The Discourse

January 2

If I’m still writing so patiently and in so much detail about these essentially very mundane things, it’s probably out of inertia: the abstract discourse is still AWOL for now, and the music’s still there in its place, sometimes louder and more insistent, sometimes so soft and subtle I’m barely aware of it. The tune seems to come from a kind of mechanism for erasing dreams. I fear it all traces back to a divided self: on one side, the me who wants to recover the dream, and on the other, the me who doesn’t want to hand it over. The first, inquisitive me is my old self, the one I’ve known all my life and who got used to recording dreams, savoring them, writing about them, and even trying to interpret them. I have countless pieces of paper with dreams from different periods of my life written down on them. But now there’s a new me (much more influenced by the superego, yes, but me at the end of the day) that’s more focused on external, practical matters (which I’ve called “mundane,” maybe unfairly but definitely angrily). This new self has seized possession of my being, it’s taken root decisively in my life, and all without me accepting it (and when I say “me” now, I’m talking about the old me). It has too much control and there’s no getting rid of it, and I’ve yet to find a way of reconciling both selves into a single unique and powerful self. It all seems to come back to the problem of time—whether the lack of it, or the inability to situate both selves harmoniously within it.

I’ve just remembered a dream I was in fact able to retain, at least partially, and perhaps this dream expresses the problem I’m talking about. I’ve forgotten large swathes of the plot, but I can remember some of the ending.

In the bit I can remember, I was walking down the street with a man who seemed very friendly, agreeable, and somehow protective. I felt comfortable with him. And yet he was a policeman who appeared to have caught me, and he was taking me to the station to fill out a form. The purpose of the form wasn’t clear, and I was afraid that once we got to the police station they’d arrest me or lock me up and I’d have to stay there for a very long time. The agreeable policeman advised me to introduce myself calmly to the people in the police station, hiding the fact that I had any reason to be concerned or defensive. He pointed me toward a door and said he’d wait outside; for some reason, he couldn’t go in himself. His mission ended there. So I went in alone, edging through a narrow gap with the wall to my left and a pool table to my right. There were also a few people there playing pool. At the far end of the large room I found myself in was a booth with a little window on one side, covered by vertical bars. I approached it nervously, but when I got closer I realized there was no one inside it and I’d have to wait patiently to be attended to. At that moment, I woke up.