| Have you ever had the experience of waking from dreams, remembering
separate episodes, but unable to discover their sequence? That is
because there may not even have been any sequence. We dream many
dreams simultaneously, and on waking may remember several. In fact,
we still dream while we are awake, but usually we are unconscious of
this. We do not begin to dream when we fall asleep; rather we re-enter
a dream that has been unfolding continuously within ourself. More
precisely, some part of ourself that is capable of retaining a memory
and of yielding it up later to our conscious self, re-enters the dream.
Often it is hard to recall a dream at breakfast. But after lunch,
particularly in the middle of a boring meeting or seminar, dreams
will come tumbling out as if from a drawer that has suddenly unjammed,
tipping its contents onto the floor.
In waking life our surroundings are more or less fixed. Their
constituents have positions, and we may wend our way through them.
In some dreams, for me, it is the other way about. I am fixed
and my surroundings transform by some curious exercise of will.
The sky is no firmament. Huge immanences may loom in it, blotting
it out, not to be looked at for fear of vertigo. You can drown
in the distances. How close? If near their mass is serene
and terrible. If far, even more terrible to contemplate.
Dreams take place in inner landscapes - oneirotopia - which
they share. One dream may be close to or distant from another.
Winchester, the North, outer space, a golf course outside Leicester
with the German army advancing across it, the battlements of a castle
thronged with Chinese tourists - though their relative positions
may not always be clear, yet you can dream your way from one topos
to another.
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I have no evidence for the truth of any of these feelings
about dreams.
