---
title: Dream/Life
date: '2003-10-24T06:25:18-04:00'
permalink: /dreamlife/
tags:
    - life
---

I should begin with the caveat (possibly disingenuous) that I’m not ordinarily big on the “let me share with you the completely bizarre dream I had last night” conversational gambit. (What was the song that David Silver sang part of to me and Liz before [Jason’s panel](/aoir_432/)? Something about no one caring about your dreams, unless they’re in them…)

However: this dream was much too terrifying, and much too vivid, to simply leave be. I dreamed, just before waking up this morning, that I was going rapidly, unmistakably, and irremediably insane. Someone referred to the disorder that I was suffering in the dream as bipolar, but the evidence (a bizarre concept when it comes to dreams, I recognize) in fact suggests that what I was suffering was more akin to schizophrenia. In the course of the dream, I rapidly lost all concept of or ability to distinguish “reality” (again, a bizarre concept to consider in relation to dreams). I was hallucinating (ditto), both visually and aurally, and at least at first I was aware that these were hallucinations, but my ability to distinguish between the things I was perceiving and the actual world (mm-hm) rapidly deteriorated. Family members (who appeared to me as more and more distorted and threatening, as the dream wore on) presented me with things I’d done that I had no memory of, things that provided clear evidence of the break I’d apparently suffered — for instance, having sent over 60 rambling and somewhat threatening messages to a listserv in rapid succession, each less coherent than the last. Even more, I found myself unable to maintain a clear distinction between my thoughts and my actions (on the bizarreness of such a distinction within the unconscious mind, see above) — at one point, I saw (or imagined I saw) that our house and our truck (whose house and whose truck? don’t know) had weeds and flowers growing on their roofs, and I attempted to tell someone that they needed to be mowed, but the words wouldn’t come out right, and I found myself instead having to fight off the incredibly strong urge to do that mowing.

Needless to say, I’m deeply unnerved by this dream. The only real-life impetus for it (and please don’t ask me to define “real-life” today; I’m feeling a bit shaky in my grasp thereof) is I think that I’ve been reading too much postmodernist theory, and that the sense of contemporary representation as schizophrenia — the links of the signifying chain having been broken, leaving us surrounded by a heap of unrelated signifiers, as Jameson lifts from Lacan — has left an imprint on my unconscious. I need some more awake-time, though, before I can piece through the multiple layers of consciousness, consciousness within the unconscious, dream, hallucination within the dream, to even begin to sort out what it might all mean.