. Nevertheless, I don't think I should have continued working with them.
I think that it's interesting, in this aspect, then, to see how, in a lot of the earlier dreams in this notebook, I am always pointing out in my dreams how some image "means something."
I usually get black-balled by saying this -- but probably the biggest intellectual influence on my life is Sigmund Freud. And I read Sigmund Freud before I started seriously recording my dreams.
So meaning in dreams was always of great importance to me. Dreams were, for me, from the beginning, sort of a place where my soul could be creative without constraints. But they were also a place of meaning. This became even more the case as I became less a disciple of Freud and more a disciple of Jung. Meaning in dreams was something I always sought out. And I think I'd fine-tuned myself in the search for meaning in dreams so much that, by this point, I was even recognizing within the dream that images had meaning.
I wonder what would have happened had I not gone into analysis again. Would I have developed a method of analyzing my dreams within my dreams? But there's no reason to wonder about that, I guess. My mental life didn't take that path.
I think it's also important to point out the attention I paid to Philip Johnson's AT&T building, which, when I wrote these dreams, was actually the Sony building, and is now, I think, just its Madison Avenue address. At this point in my life, and in the couple of years leading up to these dreams, I'd started to focus a lot on architecture.
I will talk about this more in earlier notebook prefaces. But I studied architecture -- exterior and interior -- as well as civic planning, almost as carefully as I had studied nature. And the reason I did this was because I wanted to recreate these spaces in my imagination.
I wanted to do this for three specific ends. I wanted to be able vividly to imagine spaces for any of my creative writing projects. I wanted to be able to vividly imagine all different kinds of spaces so I could remember any spaces I traveled to as part of out-of-body experiences -- as silly as that sounds to me now. But, probably most important of all, I wanted to be able to give my mind as much free play as possible while dreaming in the creation of spaces in which my psyche could act.
So much of my study in life was visual -- whether it was studying my visual surroundings in daily life or studying imagery in movies or books. And the biggest reason I devoted myself to all of this visual study was to be able more freely to create all kinds of imagery in my dreams. In these notebooks, Philip Johnson's AT&T building is a very clear symbol of that.
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