Wednesday, April 8, 2009

The Collective or Sub "Conscious"?

Weird moment today in class.

The teacher was discussing the Arts during the Renaissance, and the fact that actors would put on tragedies that corresponded with the tragedies of the time. Today, she said, they could put on a tragedy about earthquakes for example, as an allusion to the earthquakes in Italy.

Instantly I was reliving the dream I had last night, of being caught in an earthquake in the night, in a city that wasn't my own...

Truth be told I did have a newspaper yesterday, but I was reading all about the NATO summit. I merely glanced at the article about the Italian earthquakes, I didn't even get around to reading the sub heading or the text under the photograph.

So what is that? My subconscious pulling out a moment's thought from the day and turning into an entire logical and flowing dream? Or is there really such a thing as a collective consciousness, that we're all connected by this tiny fiber of awareness? Another thing, merely a detail that struck me, was the fact that my dream was set at night, not really the usual for me but nothing really out of the ordinary, but coincidentally the quakes started in the night on Sunday.

I'm not psychic, nowhere close. Its just that after suddenly remembering that dream in class today, I suddenly feel... connected. I know that I wasn't reliving what happened, because I was in a lake surrounded by apartment buildings (which you don't really see in cities) trying to keep from getting crushed by the falling buildings and debris. All I'm saying is that there are elements there - the flash of terror, the way the lights of the buildings look against the night sky, the screams...

Have you ever considered that? That maybe our dreams aren't just bits of hashed up things our subconscious feeds us while we're sleeping...? Maybe within those unintelligible narratives there are real fragments, albeit little ones, one someone else's consciousness. A moment, a thought, a memory that doesn't belong to you.

Maybe that's why so many people can't remember what it is they dream. Maybe we shouldn't.

[image from http://cs3143.k12.sd.us/year/menu.htm]

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

dreams can be very nice or terrible and might be all day with you. Don't take tooo much effect on it.

U+A

Kellen Barrett said...

see 'synecdoche, new york'