Thursday, July 3, 2008

I should probably keep the dick/head dream to myself, the dream dictionary threw up a little

Finally got to sleep 4-5 hours last night after about 60 hours of being up. Had one scene of a dream so awful it made me come through my sleep and force me to wake myself up. Basically I was in a small room and there was a small person who had a head in which there was an impression of a dick. By that I mean the head was meant to hold a dick, there was an outline for it, and it fit inside its skull. Ok. Then there was this really huge fat muscle man with weird hair and he took the small person by the skull and was putting his dick into the head, but his dick was too big to fit inside it the way it was supposed to. The balls clicked into the mouth, but the center of the head had to like split open to receive the shaft and the face stayed intact in halves, eyes blinking. The large man continued to force his dick into the head receptacle. Like pulling on the small person's face and ramming and making it stretch and rip. It was a massive, weird looking dick. The small person was screaming and crying in pain about the way the dick was fitting into his head receptacle. I mean screaming in such revulsion, and the skin on him was ripping and the big man was sort of grinning in this expression of weird insistence and he had huge fat teeth with all this shit on them, and he kept fitting his dick into the head with all the damage. I was just there seeing it, I don't think I was actually in the room with them but I could see it. The sound of the small person screaming was so awful. Somehow I forced myself to wake up, I just stepped out of sleep, and I felt so disgusted and awful I felt afraid to go back to sleep though I knew I needed to, I was so tired. I thought about what if my dreams became so that I did not want to sleep. I don't remember what I dreamt about after that.

17 comments:

Josh Maday said...

shit, dude. i've had dreams where people scream like that; it's the most horrible sounding thing ever; i don't know how my brain could make it so awful when i'm sure i've ever heard anything that bad in waking life. crazy crazy shit.

BLAKE BUTLER said...

its funny how your senses shift in that realm. a new kind of input. i think there are like 6-9 extra sense in dreams also.

Alicia P. said...

this nightmare is going to make me have nightmares.

Josh Maday said...

yeah, extra senses is right; maybe all the intuitive senses we subdue in waking life? it's amazing how the feeling of it totally soaks you for a day after you experience it.

thanks for sharing this twisted dream; i think alicia is right, though, some creepy and possibly contagious stuff.

LL said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
LL said...

i went a really long time without ever having nightmares, but lately i've had a string of terrifying ones.
the worst part is, when i finally wake myself up, i fall back asleep and am right where i left off.
maybe it's your diet.
maybe it's my diet.

BLAKE BUTLER said...

lisa, yes the air is in trouble

BLAKE BUTLER said...

alicia, fight a fight

none said...

i dream because it is only way to get what i want. i drift and even my nightmares feel peaceful, ethereal- just what i have asked for.

a cast that i have recruited.

jereme said...

blake,

i am sorry my friend.

at last you weren't the guy with the penis hole head

slatted light said...

Hi Blake. I read your blog a lot, but haven’t commented before. Anyhow, I sort of study the psychology of dreams a bit and this was a really fascinating one to me and well, I couldn’t help but post a reading of what I imagine this one to mean. I'm sorry to eat up your comment space like this but I hope it's enjoyable to read.

Anyhow, to me, the key aspect in your dream is not so much the violence that erupts per se as the lack of fit that on the surface seems to allow the horror to occur in the first place. Insomuch as the emphasis of the dream seems to be on the idea that the cock is too perversely large for the receptacle, we could also just as easily reverse this and say that the receptacle is too obstinately small for the cock. A polarity of shapes, in fact, abounds in this dream – just as the cock and the receptacle are not sized 'for' one another, we have an exaggeration of body types, too – namely, a very small person and a very large man. Jung had this idea of what he called a Shadow self in dreams – representations of characteristics alive within us but which we refuse to acknowledge – what contemporary psychologists would call our 'ego-dystonic' characteristics, those that don’t fit in with our concept of ourselves. It interests me that the small person is referred to consistently as a 'person' in your recount while the large man is designated by the gendered term of 'man'. I’d venture that the basis for this unconscious linguistic determination of the small figure as a 'person' and the large figure as a 'man' is because the small person is meant to be universalized - he is the receptacle where our vantage point is meant to fix - while the 'man' is designated as a 'man' to discretely cast him off as a separate character of some kind, not under the direct agency of the dreamer or, for that matter, those of us who read and relate to the dream. So, the grotesque 'large man' seems to be a manifestation of the Shadow self and, in being this, is distinguished by two main things: he is powerful (as indicated by the muscles) and excessive, overbloated (as indicated by the fat). That tension between power and excess seems to act out another tension between trying to make sense of the actual hold the undesirable characteristics in one's self have over you and the overestimation of their ability that one can assign to them and which can make them only seem so overpowering. But the problem in the 'large man' is that the distinction between those two things is irretreivable. In short, where does muscle end and fat begin? I think this question of assessment and the inability to properly tell strikes to the very core of the dream. Intriguingly, this dream does not totally disavow its Shadow self, it is not about outright expulsion per se, but rather narrates the collapse that comes in the form of making a place for one's undesirbale elements and the inherent incapacity of one to ever adequately do so. The dream seeks to make room for its undesirable ego-dystonic elements in the form of the predesigned receptacle in the head of the small person. Quite literally, this small person’s face – a typical trope for the ego – has an impression or outline set into it in which a dick can be inserted. On this point, the obvious metaphor of the dream – 'dickheadedness' – should not be avoided. What seems to be an implicitly erotic element in the dream is important here not because it is really sexual in any way but because the dick receptacle enacts an ideal situation where one’s problems and problematic qualities are totally 'intake-able', if you will, able to be fitted in exactly and absorbed, an eroticism of exactness and equilibrium. In that sense, the small person is equipped with the receptacle on some level in order to handle being a 'dickhead', or, to put it another way, to be able to (ostensibly) integrate the undesirable elements of the self that have been cast off back into itself. The small person’s presentation in the dream is thus one we would associate, then, with self-reflectiveness, an ability to critique and evaluate one’s interiority. But the problem for the small person is that the limits which its 'face' has set to accommodate this self-reflectiveness are not equivalent to the sheer size of the dick/headedness it now has to face. The 'massive, weird looking' dick that is forced into it is not what it expected and overwhelms the perimeters it set out to deal with its own undesirable, destructive side. But the dick is no mistake: it is indeed meant for this particular receptacle, despite all the signs that seem to indicate otherwise. The way we can know this lies in the fact, as you point out, that "the balls clicked into the mouth". This tiny aside is probably the crux of this dream. The annihilating lack of fit of cock and face is meant to happen to the small person, as it hinges together perfectly, and in fact, stops up the mouth, taking with it - one assumes - the ability to voice protest. In other words, the total ruinous lack of fit is in itself what fits. All the small person can do from here on is scream as this truth is driven home.

