Who tells ego-boosting lies in a dream and knows in their dream they’re lying? That would be Doña Quixote

Featured Image: Baku, by one of Japan’s most famous manga artists, Shigeru Mizuki, best known for drawing yokai, namely ghosts and monsters. As the New Yorker puts it, he “resurrected Japan’s folk creatures as pop culture for the masses. He was “a member of the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology, and traveled to more than sixty countries around the world to do fieldwork on the yokai and other spirits of different cultures. The Baku image is from the  Yokai Mizuki Shigeru 97th Anniversary Art Book Illustration Collection, 1970. A baku is a (mostly kind) monster that will suck children’s bad dreams away if called upon.

The other day my friend Kirstin gave me New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast’s most recent graphic memoir/comic meditation,  I Must Be Dreaming. Despite acknowledging that “only shrinks are interested in [dreams], and maybe not even them,” Chast manages to enchant her readers by presenting “blessedly short… [and] deliciously skewed takes on life’s absurdities and fraught moments…enliven[ed] with her signature drawings of anthropomorphized chickens, crabby matrons, and animated vegetables” (NPR).

“Nubbins.” A page from Roz Chast’s book I Must Be Dreaming

In “Nubbins,”and throughout her book, Roz Chast is able to harvest humor from a dream that must have been upsetting—or is it just me? I cannot even in daytime render anything funny from the kind of nightmare I had recently and want to talk about: the type in which you’re aware that you are dreaming, namely lucid dreams, and keep on doing some dream-action that you’ find utterly unethical even while you’re still dreaming. While some people who dream lucidly can direct their actions in a more acceptable direction, I couldn’t budge my unconscious to stop dream-shaming me. To make it worse, I wasn’t the only one of these types of dreams I’ve had in my later years. They recur frequently, sometimes as a chain of repetitive versions in a single night and sometimes weeks apart. Although I don’t necessarily lie in every one, they all have a similar theme: me being painfully ethically or otherwise inadequate to whatever sticky situations my mind unearths. This dreaming is terribly upsetting during the night. When I wake up, I still feel weighed by the entropy, disorder, messed-up-ness that Doña Quixote, aka, my dementia, visits upon me and that lasts all day long—in this case, several days.  It is depressing that even in my waking life I still endure a disorder I can no longer control, increases over time, disperses energy, and dissolves my living-in-the-world systems into chaos.

Babel, San Francisco beat artist and poet, Sutter Marin (1926-1985). Marin’s mixed media collage depicts the biblical Tower of Babel. The artist painstakingly built-up his interpretation as a mosaic using thousands of wood matchsticks, small bits of wood dowels, tucked-in magazine and newspaper cut-outs from various language publications, and embellished it all with paint. The cutouts from newspapers in different languages refers to god breaking up the common language of Noah’s descendants into multiple tongues.

The chaos my nightmare set loose in my brain compels me to ignore Chast’s caution that telling one’s dreams is a guaranteed conversation killer. Here, in one paragraph, is the surreal nightmare that triggered this post: I was at a gathering on the U of Utah campus with colleagues and other faculty whom I had come to know while being the Associate Director of the Gender Studies program. The dream took place in my current present, that is, over a dozen years after I’d retired. People I used to know but whose faces I do not recognize, names I don’t remember, and about whom I cannot recall which department I know them from would ask me what I was up to now. I told them I was still at the U and now have a different MORE IMPORTANT position where I do vague IMPORTANT things and mix with IMPORTANT people. I know in my dream that I’m dreaming and that I’m lying, but I cannot stop myself. For example, I remember in my dream that I can’t say I’m still at Gender Studies since that no longer exists and had been incorporated in a new large IMPORTANT organizational structure. (I googled the morning after: School of Cultural & Social Transformation, or Transform). I presumed that most of my dream-colleagues were employed by Transform and they would know I did not work there any more. I hinted, therefore, that I now worked at a different, even MORE IMPORTANT place. I would half wake up, cringe at my duplicity, dream again to tell an even more far-fetched story. In the morning, I woke up aghast: this unethical liar lived in my head in addition to the honest person I try to be.

