Clotted Dream
As a rule, I don’t share my dreams. I think it’s boring and rude. For a long time, dreams were not a problem, because heavy drinking buries dreams. Whether you have them but can’t remember them (like so much else) or don’t have them in the first place, I can’t say, but now that I’m down to a glass or two of wine – and last night, I never got to the second one; I was too sleepy, even though I was fired up by the season finale of Mad Men – I dream all the time, and I’ve been having some corkers. To contradict the old hymn again – last time, it was about the East River – some of these corkers do not “fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day.” Au contraire. They hang around all morning, like the overupholstered ghosts of Freud’s first patients.
This morning’s dream, the odder details of which I’ve just poured out to a friend who happened to be awake and on chat, was, I see, about adolescent acceptance, something that eluded me completely when I was young, mostly because I didn’t know what to accept. I sometimes rather bumblingly confused my longing with homosexuality, but what I wanted wasn’t love or touch or release but simple understanding. “Simple” – ha! There was nothing simple about me then. (There still isn’t, but I’ve sanded down the surfaces a bit.) God Almighty could not, probably, have convinced me that I was a person of worth, even though I myself had no doubt that I was a walking gold standard of worthiness. I wanted companionship – and coronation. As I say, “simple.”
Most of the dream took place in a ruined mansion near Prospect Park. The grounds were extensive but also wildly overgrown, and both house and garden were littered with broken debris. This was the retreat of my friend, X. Well, I knew X and X knew me, but (as in life) I was not part of X’s circle, most of which was also on hand. How annoying that was! X’s friends (in the dream) were sullen and hostile, like the party guests in a Bergman nightmare. Some were beautiful. Some were dweeby. All were men. I had gone out to Brooklyn to rent a tuxedo from X, but it was a bad day for that, he told me (and how wicked I was to show up unannounced), because he was “at home.”
Beneath all the new-wave filigree, the flotsam and jetsam of sophisticated, “pointless” Sixties movies, my dream was about the different but much more ordinary boredom of putting up with a friend’s friends as a way of getting closer to the friend. (Very adolescent, but see also Swann in Love.) At one point, however, I found myself alone in the house. I wrote a note to X.* I have no idea what the note said, but I did begin the first sentence with X’s name, followed by a comma – only I addressed him as “Y,” another real-life friend. (“Simple.”) When I began the second sentence with an identical apostrophe, I remembered reading recently that to begin successive sentences with the addressee’s name is a sign of the most desperate and hopeless love; the writer’s only next move is murder-suicide. Unable to continue but also unable to tear up what I had written, I sat at the flimsy old escritoire, paralyzed in deep humiliation.
It isn’t what woke me up, but that’s enough for now. Doctor, what do you think it means?
* Of course; more Proust! Why be in the same room with someone, however madly desired, when you can write notes to him from another room?
The whole situation has something of a “You wouldn’t treat me like this if I wasn’t in a wheelchair” quality. You want something, but feel disarmed in your expedition to it. You both admire and see through “X” and his brood, while making the passage (Prometheus goes to Brooklyn?) to seek membership/investiture (tuxedo) in the alluring group. You don’t want to become that guest at a party who says to the host “I really must speak with you. Won’t you please come out to the garden with me.” The host protests stammeringly that he must tend to all his guests but you really insist and he goes with you only to end up angry at the unnecessary timing of the disclosure you make. You look in the mirror over the escritoire and see Matt Damon’s face in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Or Jean Genet who became klepto whenever he found himself alone in the salon of someone he admired. His way of gaining place in that one’s life by stealing a little piece of it. Anyway, it’s an exquisite DH Lawrence kind of scene and could be filmed very nicely by Ken Russell, with screenplay by Edith Wharton.