Dreaming

Last night I had a dream (or it may have been two dreams, they soaked into one another). It was a hot night and I’d eaten too much before going to bed, so I slept badly. I’d eaten too much too late because I was feeling depressed and eating is my comfort. I was depressed and unhappy and frustrated by Blogger.com, which has swallowed more time than I want think about these past two days as I’ve been trying to make pictures appear alongside my writing. But I’d also got myself into a state over this whole project and was letting myself get stressed out by the time scale. A stupid thing to do as the project is entirely voluntary and the deadlines, at least at this stage, are completely arbitrary.

The Chinese box
So, anyway, I slept badly and I dreamed. In the dream I was 8 or 9 years old playing with a Chinese box. It was about 7 inches broad by about 6 inches wide and perhaps 3 inches deep. Intricately carved on all its sides and top (the bottom was smooth). Something rolled about inside, not in every direction, just when I tilted it forward or back, so I imagined it was a cylinder or something like a cylinder. There were no obvious hinges or locks, so I turned the box about in my hands trying to open it.

Now this was something which has happened to me in real life. When I was a child, I was staying with my foster aunt, Jill, a close friend of my mother. Jill’s house was crammed with curios which she had picked up in her travels, or which people had given her, and the Chinese box was one of these things. In the real event, the box was empty and Jill had given it to me and challenged me to open it. After what seemed like half an hour, I gave up and admitted being baffled. Then Jill showed me the two slender pieces of wood that had to be slid in sequence, one to release the lock-strip, the other, the lock-strip itself, to release the lid, and how the lid then slid smoothly off. There was no metal, all the parts were finely carved in wood.

In my dream, I remembered this, and turned the box over and over, pressing and pushing with my fingers and thumbs, trying to find a piece of the box that would slide. But I found nothing, and the little cylinder in side rolled back and forth, each time with a little clunk, and it was driving me crazy.

The lump of clay
Then the dream shifted and instead of holding the Chinese box, I was holding a lump of clay about the size of two fists. It was the sort of clay used to throw earthenware pots, a light ochre brown, and glistening because it been dipped in water. It was as if I intended to throw it, but I had no potter’s wheel to throw it on, instead I was holding it in my hands, shifting it from hand to hand, turning it around and around. Searching.

Gradually, it came to me that I was a sculptor looking for the right angle at which to begin cutting. In my dream this seemed perfectly sensible, even though it’s actually more than a bit odd. Stone or wood sculptures usually begin with this turning around while the sculptor looks for the point of attack. Michelangelo – I think it’s Michelangelo – is supposed to have said that in every piece of stone there is a statue hidden, and it is the sculptor’s job to identify the hidden form and to cut away the surrounding matter n order to release it. Clay sculpture is rarely a matter of subtraction – cutting away. It’s more of a process of addition. Most clay sculpting starts from a frame and builds up to a completed figure.

Be that as it may, there I was holding this lump of wet clay and turning it around, just as I’d turned the box. There was no feeling of anything rolling about inside, however, though I was convinced there was something there, something that, if I could just find the right angle of attack would become a beautiful thing. But I found nothing, and the clay seemed to become wetter and wetter as I turned it (though I wasn’t dipping it in water), and more and more loose. It squeezed out between my fingers like mud, which it was fast becoming. The more I turned it, the wetter it became and the more escaped between my fingers until the ball of clay had shrunk down to something I could hold in the palm of one hand, into a puddle of mud cupped in my palm and trickling down my wrist.

Coda
When I woke, the first thing I thought of was this quatrain from Fitzgerald’s Khayyam:

For in the marketplace, one dusk of day
I watched the potter thumping his wet clay,
And with its all obliterated tongue
It murmured: “Gently, brother, gently, pray!”

An interpretation
I’ve got an interpretation, but having written all the above, I can see how it might give a Freudian a field day. Well, let ‘em have their fun.

Here’s what I think it means:

I am trying to write something, but I am not clear in my own mind exactly what I’m trying to do. I have material, but I don’t know what to make of it or where to start. A part of me believes there is an intellectual solution (that’s the business of opening the Chinese box), but another part of me is looking for inspiration (the clay sculpture). At the same time I have a fear that the material I have and am collecting (and possibly the whole project) may be irrelevant, (the clay which turns to mud and runs through my fingers). There’s also a reflection of my frustration over Blogger (being unable to get to the cylinder – which might be a cylinder of photographic film). On the whole, I think the dream would have been quite depressing, if not for the poetic coda. I actually found that quite encouraging. I read it like this: my subconscious is telling me not to over-exert myself, not to get stressed, to go gently.