Emotion, dreaming

I wake up.  My body is soft and diffuse.  Inside it is thick with dreaming.  Still flushed with non-numb sensation lingering in and around me. 

I feel grounded, slow. I stand up from my bed quite directly and walk to the bathroom, taking leftover sleep with me, a soft energy that stays close to my body, perhaps trailing imaginary wisps here and there. 

In the kitchen, Tina is doing something, cleaning something, the radio is on, she is in her night dress, scrubbing at some laminated signs. She uses them for her work is what I imagine. I move in the space with the ease and soft semi-fumbling of someone halfway present, halfway in a different plane, slow-motion. The speaking in the radio is like rain, attacking my dream-cloud, invading my emotional body with thoughts, awakeness, reminders of the outside real-world. It’s invasive power is only gradual and weak, it is so foreign, and I recognize its absurdness, see through it. A different, strange yet familiar, larger dream, callling me out of my personal, private one. 

Tina giggles once in a while at the radio, and I also make sounds, and some words, reacting briefly to her and the radio — small signs of participation in our common space, while I hold my dream-body to me still. Hold it with soft attention, not clammering. I know it will inevitably fade, but for now, I am still with it, feeling it, bewildered by it, wondering, wanting it to stay a bit longer. 

It feels like a precious energy, a portal to a state of being where I am simulanteously on the inside and the outside of my actions. Everything predetermined and calmly inevitable, while also strange, suprising, and unexpected. I savor the confidence and peacefulness I feel. I am the oracle and the doer in one. 

Standing at the sink, I prepare coffee and notice a few thoughts flitting up. I observe, somewhat bemused, how I am, right now, apparently curious about dreaming. And I note, catching at something larger, that dreaming, as a topic, has been on my mind the past few days. Briefly also a negative voice: “everyone has this weird fascination with dreams, and now you do too”. In the span of milliseconds, I think fleetingly of Mona, and the film she made with her dreams. I think of artificial intelligence, dreams emerging there from a lifeless network of electricty. I think of my pscyhologist, my fear of interpreting dreams, of getting tangled up, confused, led astray. 

Thoughts are so quick! So rich, so immensely more than the idea of a mere propositional unit. They are an image, or several, and a rich nuanced world of embodied sensation, emotion. And yes, also something conceptual, some sort of linkage of various recognizeable entities, both abstract and concrete simulaneously. Mona, a “person”, and also that person. A “film”, and also that film. Mona, that person that I connect so much with. That film whose images I see before me now. 

When I write her name, it feels slightly as if I’m breaking a sort of taboo with myself, though I’m not sure which taboo. And writing this, emotion suddenly rushes and radiates in my body. Painful, diffuse, strong. This is not a thought. 

I feel at a loss to say what it is — opaque emotion, knotting me tightly. I take deep breaths and pause, slightly overwhelmed. There is a mixing moment of agencies — the emotions want to do something with me, and I, wary, balancingly activate something which keeps the emotions tempered, gauged. Then I start to analyse, and the emotions fade.

I feel confusion when trying to understand emotion, or directly sense what kind of thing they are. I cannot observe them as clearly as I seem to be able to see my thoughts. “Chemicals in the body or something”, says a voice. “Trauma”, “psychology”, “evolution”, “subconscious”. Associations echo around. A thought comes that somehow emotions and dreams seem to have some similarities. 

[… to be continued …]