Bubblehammerblog

I had a dream last night of the type that Burroughs calls a 'Land of the Dead' dream. These are characterised by being set in a region of permanent starless night, in an oddly familiar landscape of paradoxical topographies, where there is no discernable difference between the inside and the outside of structures.

Such dreams are uncommon, and though they're distinctly unsettling and call for attempts at interpretation, it's difficult to reassemble much of them on awakening, since the action is usually fitful and disordered. But last night's dream was remarkably different from other examples of the genre my unconscious has screened for me. All the other Land of the Dead features were present, including narrative incoherence, but this one was distinguished by the fact that it was, for the most part, pleasing, rather than being disturbing or ominous, and I'm able to clearly recall some scenes from it.

The dream concerned a former girlfriend I haven't seen in some forty years, (distinct personalities are unusual in LoD dreams). Perhaps for the sake of the narrative coherence of this tale, and for readers of a certain sensibility, I should say that I was in love with her, though this would be misleading.

She was the first posh girl I'd ever had what people now call a 'relationship' with, being from a part of society with which I'd previously never had any direct contact. In a tangible sense she was a different species, and this was utterly fascinating. Her parents were academics, and she was reading French Literature at Cambridge. At the time I was working, when I could force myself to turn in, at a concrete mouldings factory, and reading the labels on stolen pharmaceutical products.

I used to love, and that's the word, to stretch out on the couch at her flat and simply watch her - for she was beautiful - doing the things that other people did, but that she could perform with an air of such radical alterity. For instance, the elegant disdain with which she pushed a vacuum cleaner over the carpet, or the way she could sit at her kitchen table reading, while at the same time unerringly transferring her delicate underwear from the washbasket into the washer with the tip of her shoe. Such sights were a marvel.

Before meeting her I'd only dimly considered the notion that her species had sex. When I mentioned this to her she chuckled, and placing two fingers lightly on my lips quoted St Teresa of Avila, 'Nous ne sommes pas des anges, nous avons un corps.'

It was an initiation into a fragrant mystery. In contrast, the girl I was living with then was a farmer's daughter, for whom sex had no mystique. Following the example of the farmyard animals, with particular attention paid to the donkeys, she proudly claimed to have been having sex of one kind or another since the age of six. (Which would would explain her fondness for coitus a tergo, during which she often liked to noisily eat her fish supper from a small trough, without benefit of cutlery - if she's now reading this I hope it induces a face-searing jolt of recognition. Serves her right for the breadknife incident.)

The message the dream might have been carrying, I sense, was occluded by the the pleasure I felt of having this girl brought to mind. As often in LoD dreams there was a general air of dereliction and decay. In the opening scene the girl and I were ascending, side-by-side, a steep, rickety wooden staircase:

[S]taircases and ladders in dreams [are] unquestionably symbols of copulation. It is not hard to discover the basis of the comparison: we come to the top in a series of rhythmical movements and with increasing breathlessness and then, with a few rapid leaps, we can get to the bottom again. (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams)

Yet the dream oddly lacked any erotic charge at all. At the top of the stairs we went into a room, dark, cluttered with indistinct objects, and of course without a roof. We laid down together on a bed made from thick lengths of wood (sleepers!), so arranged as to make a sleeping posture impossible. We were fully clothed in thick overcoats made heavy by rain. She lay on her side curled up with her back to me, I was on my back, feeling discomfort from pieces of the wood pressing against my spine.

At one point I noticed in the darkness that there was another bed opposite us. On it sat, expressionless, silent, a heavy set man, bald, barechested - possibly Far Eastern in appearance - who was watching us.

I think the sequence where we ascended the staircase was repeated.

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