Making sense of the nonsense

Having rethunk what I had pre-thunk, and thinking there may be more thinking to be thunk than originally thunk, I think I will rethink my pre-thinking. (This post takes another look at yesterday's Robot me).

Yesterday's dreams, along with the accompanying post, have inspired more curiosity to my mind than has been precedential. So together with a few modos de pensar presented to me by some of my more inspiring school classes, I have considered and reconsidered some of the implications and nuances of the dreams I have, the memory I have of those dreams, and the notes that I make based on those memories. And now, in one of the deeper and more thought-provoking posts this blog has seen (and it is suspected that there will be very few of its kind), I present the thinking that I have recently rethunk.

As I read the dream in its current written form, I can see areas which are not perfectly consistent with my memories of the actual dream. There are some inconsistencies in there, but not because of any intent on the narrator's part to deceive or misrepresent. Take, for instance, the part of the ugly robot in the garage, and the boys that built it. During the final song, I remember a confusing mixture of singing and music, as well as pauses in the music where I would hear the words "hot dog." The words seemed to have been intended as part of the song, and yet were so distinct from the rest of the song that they are the only words I remember. There may not even have been other lyrics at all. In my previous post, I assign the music to some background source, and the words "hot dog" to the ugly, jumping robot. But the boys may have been singing as well, and the music may have been coming from the robot itself, or may have not come from any one source, but may have simply emanated throughout the dream, penetrating everything. The way the dream is written, however, is the way in which I have made sense of it, putting it into some sort of intelligible narration. Thus the dream, as bizarre as it remains, takes on a more logical format.

And perhaps that is the key to the inconsistency. Written narration looks for logic and pattern, and can often be represented by the classical plotline, with exposition, rising action, climax, and denouement. Even when the classical model doesn't work, a more broken up, realistic plotline model can be drawn. But written narration seems to have no support at all for the dream sequence format, which knows little of logic and pattern, or even the erratic, meandering sequences of real or realistic life. So dream falls apart in the presence of narration, and vice versa.



Another example of the dream/narration inconsistency involves a conscious omission in the narrative where words just can't make sense of the nonsense. My own swirling mass of intangible, ephemeral memories on the matter only just come close. I'll attempt it in words anyway. I left out the part where, after suggesting that I learn to do flips (from either acrobatics or something like it), Angelina Jolie takes me around to another part of the garage and shows me how. But not by doing any flips. Or martial arts. Or acrobatics. We are both sprawled out on the ground, with our stomachs down, propped up on our elbows, with our heads close together. Like two kids taking a close look at an anthill. And she is showing me some color-coded wires, explaining what each color represents. Somehow, understanding the wiring down on the ground was directly related to me learning to do flips. Each of the four wires represented a concept related to it, though in retrospect, if I could remember the words she used, I think the concepts would prove to be bizarre and imaginary ideas. At least three of the four would be. She said she couldn't remember what the fourth stood for. As it turns out, I don't think I ever learned to do flips in the dream.

The third and final major inconsistency that comes to mind is that of the severed head, which toward the end of the narration turns out to have arms, and the ability to swing around from tree to tree, much like a monkey. He was in fact very much like an animal, ever since coming "alive" again after his beheading. The severed head was never able to talk, and would bite people based on a seemingly animalistic instinct, rather than out of premeditated, human maliciousness. The inconsistency evolves around the fact that the current narration doesn't quite depict what was happening with the severed head. He was only a head at first. The girl with the ninja sword had most definitely chopped off his head. Only his head. The head of a man. While showing the head to the family, I had to hold his mouth shut to keep him from biting them with his sharpened teeth, already making him seem like more of an animal. Then he was swinging around with arms disproportionate to his seemingly large head. Toward the end of the dream, he had shoulders, arms, and a torso in addition to what was originally just a head. For a brief moment in the dream, this was confusing, but I seem to remember "reminding myself" that he had been cut in half after all, not beheaded. I think I was lying to myself. I even seem to remember him having the majority of his body by the very end, missing only his feet and part of his lower legs, as though he had only lost his feet. And yet he was still quite animalistic, like a household pet. Then he swung down and picked up the ugly robot's face, a humanesque face drawn onto a paper plate, with little folded rolls of masking tape on the backside, and secured it to the ugly robot, giving it life. The ugly robot then dances around and says "hot dog," evidence of a very limited vocabulary, yet a vocabulary greater than than that of the now animalistic severed head/body.

I don't think that each individual dream or detail of a dream has significance unto itself, outside of context. But I do tend to think that certain ideas or patterns will be found by looking at several of an individual's dreams. It seems fair to think that overwhelming thought patterns or fears that an individual has would be made manifest in dreams, though they may mask themselves with bizarre or unpredictable images. I just recently saw a movie with Angelina Jolie as a character who gave counsel. That she was the image chosen to represent the character in my dream is easy to understand. But the purpose of the character itself is not so easy, nor is the fact that she couldn't quite explain to me what she was trying to explain. Why would my subconscious mind linger on something like that?

I enjoy remembering so many of my dreams lately, and hope to see them in the future under a more enlightened point of view. But if not, at least they make for good stories.