Between the devil and the deep blue sea

I had that nightmare again a few days ago: the one where I'm treading in fathomless water surrounded by monsters, but I can't see them ... only sense them beneath me.

I don't know what this dream means. I don't really care for dream interpretation. It's like poetry -- I don't like to analyze poetry either. I like the cultural literacy aspects of poetry, like when I read T.S. Eliot and end up looking up all his foreign phrases and mythological references, but that's because you can't understand the poem without knowing the background. Despite that, I don't think poetry was meant to be an exercise in Kabbalism. Even with meanings and double meanings and triple meanings, when it comes down to it a poem is meant to be heard and felt.

Dreams are the same thing to me. They are mysterious, subconscious bubbles floating up from the cracks of our mind. You can try to interpret them but I think it's futile: if you're subconscious mind is trying to tell you something I think you'll get the message; but personally I don't consider my subconscious mind to be some didactic supergenius. I think of it as a frightened child. My nightmares aren't encoded messages -- they're emotions, pure and simple, told back to me in story form.

I was listening to NPR the other day and there was a band playing in the studio in Austin. The lead singer had written a song about apples and apple orchards and the show host mentioned that the song was based on a Whitman poem.

The singer admitted that it had been, but then started talking about the poem's initial idea coming from a dream she once had. She and a friend had decided to try a dream experiment where she would dream of an apple tree and she would carve a message on the bark. Her friend would also dream of an apple tree and try to read what she had written there. Surprisingly enough, they both did dream of apple trees -- but completely different ones. Her friend dreamt of a typical autumnal apple tree. The singer, however, had a different image. As a child she had cut her finger deeply while carving an apple; so her apple tree was spindly and skeletal, with hanging scythes and knives.

I don't have anything comparable to her dealing with deep water -- no past history that I'm aware of. Well, I did fall into a swimming pool once as a baby, but I also fell out of a second story window and I don't have any nightmares about falling, I almost baked myself in an oven but I don't have any nightmares about fire.

No. Deep water is a more visceral fear to me. It's the fear of eternity, the fear of the unknown, the fear of me. I have a fear of swimming into that dark deep, afraid of what I will find. Writing this blog is my attempt to swim out there, but it's like a few feeble strokes and then I turn back to shore. I'm never as honest as I should be.

I got a package from Shasta a couple of days ago. It contained a couple of articles and an ambiguous black and white picture. I've only had time to read one article, Nine Drafts of a Suicide Note, by Erik Anderson Reece. It was incredible. It gave me pause. Among other things, Reece said this...

Even in dreams, we are never free.

He was talking about guilt, but I think the same could be said of fear. I'll have to write more of my thoughts on the article in tomorrow's entry.


I apologize for the randomness of this entry. Somewhat James Joyce-ish.

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Post-script:

Chrissa complained that my blog titles are too ambiguous. I've tried to make them less so (e.g. Poet spotlight: Stephen Crane) but I broke that rule today. I was trying to describe my dream, and I looked up deep in the thesaurus. The phrase "Between the devil and the deep blue sea" popped up as the first of 153 entries.