Xalapa, May 1994
2 Translated by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni
Happy dreams tend to be scarce and difficult to remember. We awake from them with a smile on our lips; for an instant, we relish the slightest fragment our memory retains, and our smile quite possibly grows into a full laugh. Yet as soon as we get out of bed that happy dream disappears forever. At no time during the day does it occur to us to repeat or build on the happiness that we experienced.
On the contrary, the others, the distressing dreams—the terrifying ones, the monstrous nightmares—are capable of not leaving us alone, even for several days. They demand that we undertake an anxious search that is seldom crowned by complete success. We cling to any loose thread in an attempt to piece together the plot, and, little by little, dark, tangled fragments begin to appear, vague parodies of scenes, scraps we take advantage of to reconstruct the oppressive nighttime experience. We’re fully aware that we’re fabricating a narrative act that corresponds only in part to the ominous atmosphere that upset us at night. Specialists say that the function of these disturbing dreams consists of externally discharging unnecessary energy, of a poisonous kind, created, for some strange reason, by our own organism. Dreaming implies a defense or an omen. Dying means the end of one period and the announcement of a better one. A rebirth! We have undergone an internal cleansing without having willingly participated. Later, as we search consciously through the dream’s residue, we weave it into a story to which we attribute pertinent faces and gestures to give shape to the ghosts that multiply beneath the surface. As we recognize them, but now completely awake, we destroy them, annihilate their evil powers, and we push them out of our psychic space. If this were not so, what sense then would the effort invested in recovering and reuniting the lost fragments make? Only a collective masochism, more widespread than desirable, could sustain that possibility. And I don’t think things are heading in that direction.
I must have been twenty or twenty-one years old (I’m guessing because that was when I began to live by myself in an apartment on Calle de Londres) when an unknown figure, who seemed to encapsulate the infinite spectrum of human evil, began to appear in my dreams. His face displayed nothing but evil. At first glance, he might have looked like an ordinary man, but glancing at him a second time produced fear—being close to him, speaking to him, even more. I awoke terrified. Hours later, when I went down to the street, I recognized the sinister individual about whom I had dreamt. I was dumbfounded. I had read something in Jung about the premonitions contained in certain dreams. The Swiss author related the experience of some patients of his who had dreamt about a catastrophe and had later been the victim of a similar accident. A parapsychological premonition. I thought that the dream was trying to forewarn me of a demonic force that was surrounding my home. I had not dreamt of an imaginary being but rather a real one, whom I had seen with my own eyes a few yards from the building where I lived. That afternoon, I visited a psychologist friend of mine, and I told her about the incident. She believed that I had possibly seen someone who had, perhaps because of a single detail, transformed into the frightening person of my dream. That is, by some mechanism of identification, I had erased the original features of the man I dreamt about and had attributed to him those of the individual who passed by me on the street. Since then I am aware that a large part of what we believe we remember are in fact inventions after the fact, and that this condition makes them indispensable for analytical work.
One never dreams so much as when undergoing psychoanalysis. He wakes up at any hour of the night and writes down on the first piece of paper within reach what he just experienced in the shadows. It would seem that dreaming only makes sense upon relating the experience to the psychoanalyst and scoring points in his analysis. One of the patient’s greatest pleasures is subjecting himself to the exercise of interpreting what he has dreamt, sketching a first exegesis and listening to the analyst solicit another interpretation because the first one seems too obvious, or too flat, or too vague; then explaining one after another until the moment arrives when the patient is no longer talking about his nightly visions but rather certain real problems he has approached by way of the dream without realizing it. And that, I imagine, can only happen when one is under the almost silent tutelage of a specialist; I doubt anyone is willing to subject himself to the same effort when he’s alone. Most commonly, the dreamer re-examines his visions alone for a few minutes and tries to make sense of them by mere formula; in reality, he doesn’t attempt to interpret the dream, he doesn’t try to find its meaning, he resigns himself to submitting to the process of putting it in order so he can recount it to the first person he traps. And then, upon recounting it to a third person, upon giving it some kind of coherence, an exercise of fictionalization, of distancing, of “defamiliarization,” is unintentionally produced, which in and of itself can be therapeutic.
It seems to me that people abuse the word oneiric when describing phenomena that escape the usual notion of reality. It’s said that The Garden of Earthly Delights and the Haywain Triptych are marked by an oneiric register. In those paintings, as in all paintings by Bosch, there are people with more legs and arms than necessary, men and women with roots on their feet and thorny branches on their head, make-believe animals, rats ridden by riders as monstrous as they are, bodies made up of nothing but a disproportionate head that is sprouting a pair of feet, outlandish machines, gnomes hatching from bleeding eggs, men birthing flocks of crows from their anuses. Anyway, we’re all accustomed to describing those excesses as oneiric, just as we classify as oneiric “The Nose,” that brilliant short story by Gogol in which one morning a man wakes up without a nose and spends the ensuing days looking for it, then making it return to where it belongs. The nose continuously disguises itself in an effort to evade its owner, until one day it becomes a powerful field marshal, without anyone on the streets of Petersburg exhibiting the slightest surprise at its metamorphoses.
Could someone possibly dream such fantastic and extravagant worlds as those? I can’t even imagine it. My personal experience is so limited that it cannot conceive of anyone in his right mind being able to arrive at such enviable excesses. Perhaps alkaloids or other chemical stimulants could provoke such images. In any case, I would venture to say that the starting point of the works of Bosch, as well as those of Gogol, lies in wakefulness, not in dreaming: they are the fruits of imagination and fantasy. Oneiric mechanisms are different. I have never in my dreams seen myself with a body and face different than my own. My organs are always where they should be, and during the course of the dream I never turn into a jaguar, or a vampire, or an axolotl. I don’t float in the air; on the contrary, I fly in a plane like God intended. I take in everything around me, but I’m more than a mere camera. I’m a camera, and I’m myself, lost, pursued, trapped, and judged.
Borges recounts a dream that leaves me very disturbed because it refutes the rule I maintain. The writer dreamt that he had met a friend who seemed to be hiding his right hand; at a certain moment Borges realizes that it has turned into a bird’s claw.
If anything characterizes my nightmares it is their infinite ability to cause anxiety. They are not as rich in motifs as Bosch’s paintings. They only differ from reality in time and space, as well as their combinatorial capacity, which in dreams exhibit a dizzying freedom. One can be in one place that turns into another and then another and so on infinitely, and talk to an interlocutor who during the conversation demonstrates the ability to mutate. A is X, and then Y, and then R, only to become A again. Nothing can ever be taken for granted or trusted.
When I returned to Mexico at the end of 1988, for several years I always dreamt that I was in European settings, even in some that in reality I do not know, like Oxford or Copenhagen. It was impossible for me to recognize those cities but I knew I was in them, in the same way that I knew that a house was in a certain region of Italy, or Spain, or Portugal without any local element appearing to verify the attribution.
I have noticed that
