Dark of the year.
Winter solstice, full moon, close to each other: death and life.
As everything gets slower, calmer, there is a lot of time – and a lot of mental space....
All my analysands seem charged: some are very present to themselves, you might say. In many sessions for the past two weeks or so, there is a sense of moving through large spaces, with a great deal of implicit weight and strength and attention – as though a sort of existentially massive awareness, at this point in the cycling of time, is... easy.
•••
Sleeping is restless. The experiments with the timing of medications are over; it is clear that I am better off when all my HIV meds are taken at the same time – about 5-6 pm, whenever dinner is – but taking them in the morning was disastrous... yes, it's true, the side effects are a bit less, and they last a shorter time when I am awake and moving around; but on the other hand being queasy and dizzy for two or three hours in the middle of the day is not reasonable. I actually tried to teach a couple of classes that way and, to be frank: yuck.
Moving the pills back to evening was not a difficult decision, especially as my primary impulse when I was sick was to go and lie down until I felt better, so... let's take the damned things when I'm lying down anyway.
•••
But the past few nights are restless – many headaches and paracetamol. Alcohol doesn't make it pleasanter – though perhaps it doesn't really change things at all.
Tonight I went to bed before 10 pm – very early for me; so perhaps it was reasonable to get up before 2 am, answer some notes, put oatmeal in a bowl to soak for morning; make and drink some golden milk.
Copy a CD or two into the computer, all the while thinking of the dazzling new world of music P. is advising me on: higher quality sounds, easily available through a server; turning all of these CDs into mp3s starts to seem a bit pathetic in comparison. Ah well – a life filled with many symbolic objects in many forms (books, CDs – DVDs, videos, minidiscs, cassettes – electronic files, papers, notebooks – laser discs?) means that there have been so many chunks of information, and so many databases, real and implied, in my life... I am finally, at the age of sixty-two, realizing that maintaining all those materials and forms and objects and databases is.... not terribly important.
A bit more interesting to listen, to read, to see, now.
•••
S., a friend of D.'s, came by to have a long dinner and talk on Wednesday – about my LPs (he will help me sell many of them, though he thinks I should keep a lot), and his prospective return to a doctorate as a mature student (I gave him, with both barrels, the entire talk: the PhD should be something you care about with passion – everything else follows on from that point).
•••
And last weekend! I don't feel like talking about that so much now... the longterm survivors weekend, at a country house near Stafford. I started depressed and disconnected, but was relaxed and comforted, even happy, when I left.
In fact, is there a lot to say about it? I made a point of connecting with a lot of the people there.
Perhaps it is enough to say: it was good. It was needed. I'm glad I went.
•••
But, on this night, it is now three hours later – I'm still not quite sleepy; could return to bed, but am still filled with this sense that – I must do something for, with, the solstice. The moon. The dark of the year: some observance so that it is not lost – or, more accurately: so that I am not lost, so that I don't lose whatever connection I may still have to deeply charged things – so that I don't fade and vanish from the world.
Grabbing onto the ancient, the archetypal, in order to remain on the planet: does that even make sense?... no matter.
•••
I've been rereading my dream log for 2018. It has worried me a bit that I haven't remembered many dreams this year – there are only eight pages of dreams and notes, as opposed to more than fifty pages last year, and more than sixty the year before.
There are several distinct concerns here: am I pushing too hard to interpret my own dreams, so that they have decided to hide themselves, feeling offended/manipulated by my Faustian insistence on being too knowing, too aggressive?
It wouldn't be a surprise; there's no doubt that is one of my faults as an analyst. (Note to self – in addition to the Jung-Institut thesis, which I must, must finish by April, there is still a leftover seminar paper due... the one where I decided to write on the analyst and his arrogance. And yes, I know what I need to say there.)
Though I also know there are other, perfectly good, excuses for not remembering dreams – the medications make me wakeful, sleep is erratic, in the night I am often distracted by side effects; I am an older person, and older people dream less; I am no longer in my own analysis. All understandable reasons why I wouldn't remember many dreams.
•••
So: celebrate the solstice, connect to time and change, the death and life of the year.
Here, then, is my chosen observance: a double handful of dreams and memories from the dying year.
•••
8 January 2018. As I wake, with some gut pain, there are fragments of several dreams floating around – one involves visiting New York, realizing Joan Rivers is old and probably not completely coherent, and deciding to visit her – she won’t remember me, we only met a few times… And then, in retrospect, I think of having visited her twice in this old, senile state, but with affection.
11 January 2018. [Reading Susan Bach on drawings made by children with cancer, grieving a bit at the book; and that sense that I may be too weak/ill to complete the Jung-Institut degree, or continue working, and that death looms… got up in the night and went into the living room to touch my books: and, comforted, smiled – even if I am ill and inactive I’ll have my books, and that is such a pleasure. I won’t go out in frustrated boredom.]
12 February 2018. Dream fragment while in Zürich – the end of what seemed a long, rich dream. In a large, darkish house that seems to be mine; one is sitting at a large table keeping records or writing, another is wandering around; probably both are me. The second me comes up to the table and steps onto it, it is a pool – the first me hastily gathers papers to get them off the table – the second me says that’s what he needed to do, he knows that he interrupted the first me, but this is what mattered.
