What A Stupid Thesis

"My God Richard,what a stupid ridiculous thesis you presented in your last entry, the one titled 'The editing and Composition of Dreams'" What are you doing fantasying that you are Freud now, and going to broaden our understanding of the unconscious."

Actually, I am glad you brought Freud up. Because he was always one to state a premise, and then turn around and demolish it. But then, like Dostoevsky, nobody reads or talks about Freud any more. And even more to the point, Freud loved to read Dostoevsky. as a matter of fact, Freud is just Dostoevsky revisited. Freud's half-wit successors have dismissed him, even though he put the words ego, id, unconscious and Oedipus complex, into the language. He did all that, but his successors, are happy to just give people prosaic and call it a day.

But I am way off the point. I was saying that dreams employ foreshadowing and other literary devices, and therefore must be considered as composed, if not edited and embellished with an artistic devices. Earlier I used a dream of mine where seeing a puddle in the street leads to finding a building engulfed in a flood. But the problem with describing that as foreshadowing is that in real life a puddle may foreshadow a flood, and also in cinema or a movie. But in a dream, anything can come after the puddle. In a dream I may go to see what is causing a puddle and find, not a flood but a train car in the middle of the street in which a group of midgets are playing Mozart on Kazoos. The flood was only foreshadowed the flood because the flood happened to come after the puddle.

It is probably more likely that with dreams we are dealing with two things, stream of consciousness thinking and the connection of one image to another by association. Flood, Mozart, kazoo, and midget must be all connected in my mind in some way, unknown to me, for me to use them in one sentence. I dreamed it up, although I am awake.

But the problem remains that our dreams contain content that is beyond our meagre powers of invention, and we have to wonder where the skills of invention and composition are coming from. Personally I think that dreams are created in the mind for a reason, ( I have no idea what reason). Dreams are also important, so therefore there is a program in the mind which is in charge of constructing dreams. Not only does it construct dreams but it employs craftsmanship , and invention. All of the materials of dream construction are stored in our memory, and they are pieces of our actual experience. From this store house of images and occurrences, are taken snippets and segments and they are sewn together to create a narrative story. I think the story is trying to tell us something, in the most obvious and simple minded way. The dream perhaps is intended as warning, instruction, hopes, fears , that sort of thing. This is Malcolm's razor, such a purpose is the most obvious purpose of a dream.

But purpose does not concern us here, method is what I want to talk about. All the materials are stored in the brain as memory, and we use the snippets of pieces of it to build up the dream. A person who has never seen a monkey in real life or in a picture does not dream of monkeys. That is obvious.

But what about movies, do the images we see, and the stories we ingest watching T.V. become a part of our store of dream images. Actually, I don't think so. I can only use my own experience as an example but I will give this as a proof. My dreams never employ the "zoom" and they never employ sweeping "panorama" shots. Since my eyes do not have a "zoom" I cannot dream of zoom images. The significance, at least to myself, is obvious. The mind does not store movies, sitcoms, advertisements, photographs in books, etc. in the bin for creating dreams because they are IRRELEVANT. The mind knows that the billions of hours we spend watching television are IRRELEVANT. The program for dreams in out head is set up to process real stuff we have experienced, and to process and compose it with a definite purpose. The brain creates dreams with the same determination , singlemindedness, and careful devotion to detail as the kidneys do when they filter the blood. The heart goes about its business also, and never takes a break, never procrastinates. It has a job to do, and it does it from start to finish, lets say for eighty continuous years,and it never does anything irrelevant. All the functions of the body are like that, including the brain. It works its job, and does not give a good god damn how you feel about it. The brain is just as independent of your so-called will as your liver or your spleen. But your consciousness lets you go along for the ride. We are like the child in the toy car at the fair, pretending to steer, as the car runs around on its track.

But I would like to conclude this polemic by talking about Mozart. Do you remember in the film "Amadeus" that Salieri is jealous of Mozart because his manuscripts do not have mistakes and corrections in them. Now, "Amadeus" was a fictionalised account of Mozart, but was it correct in telling us that Mozart's manuscripts were usually without mistakes and corrections? Lets take a look.