from the Workbook for the Interpretation of Dreams: Finding the Narrative Through-Line, A Self-Guided Lecture, with/out Prezi or PowerPoint
Prompt 1: Consider the waking day’s novelties and expectations.
Remember: The dream knows more than you do. The power of any dream will lie in its images — unreproducible in jpeg form or open-access clip art. For now, however, we will begin before the brain’s club-hopping REM cycles, before the laminae of sleep.
Here, images are readily available. Case in point: the concrete block of the basement classroom, the unwashed whiteboard’s wraithy palimpsest. Aluminum-clad windows reveal a huddle of last fall’s unraked leaves.
(Unspoken, unpictured — the pandemical years, months clicking by like those old-time filmstrips-with-narration from your childhood, the record player’s sprightly DING when the teacher flipped the frame. Your elementary school had two “wings,” they called it — one half built just after WWI, dark wooden banisters and echoey ceilings, each classroom’s cloakroom musty with damp coats and boots; the other, mid-century modern, Little Red Hen brick and polished linoleum. There was a hallway where the new building connected to the old and on days when we’d assemble for the nurse to give us shots, the line of kids snaked through the double doors, our bodies filing through between two worlds. Your father once told you how he carried you, a tiny baby, for your first polio vaccine, into the antiseptic wonder of it —)
The moveable seats, the students on their phones. The last time you taught in this building, a bell rang on the half hour, but when you ask, the students look up and tell you, no, it doesn’t do that anymore.
Prompt 2: Reflect on your dream journal. Can you piece together the evocative details?
1) At first I’m in the front row sitting in one of those chairs with a fold-down armrest for a desk. A woman, surely from Uncanny Valley, stands beside the lectern, a word I somehow notice rhymes with stern. I’m trying to explain I have trouble reading the board so I’m going to need to be up front.
2) This is unimportant information for her.
However, wisely, the dream is setting up context and preparing point-of-view.
[Moments before the gunshot, and the teacher is felled, and the overturned desks prickle from the floor like tossed jacks, and the breath in my own body swells, an abomination, from that front-row chair beside the windows,]
3) I can see through the doorway — is the door missing? propped open? — there’s a darkened hallway, empty once the room is settling down.
Perspective splits,
the dream knows more than you do, and flicker-flicker-flicker
(from that front row view) goes a figure at the doorjamb,
his face in profile
there/gone
/there/gone/
theregonetheregone
there; gone
It’s like a hand-drawn flip book, your thumb strumming the pages, ppppprrrrrrrbbbb — done.
Prompt 3: Within an hour of waking, the horror slackens. What next?
The details melt. Suffering becomes a concept, the dream’s sharp-wire awareness dulled. From ignorance arise defilements of the mind, said the Buddha, and, uninterested in detachment, you consider the word, defilements.
Now follow the line of thought, that filament that pierced you, through the ear’s imperfect translation, défoule, befoul, bethink you of that Aesop’s tale, the viper that walketh not into a bar but in a carpenter’s — O He that a greater biter bites / His folly on himself requites [and finds] viz. the papers strung upon a thread that once were filed away, I’m telling you, the line, the line.
Remember Pound, in Canto XLV, “with usura the line grows thick,” dressing his curated bigotries for dinner and a smoke. And here we are, again. The dream knows more than you do.
From The Workbook for the Interpretation of Dreams: Late Night Monologue
Have you heard this one yet? It’s a memory that’s been keeping me awake lately. It was New Year’s Eve, a high-rise hotel in Toronto, and I had a bad cold, trying to get some sleep before an early morning flight back home. Work trip over, I would have liked to spend the evening out, but nope — it was herbal tea and sore throat lozenges. A party throbbed down the hall, tamped down once or twice by noise complaints, but by midnight the fever spiked. Doors slammed; some shouting. Pressed up to the room’s security peephole, I watched two guards stride past. Moments later they returned, hoisting an expensive-looking teenager down the corridor. His feet pedaling the hotel’s warm air like a cartoon rich boy, he seethed, “Do you know who my father is?”
(Tonight, the memory feels almost like dreaming: this detached attention resting in the pillowy dark, the pique pinned for replay like a private meme.)
At the pre-dawn checkout, the clerk apologized for the disturbance — it was Canada, remember, and this was back in the mid-‘90s, of course she apologized. I deadpanned: Please have him shot. I’m from the States, I believe in guns, gave her a flicker of a smile and after a beat she laughed, we both did, there in the over-lit lobby, so absurd and last-millennium.
Choose the punchline most likely to go viral in Trump’s second term and write your own ending.
1) I LIKED BEER, I STILL LIKE BEER
2) Frankly, when you see stuff like this – I mean, look. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.
3) Oh, I don’t know. Let’s pass this one over to the NYT Pitchbot.
4) Thank you for your attention to this matter!
From The Workbook for the Interpretation of Dreams: Journaling / REM Cycle
In the dream I was carrying the man who no longer loved me in my arms. I had been running for hours, through unfamiliar suburbs, taking us both home.
False start!
What gun let this thought out of the blocks?
Visualize the abstraction, the impact, a heart’s synaptic paths.
For all his talk about the solar plexus, I wonder whether D. H. Lawrence ever ran the half mile on a cinder track, the space / the trace / the network of nerves at the upper part of the abdomen, in front of the aorta—Take note, remember: a blow to the body just below the sternum…
The rural high school tracks I knew were paved with shards. We tried to fly along the home stretch each yard starving the blood in the final, anaerobic close. Once I envisioned unsheathing my cleats, like claws, and when imagined blood dripped down the runner’s legs in front of me I kicked it in to pass.
The paper number on your singlet crinkles. You can’t look down or back, just focus on the tape. Your feet cleat through the straightaway.
Elizabeth Dodd is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Kansas State University, where for many years she taught poetry, creative nonfiction, and environmental humanities courses. She is the author of six books, including
Archetypal Light (poems) and
Horizon’s Lens (essays) and she is the nonfiction editor of
Terrain.org, the oldest online journal of place-based writing.