6 March 2018. [Dream fragment] In a sort of business office for a small business, in a shopping center or business building, I remember several of us there and talking to a younger, shorter man with sandy blond hair. I go away, and come back a little while later – there is a scrawled sign pasted up inside, over an inner half-door (I can’t remember what it says); I turn around and he is there, smiling, and he says: Where else was I going to go. I want to hold him, he’s come back to be with me….
28 May 2018. ... As I come downstairs there is a large stone sculpture, one that is balanced rather than on a flat base – it is like a frog, but it is brightly colored across the top with the green image of a frog at one angle, but it tilts (naturally, on its own, at regular intervals) to the side, at which point the color vanishes and image fades; then it shifts back and the image returns. One of the men leads me to a nearby space where a number of these rocks – they seem partly natural and partly made – similarly rock back and forth; something about a natural split or flaw in them that causes them to shift, irregularly, and change appearance, at intervals; they’ve been sculpted into forms for this collection.
18 June 2018. The dump. I’ve moved into a new apartment – it’s in very poor shape; a friend is staying there, a woman, and she notices the cockroaches, and is disgusted. Three people, the woman (a cleaner?) and a man and someone else are there – I finally say, look, I need help to make this place livable, can you help me? They agree to do so. Everything is beaten up – it looks like a ruined but rather grand old place from a previous century, almost like a tropical place.
13 July 2018. A dance/theater practice or workshop – detailed, long, have forgotten much of it. At one point I am standing on the sidelines as a woman comes over and finishes something with a series of moves to drop to the floor – as I am standing next to her I turn around so she can use me as a support; she gets it immediately and we move together, it is enjoyable and interesting; a sense of involvement, with a bit of my usual care to stay out of the way of being judged as a performer. Then there is a break – there is a clear timetable, people are going to do various things during the day – a sense of increasing professional involvement, of pleasure.
2 August 2018. Big city, large modern apartment block – steel, glass, shiny; I have a large new apartment in it, which is in some ways old-fashioned, like a Japanese traditional house, with elements of transitional or unused spaces. Some drifting/changing fantasies, including sexual ones, but also some handsome men who come by and leave – I remember seeing them downstairs, coming back into the building in a robe and in disarray, but comfortable with it… Very loose structure, but a lot of detail, beautiful, comfortable, upscale: a dream of a pleasant life. Wanted to stay in bed, eyes closed, and stay with it for hours…
9 September 2018. Dream – end of a long dream. I have been traveling far through a long trip – across deserts, perhaps – with a big man, who is increasingly cynical and bitter, and who carried my bag or backpack, taking it from me in the middle of the journey. When we arrive he doesn’t have it, and doesn’t care – it is lost somewhere in a long trip across many places. I am desperate and enraged, and I attack him – it had everything in it, I can’t even remember what was in it so can’t start replacing it. Later, a woman, cynical – she seems to have lost my bag (she may be him transformed into another figure); I remain enraged and hit her; but she finally seems to know where something might be – it might have been left by one of the servant women when she was taking care of children, and she may be finding it for me. The two of them are like Vince D’Onofrio, and Madonna, perhaps, but they don’t seem like stars or dazzling in the dream. I am full of rage and grief, and they don’t seem to care. It’s strange and unreal when I might get everything back at the end. At one point, the man wants to climb down into a huge deep, very dark, area carved into rock, or built from metal, which seems industrial and has a metal ladder that seems to lead down; when he goes over the edge I am horrified, but then it is clear he is standing a ledge that is just a few feet down and in lighter colors, and it’s not so dangerous; it has a ramp that leads downward more gradually.
19 September 2018. Wake, middle of the night; among scattered thoughts an image – imagined or dream. As though a camera pans across a dark room, a number of human bodies piled up – heads aren’t visible, might be parts of bodies, all strewn along the sofa and chairs; all like the aftermath of some terrible carnage. The image is shocking but not emotional – I try to hold on to it to see how it could have come about – imagined anger or horror, a nightmare fragment?
28 October 2018. Big old house, large family – I am a guest. The family is lively, energetic, funny, distracting – and I have work to do. They are all going away, to different things and different projects, over the next year – I will be here, mostly alone. The room that is furthest in is a bit dark and dull, with plain, cheap surfaces, a large dining room table, a table that had been mine, and another one; the middle room is livelier. I did have a desk in the middle room, it’s been moved. I ask, where am I going to work? Because my desk is gone – I wake from the dream before they answer.
12 November 2018. Dream fragment: in the back of a book, there are advertising pages of other books that are available – but they are from different publishers, and some from an amateurish publisher. Many of them seem to be about time and awareness, in different kinds of tale/story form; some are more essays or science, also related to time – I am interested in these and circle some of them…
18 December 2018. A remembered dream: a young man who doesn’t want to talk to me – is he my son, the son of someone else? – someone who refuses any contact with parents or adults. I get him to come out through his front door, but mostly he shuts me out. Thinking as I wake: is this my relationship to my own dreams? Do they shut me out because I keep trying to be right and in control?
•••
May dreams resonate, for me and for you, and for the year.