Just as a final note - and a necessary last thought to the dream - I notice that you make it quite clear that you were neither one of the characters in the dream: not the small person or the large man. In fact, the precise way you describe your situation in the dream is that you were there but (crucial words) you “don’t think” you were in the room. You report, “I was just there seeing it.” That (equivocal) distantiation interests me considering how visceral the dream is in your recount of it and how it woke you up in such an emotional way (i.e. you felt awful and disgusted). Basically, it seems to me that the reason you did not need to manifestly appear in the dream as your 'self' was because the small person and the large man were actually emoting in your place – in line with Zizek’s idea of the interpassive subject. In the dream, you were delegating the responsibility for consuming this experience of ego integration/disintegration to another set of signs confected by your dreaming mind. But the problem is that the screaming of the small person undoes your capacity to delegate that responsibility away. It interpellates you directly into the horror that is happening because the interpassive transfer is now transferring trauma right to you. The very universality you assigned to the small 'person' in order to be able to have him do work for you, at a distance, now rebounds on you and drags you in. The shadow self of the dream implodes onto the ego of the dreamer. I think this is why you have to 'force' yourself out of the dream at that exact point - 'force' too recollecting the large man and his actions, in a strange reconciliation. It’s about the time the screaming starts you can no longer avoid that this is really all about yourself.

Hmm. Okay. Sorry to eat your comment space up with my wordiness. It was a great dream, though, I really got excited and had to say something. And don’t worry too, the reading I made may sound quite bleak but I really do consider this an auspicious dream. Notice that afterwards you didn’t remember what you dreamt about for the rest of the night. The bad dreaming let you rest.

All the best, Blake.

BLAKE BUTLER said...

minivan, yes usually i really enjoy my nightmares, this was a rare exception

jereme, yes no thank you penis hole head

slatted, wow, that is quite an analysis. usually i dont care for dream analysis as i find it overriding of the symbols themselves but i liked reading what you had to say and saw some definitely concurrence in it. one thing, i wasn't going to say this, but the reason i said 'person' in relation to the smaller entity was because the person was a child, and i couldn't quite bring myself to publicly discuss that image fully, so i said person instead. but yes, the universality is probably still attached.

the idea of too much strong forced into something too small definitely seems to speak to where i've been in life the past 6 months. as sexual as the imagery here was, i agree that it wasn't sexual at all in how it affected me and what it made me feel like. it was more the pure violation and noise of it, so much at once.

thank you for putting so much thought into your reply, it was nice to read.

slatted light said...

Oh no worries, Blake, I agree with you on dream analysis, it can be horribly assumptive at times. I tend to like to read dreams like literary problems - so the level of abstraction comes from that direction, if it helps. Anyhow, I hope I didn't give the impression that I thought I was quite authoritatively 'diagnosing' you or something (that would be pretty obnoxious) because I didn't mean for that at all. It was meant to be more like sharing my idea of what a poem is about with its author or something.

That the small person was a child is really interesting and sort of ties it all together even more, I think. For instance, it makes the ego collapse much more disturbing because of how shocking a scenario like that involving a child is. Generically, a child in danger denotes the outer limits of vunerability for us morally and it exaggerates the large man, making him seem all the more grotesque by contrast. Also, too, children tend to be understood as symbolic signs of the future, of what people will turn out to be. So, it could also be said in that sense that the fact the 'person' was a child only knits any identification with it closer to an 'ideal' of the self you want to be, which I think is something - abstractly speaking, of course - that the small 'person' could be seen to represent. The need to sort of despecify the child and turn it into a 'person' in public, due to the difficulty of the image of a child in that context, sort of only goes to show how much the full horror of ego disintegration is to represent.

BLAKE BUTLER said...

slatted, no definitely, i enjoyed your analysis, it wasn't in the same mode as many other sorts i have read. good job, it was interesting i thought, and does speak to probably some of my current mindstate in various threaded ways. good.

BLAKE BUTLER said...

the muscle/fat duality is particular making me think

Ken Baumann said...

good dream

jereme said...

SOME ONE ALERT THE GOVERNMENT

There is serious talk occurring on the internets.

we cannot have this

i liked the analysis too

I think there is a lot to the fat/muscle notion