Writing in Motion: Body—Language—Technology

Dreams and Collage

Dreaming is forever mysterious and inexplicable. Reading Aristotle's On Dreams (De Somnis) and On Prophesying By Dreams (De Divinatione Per Somnum), I'm reminded of two rather recent though quite dissimilar sources that shed a considerably different light on this subject (which will always elude theory). First are Susanne K. Langer's insights ranging throughout the three volumes of Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, based in part on her research into art and neurophysiology, with regard to the many cortical regions traversed by electrical impulses as they entrain neuronal networks and jump intrasynaptical junctures in concert with rapid eye movements whose mimetic pixilations cathect an upsurge of fantastically discontinuous passages, sparking unusual juxtapositions of oneiric imageries fretted with illogical (dis)associations. These (tele)somatic impulses perhaps start all the way at the base of the brain stem or are activated by physiological motor impulses remaindered from the day or occurring during sleep (Aristotle maintained the latter). A second insight comes from theoretical physicist Michio Kaku's explication of string theory, a comprehensive fusion solution of quantum physics' breakthrough epistemic of ten-dimensional hyperspace—the vibratory pulsions of hyperdimensionality offer a new paradigm for the synergetically intersecting dimensionalities of mind, perception and the phenomenology of dreams.1 Just as the unitive, holistic complexity of the human body is comprised of intrasynchronous processes and biosystems, so too do intracortical and physiogenic functions and actual, virtual and irreal dream transparencies interfuse to create phantasmagoric hybrids often so unusual one cannot believe or fathom from where such dreams come. Obviously the motivation of dreams, how they surpass comprehension , and their eccentric weaves of compositing, hssionating imageries are more mysterious and complex than the simple reduction to wish fulfillment (or fantasy) initially posited by Freud. The intricate intracortical labyrinths of impulse generation, diffusion and transmission engage simultaneous branchings and network firings whose (co)extensive dendritical tributaries activate improbable and fantastic dream collages that permútate recollected, but often greatly altered, representations of place, scape and identity. Dreams spin out televisual velocities and paraeidetic amplitudes that intimate travel, astral flight and the apparitions of mythic beings, possibly resulting from the irruption of fleeting bits of memory, shards of past circumstances, latent wishes or unsuspecting motor activity, which rescrambles the riveting emotional cathexes of conflict, consternation, (dis)belief and fear in bizarre and incredulous ways. When one realizes the vast storage capacity of data, traces and substrates imprinted in the human brain's huge, complex (genetic ) storehouse, and how this constitutes its neuropathic, teleassociated retrieval system, the strange otherness(es) of dreaming may seem more plausible. Freud's therapeutic breakthrough was the understanding of how images cathect and stand proxy for entire mental constructs—repressed memories and their tracer trails buried deep in the psyche—and how dream images can be icons, ciphers and symbols of and for phobias, compulsions, obsessions, etc. In the celebrated case of a hysterical young woman named Dora, Freud discussed how psychoanalysis learned to understand and penetrate the occluded regions and encrypted layers of the unconscious mind, which can be simultaneously active but not always accessible to consciousness until the analyst decodes the patient's language for reporting them in order to unmask true feelings and childhood traumas. Simone de Beauvoir on Freud: "The hysterical patients who came to see him had not been raped by their fathers as they claimed: they had dreamed of being so raped and that was far more interesting."2 The parallel, now omnipresent artistic technique most applied to and taken for granted to mirror the dream work is collage, whose discontinu- 99 ous visual amalgams fracture, simulate and recombine discrete elements that shift the proportional alignments and (il)logicality of modes, orders, j materials and placements. Collage's mimicity overlays, leverages, recom- z bines, transects and disembodies place and figure and thus simulates ' combinational oneiric analogs composited by association/dissociation, § radical juxtaposition/condensation, substitution/inversion, displacement/ intrusion (of foreign or illogical elements), and distortion and bifurcation/ bilocation of plane, figure, space, scape, sequence and locale, including scalar transformations, teletemporal shifts and reversals, etc. Collage, now a given, is actually one of the most comprehensively transforming inventions of mankind, one that only became an official genre at the turn of the twentieth century, first invented by artists, then usurped and coopted by advertising, television and cyberography. It has enabled us to reposition , overlay, supra-and super(im)pose different orders and inventories of...