Tag Archives: Dreams

August 16: the off-limit zone

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Last night’s dream involved me going, accompanied by a young boy, to a railway station to pick up the painter David Hockney. David Hockney was staying in my flat in Paris, though it did not look like Paris. It looked like a kind of bleak warehouse area. Once inside the flat there was a sliding partition, which may have also been in a public corridor, which let through into a more secret off-limit area of the flat, which may or may not have belonged to me. I wasn’t sure. This is a recurring motif in my dreams. The flat with the off-limit area which may or may not belong to me.

What am I to make of this? David Hockney died a couple of weeks ago, so he may have been in my consciousness somewhere. Though I am not a particulat fan of David Hockney. The boy I went with to the station could have been someone I once taught and with whom I had a semi-pastoral relationship. My first little flat in Paris was a chambre de bonne (maid’s room) on the top floor of 10 rue du chateau d’eau. There was no hot water, a thin drip of cold water, and no toilet or bathroom facility. There was a Turkish toilet in the corridor. All the other maid’s rooms on the floor were used for storage by the inhabitants of the flats below. I did not know who owned the maid’s room I lived in. I had been contacted by a Dutch woman, Hanake, who said she could offer me this room for 400 francs a month (£40), but she wasn’t the proprietor, so there was always anxiety about living in the room, like the off-limit zone of the dream. But I suspect there is a more symbolic, Jungian interpretation to the off-limit zone.

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January 31: I have become too complicated to him

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I am a misrecogoniser of people, I realise. I misrecognised a woman in the park today and only recognised her because of her dog. I misrecognised an old friend in the supermarket the other week because he was wearing glasses. A couple of years ago I misrecognised someone I hadn’t seen for thirty years because she too was wearing glasses. She hadn’t changed but my focus was again on the glasses. Glasses clearly fox me. I am fooled like the audience of some primitive play when a baddie puts on a different hat and becomes, in a convention upheld by the audience, unrecognisable, or when a Shakespearean Viola or Rosalind ties her hair up and immediately becomes a boy. But, like these theatrical conventions, am I willingly suspending my disbelief about people? Because these were people, in every case, that I might not want to see, people where my conception of them has become too complicated. My unconscious is telling me that I don’t want to recognise them. I don’t know what I think of them.

Last week I saw my brother on an underground train. We were in the same packed train and I saw him across a crowded carriage, his face constricted within a hood. I pointed at him and he seemed to look at me, but he made no sign of recognition. I picked my way through the carriage, still pointing at him. When I got up to him his face remained inexpressive. He looked at me puzzled, not knowing who I was. It was like in a dream. It was only when I smiled slightly that he saw who I was. What are you doing on this train? he said. As though I had no right to be there. I’m on my way home from work, I said. It was a banal enough explanation. Along with thousands of other people, I could have added. But he seemed unconvinced and was still looking at me with that air of an aggrieved viewer of some disreputable sleight of hand. He is looking at me like I did with those glasses people. He has got to that stage where he does not know what to think of me.

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