William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea, 1819-20. Blake painted the 8 x 6 inch miniature from a vision in a seance under the auspices of one of his patrons, John Varley, who believed in the existence of spirits but could not see them. Given that Blake had daily visions since childhood, Varley recruited him as a partner in seances intended to summon spirits. In one such session, the ghost of a flea appeared. While Blake was drawing the insect, its spirit told him fleas were inhabited by the souls of men who were “by nature bloodthirsty to excess.” His resulting painting shows the “soul” of the flea as an “evil, gothic, grotesque [monster] stalking through a starry realm between stage curtains… as if [appearing] in a spectacle at Drury Lane Theatre” (The Guardian). It is about to gorge itself from a bowl of blood. The “real life” flea between its legs is no more than a line drawing the size of the monster’s ear.

If, like me, you think of surrealism, the art movement based on “the undirected play of thought,” e.g. in dreams, visions, automatic writing as the work of  Matisse, Man Ray, or Salvador Dalí—you may be surprised that contemporary art historians place William Blake on the art-historical spectrum of surrealists that reaches from Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) to the present. Given that contemporary psychoanalysis, à la Freud, still regards dreams “as a sort of enacted manifestation of emotional memories,” is it any wonder that my unconscious resonates with the art of a 20th-century-surrealist precursor? In Blake’s painting, I recognized my waking self as the all-but-invisible flea, shown on the canvas between the grandiose spirit’s legs. (The flea is visible only in a high-resolution image—then click on image to enlarge.) The monster parading its ego on a stage adorned with cultural symbols of greatness, such as stars and a comet, is my bragging dream-self. The comet is a hugely inflated repetition of the ghost’s tongue/proboscis that flicks lustfully at the collected blood in the bowl: both have phallic shapes. In my dream, I fantasized a phallic power I’d never possessed. Being associate director at Gender Studies actually had far less social- and financial weight (inside my workplace) than my previous job had, where I’d managed a team of writers, artists, and programmers that made learning materials for the business world. Nevertheless, I’d willing taken a 25% salary cut to accept a very much desired teaching opportunity at the U. Why, then, my false grandiosity in my dream?

My lies are worse than you-no-who’s lawyer’s argument: even in my dream I knew that I was lying

After two-and-a-half weeks of thinking and writing about my dream, I’ve made sufficient peace with my inner moral inadequacy to wonder whether the dream could possibly have some good effect in my life. Could I put Freud’s principle that “the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to…the unconscious” to good use? Isn’t unearthing the repressed memories in one’s unconscious—particularly those that shocked and abhorred you when you experience them to the point of you having sublimated them—one of the ways in which, for example, PTSD, can be treated? When I check out the current trends in psychology, I find that dream analysis still has weights a technique toward bringing understanding to the inflicted person’s about where the root causes of their disorders, including depression and anxiety, lie. Both of these disorders are signs and symptoms of my vasular dementia, so I’m only too familiar with them. Their proximal cause is the decline of my working memory: I can never can get a task in the physical world done from beginning to end without getting totally side-tracked. Each of the many times per day when I botch a previously simple step-by-step activity, a chunk of my self-confidence cracks off. By the end of the day, my sense of self is so diminished that I feel hollow inside. I have very little self-efficacy left: no confidence that I can exert control over any crucial situation affecting my life. No wonder my unconscious pulled “the old college try” in an attempt to firm up my self-efficacy. I deduce that my unconscious used my nightmare to perform its own version of the currently popular psychological self-efficacy-boosting technique known as self-affirmation? If so, why then was it evident to me even during my dream that it wasn’t true? And why would it help in my dream if none of the proscribed phrases of self-talk has worked for me in my waking life?

Detail from Pieter Breughel the Elder’s Dulle Griet (Mad Meg) 1563. This is the story and image that made me laugh at myself: Dulle Griet is a figure of Flemish folklore, a bad-tempered virago who is not in her right mind. She one day leads an army of women to pillage Hell: although already burdened down with possessions, Griet and her grotesque companions storm the mouth of Hell itself in their search for more. In her quest she wears armor made for a man—a breastplate, mailed glove, and metal cap. A knife hangs from her side, while in her right hand she carries a sword, which may refer to the saying: “He could go to Hell with a sword in his hand.” According to art historian Max Seidel, Breughel’s choice of Dulle Griet as his anti-heroine suggests that someone who is dull or naive may have more courage than a rational person. Even though Griet ends up in trouble, she doesn’t succumb but makes the best of it.