An unusual analysis session today... I had five or six dreams for us to discuss, three fairly substantial and complete, three or four more fragmentary and partially remembered.
All the dreams had familiar elements and settings strewn through them – a southern California parking lot and a suburban office building, a southeast Asian grocery with dried fruits and a mysterious dinner, a bedroom with a small boy and his older sister reading books, a long bus trip through the desert hills east of San Francisco, and so on – even, in fact, a strangely supernatural thriller centered on a footballer and his friends in northern England. But I couldn't quite make sense of them: I couldn't really intuit myself or the people I knew, or my past, in any of the fragments... we had a bit of a discussion about various mechanisms of dream transformations (which aren't unfamiliar to me, but for some reason in this set of dreams I continued to feel bewildered, disoriented).
And John suddenly tied it all up, not five minutes before we needed to finish: he said, well, clearly, these are fragments of your turning points from the past – confusions, problems, changes – and you're going back to reconstruct them, but while changing the endings. Sort of like alternative history fictions, or parallel universe science fictions... and, by the way, you've been dreaming them approximately in the order they actually happened, haven't you?....
Of course I love such things: I'm always interested in stories and films that have alternative-history aspects, especially when characters go back and try to alter their pasts – even when those alterations end badly, as they often do. (Think: The Man in the High Castle, The Butterfly Effect, a host of television episodes, etc. etc.).
So interesting, and so peculiar – and perhaps not as desperate as it might all seem at first: that I would try to heal my relation to my past by starting to tell all the tales, again, and in order: but through telling them differently....
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