Washing Windows


Sometimes I wake up early, before the sun comes over the mountains. Today the eye in the sky had on sunglasses, moderately dark clouds carrying a forty percent chance of rain. I slept a little more. It's in that space past the first awakening that I have dreams I remember. Maybe it's just a little bit, who knows? You don't know what you've forgotten. But that's okay. Sometimes the dreamer needs privacy.

Yesterday there was a dream about a house. But what was the true dream image and what did I add in? I suppose it doesn't really matter so much. One of Jung's analysands told him, "I've been fooling you, doctor Jung. All those dreams I told you I had? I lied. I just made them up."

To which Jung replied, "Yes. You made them up."

Sometimes I remember being a young man and trying to make sense of things like that. I would puzzle over them, even though I knew the basic information being presented: Somehow, a dream is not so different from something you just make up, like a story you invent. But dreams seemed to belong to another world and to come by some magic process, especially the really vivid ones, or the frightening ones, where I was being assaulted by unknown forces or confronted with the fear of death.

Age doesn't really change the basic information, but it moves it from the head down into the body, so that it isn't a proposition to be debated anymore. It's spirit made manifest, and the dreamer becomes the same as what is dreamed. The alienation from the unconscious goes away, in anticipation of the inner marriage. One doesn't want to die split in two and surrender to the urge to advertise on Craigslist for a soulmate.

The house in the dream had a lot of windows. They weren't large windows with one expansive view, but windows composed of smaller panes. This is the dream. The dreamer is a man who can compartmentalize, and look out of any one of many points of view. He is also a man who in the dream is cleaning the windows so that the space is becoming less separated off from other people.

There was someone else in the dream but I don't know who. I was given the information that a girl, or a woman, once lived there. The unconscious is always contra sexual. She is Don Juan's Dona Ana. Without her he could not be the world's greatest lover. Seducing women is like fishing. One's own unknown female is cast out into the dark pool of a stranger's eyes. She feels the electric jolt of desire, and that night she finds you in her bed. She opens her eyes and turns on the light to dispel the illusion. "It was a dream," the rational advisor says. "You just made it up."

This morning my dream wasn't sexy at all. My dream was shit. It was somebody else's shit and every time I would unplug the goddamned commode it would back up again. From an engineering perspective this was strange, because once the water starts to circulate and go down the obstruction is gone. But this commode would start to drain and then miraculously it would fill up again and threaten to overflow. Rising water is often a signal of unconsciousness. There isn't enough conscious, or rational, information. That is in fact the case.

It was giving me information on somebody I worked with yesterday. It was telling me what I already know. Regardless of how good my work is the unconsciousness will overwhelm my best efforts. It's a good signal that is the case when I relay some scientific information and it draws a quick response of: "I don't believe that." Information is only allowed in if it fits into the existing belief system. And the toilet threatens to overflow again ...

When I was younger I would have thought I could help. But I've been here before. Sometimes illness, or injury, is strategic.

There is the image in my mind, now, of Coyote prowling around a den of baby foxes, thinking maybe he can use a break from kitty cat tartar. And the female fox moves away from the den and begins to affect a limp, figuring she'll lure him into a chase. Sex or violence, it's all life and death, respectively. Everything is strategic, and the game is five card stud. One card is romance and another card is power. One card is procreation and one card is revenge. And there's the hole card, yet to be revealed.

Linda mentioned that washing the windows signaled a willingness to let other people see me. She also mentioned that if I'm going to make up quotes, such as the one in the last blog, "Linda said she liked the one about the midgets," I shouldn't use offensive terms. She is a woman with a reputation to protect, something I do not instantly grasp. Midget is considered offensive by many little people, but I'm sure there are little people who are not politically correct. I use the term in my story, but it was considered usage. I put it in the context that most little people don't like the terms midgets and dwarves. But my characters had made a conscious decision to be politically incorrect.

If I was writing about real people I would respect the terminology, but the use of the terms midgets and dwarves denotes that they are inhabiting a mythological space. They are characters in a dream. These characters are not the ego of the dreamer because he isn't born yet. He is in potentia, an evolutionary leap into space and beings as unlike -- and similar to -- us, as chimps and bonobos to republicans and democrats, respectively.

