Friday, July 31, 2009

Cubist Dreams

Last night I had this dream again. I say again, though the dream is never the same, the complication is always the same: I cannot focus my eyes. I close my eyes to sleep or blink, and when I open them, all I see is flashed of bright colors, pieces of the scene I'm trying to see. It is like dreaming a Picasso or Braque during their analytical cubist period, only the colors are so bright, and I only see one piece of the painting at a time. My mind creates the distorted painting in an attempt to meld the pieces together.

Always I'm desperately trying to make out the scene. I open my eyes once, twice. I close them and try to focus on the back of my eyelids before I open them a third time. The scene is in focus, then slides back out.

The story line, I believe, is unimportant. This time, I walked over to the closet in the house where I grew up. It was a tiny thing, but it had deep shelves on either side of the doorway, and when I was a child I made a "reading nest" of pillows and blankets on the floor, and I'd go in there and feel safe and hidden in my little space with a shelf over my head and one over my feet. Anyways, in the dream, I opened this closet door, only in the dream, people from my job had sleeping places in there, like bunks. I think I was trying to do something nice for them, because they are the team working on the inventory, so I was trying to hang artwork, mostly Escher, but also a few other pieces that I didn't recognize (either in the dream or in real life).

Always through the task I'm trying to "see straight". I never do.

I should also mention that the cubist sight hurts. Like when you put on someone's glasses that are too strong for you. I close my eyes against the pain, and try to focus again. There is also a low level of emotional panic and struggle that underlies the dream.

I always wake up from these dreams feeling exhausted. I never remember having one before this year, but I can think of three times relatively recently when I've dreamt in cubism.

I just chase my tail when I try to interpret the thing. The storyline is easy to make sense of. But the cubism? Am I focusing too hard on the little things, or not hard enough? Is my view of the world distorted? Have I forgotten the big picture, or am I just incapable of seeing it? Or is a sight interpretation too literal? Is it about the struggle? Overcoming the panic? A message to stop fighting the current and go with things the way they are?

2 comments:

j. said...

Are you trying too hard to see all sides of the situation at once?

Amber said...

Huh. Hadn't thought of that one. I'm usually accused of being one sided, instead of vice versa, but with what's going on in my life right now, maybe...