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I see shapes
Jan. 13th, 2005 11:10 amThere has been an organisational shakeup in the Ministry of Dreams; they are finally sending me something better with which to beguile my sleeping hours. ( yawn )
It feels somehow fraudulent describing the emotions of dreams, because of my nagging suspicion that I may be merely projecting waking feelings onto them after the fact. However, when I wake up, while the dream is still fresh in my mind, the emotional afterimages seem very strong; so if I am adding to them rather than remembering them, I am doing it subconsciously and instantaneously on waking. Besides, what does it mean to 'actually' experience an emotion in a dream? Would my body register the same physiological changes in the dream as it would if I experienced that emotion while awake? Is that what defines an emotion? Is there any art to find the mind's construction in the body? It's my body, and I don't mind.
But a dream of fair woman has turned my mind to female matter. I think of the first woman I kissed; I could not call her face to mind in any detail (I remember pre-Raphaelite ringlets and a tender mouth) but I remember the feeling of wonder and delight. The sensation was sweet, but it was the symmetry that held me spellbound: we were mirror-images, for that moment reflecting only one another, sealed in a separate world. With a man I am a space for him to fit into; with a woman I am a positive form, my curves and lines in counterpoint to hers. With a man I have a sense that together we have created a single indivisible whole, greater than the sum of its parts; with a woman, a sense that we are two, divided yet multiplied like the images in opposite mirrors, meeting in the middle of infinity. Neither is a lesser or greater harmony than the other.
It can be hard to believe in anything when all I see is patterns.
It feels somehow fraudulent describing the emotions of dreams, because of my nagging suspicion that I may be merely projecting waking feelings onto them after the fact. However, when I wake up, while the dream is still fresh in my mind, the emotional afterimages seem very strong; so if I am adding to them rather than remembering them, I am doing it subconsciously and instantaneously on waking. Besides, what does it mean to 'actually' experience an emotion in a dream? Would my body register the same physiological changes in the dream as it would if I experienced that emotion while awake? Is that what defines an emotion? Is there any art to find the mind's construction in the body? It's my body, and I don't mind.
But a dream of fair woman has turned my mind to female matter. I think of the first woman I kissed; I could not call her face to mind in any detail (I remember pre-Raphaelite ringlets and a tender mouth) but I remember the feeling of wonder and delight. The sensation was sweet, but it was the symmetry that held me spellbound: we were mirror-images, for that moment reflecting only one another, sealed in a separate world. With a man I am a space for him to fit into; with a woman I am a positive form, my curves and lines in counterpoint to hers. With a man I have a sense that together we have created a single indivisible whole, greater than the sum of its parts; with a woman, a sense that we are two, divided yet multiplied like the images in opposite mirrors, meeting in the middle of infinity. Neither is a lesser or greater harmony than the other.
It can be hard to believe in anything when all I see is patterns.