It's a task to wash windows when there are so many separate panes of glass. And from in here it's a fly-eyed view of things, which is just fine with me. Over time I have decided that one of the most accurate markers of stupidity is having no tolerance for ambiguity, because it requires holding two separate lines of logic which conflict with each other, because they are from different first movers. One is from the realm of spirit and one is from the realm of matter. The head might come up with a lot of laws and enforce them, a la Rome, with severe punishment for the guilty. This causes some concern when one feels guilty, and you can feel guilty about a hell of a lot of things once you get the hang of it. But the instinctual body does not give a rat's ass about that except as a dog fears the boot. It is thus forced into the shadows, where it manipulates from below.

On the top is John McCain, who will confront and defeat evil. That means war and more war. On the bottom is an unknown other, whose tribe intends to destroy our tribe, motivated by pure evil. In the middle is Barrack Obama, who proves truth is stranger than fiction. He combines black, white, asian, african, european, and a span of religious thought into one person. Like Bill Clinton, he was raised by his mother and so didn't have, in the house, a man who owned everyone and at whose pleasure he remained alive and free from day to day. It's like we got a representation of America in this guy which reflects our Olympic teams, our armies and our multi-cultural image in the world. Plus he can hit a three pointer with the cameras rolling. Who dislikes this guy so much? Scar?

Oh well. What you gonna do? Everybody's got their own first mover, and for some of them it's like a young William Burroughs said, "Other people are different from me and I don't like them." This line would move into his fiction as a characteristic of an American businessman in a foreign country, who, when he looks into his mirror to shave in the mornings, says, "Other people are different from me and I don't really like them very much." (I'm pulling the quote from memory so it may be inexact.)

Life at the outer level goes on in the politics and wars and weather and relationships. Life at the inner level goes on in the conjunction of the dreamer with the dream, so that meaning is not a separate thing. The dream which began this series was a few mornings back, when John McCain confronted the janitor. Well, it was a younger McCain, in the dream, and the setting was an Army barracks, which means it was a Men's House Dream. The janitor was wearing a shirt with a crazy pattern and lots of colors. He was outside the group, while McCain was at the center of the group. He was bullying Crazy Shirt.

Suddenly the dream shifted, and the anima, or inner feminine imagio, climbed up on a stool or something and began to call out for this other guy, who seemed to outrank everybody else. He heard her and headed back to the barracks to negotiate the problem. He is the King. I can tell he's the king because he has a noble look, which neither of the polarized male characters have. The McCain character is too defined by being at the center of patriarchal power, and Crazy Shirt is too vulnerable because he's an outsider and too different to be understood.

I understand that dream. When the tailor and the shoemaker are not governed by a strong king, there is hell to pay.

As I was climbing the mountain this morning, with my good dog Sammy, I found myself being more outgoing and talkative with people than I've been for a long time. And it was as if I have forgotten who I used to be when I was young. I was like the tailor, and like him, I had my eyes put out. But these stories are about movements in the psyche, and the tailor's eyes are healed and he finds his way not just back into the employ of the King, but marries his daughter and fathers the heir to the throne. (You have to know, or read from the previous link, the story of the tailor and the shoemaker for this to have context.)

So I have to back off the bully who wants all the other guys to join him in teasing the janitor so they can discard all their unwanted shadow and play the lead in a romance novel. I have to tell the janitor that he's losing relationship with Rome central, and needs to make an effort to not be so eccentric if he doesn't want to be used for shadow dumping by those who don't even suspect the mote in their eye.

"Ich bin ein Romans, compadre, and in Rome, the consequence of guilt is death, a sometimes unpleasant one at that."

It's not easy being King, but in the end there is one inescapable truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: Nobody else has applied for the job. So I have to do it.

And about the woman who called my attention to the situation in the Men's House, I will only say that she is my sweet dona ana.



Posted: Mon - August 25, 2008 at 11:48 AM