Dialecticoma Dreaming

By Cristina Archer

Dialecticoma Dreaming is a journey into the imagination of dreams and philosophical minefields. The book brings together a small number of short stories that have been inspired by my dreams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781304556882

Cristina Archer

CRISTINA ARCHER is an Australian author who has been writing fiction as a creative outlet for a number of years. She lives in Melbourne, one of the most inspiring cities in the world. She has long been fascinated by philosophical musings and has been writing fiction in her spare time since she was a teenager. She writes speculative/fantasy fiction as she believes these genres offer the widest scope to explore many a "what if" question.

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Dialecticoma Dreaming

Dialecticoma Dreaming

A Journey into the Imagination of Dreams

and Philosophical Minefields

Short Stories – Volume 1

By

Cristina Archer

Méchant Publishing TM

Copyright © 2013 by Cristina Archer

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-304-55688-2

Book cover image by Morgana Creely.

Published by Méchant Publishing TM

ABN: 203 970 88288

www.mechantpublishing.com

assisted by Lulu professional services

www.lulu.com

For my friend Greg -

who spent many a lunch conversation pondering philosophical questions with me.

Introduction

I am often asked the question, where does that wild imagination of yours come from? It usually follows my recounting of a curious story of a grand or mysterious adventure on earth or in outer space, of strange happenings, or of events of incredible horror.

My response to the question is almost always the same - I had this really weird dream last night. For as long as I can remember, my nights (and days) have been filled with a landscape of idiosyncratic symbol-filled stories.

While I sometimes wake up from a night of sleep just at that pivotal moment, when all I want to know is how the story ends, more often than not I can and do fall back to sleep and dream my way through an entire story. Knowing the ending does not necessarily satisfy me, because not all of my dreams have meaningful resolutions. I also often wake up deeply perplexed asking myself should I even try to make sense of that story.

The daydreams can be perplexing tangents as well, where my imagination is triggered by a statement I hear and a random story plays out in my mind in an instant while in the company of strangers. It perhaps explains why so many people have mentioned to me that I have, at times, a distant look in my eyes. I expect that look is a bi-product of my thoughts being somewhere far away. I am often lost in my tangent world.

My dreams frighten me and inspire me. They have been a key source of my creative inspiration since I first started writing as a teenager. My first ever short story, Monster, was based on a dream about two teenage sisters finding a mysterious box while playing on their farm. Discovering what is inside a strange box can never be a good thing in this sort of dream, right?

This story was written shortly after I moved from the city to the country and many years before I discovered an author who reminded me so much of just how vivid dreamscape imaginations could be – H.P. Lovecraft. It was also long before I read that Mary Shelley’s most famous story, Frankenstein, was based on a waking dream she had. These are two authors who remind me that an apparent curse of a wild imagination can also be an incredible gift.

My first novel, Transition Girl, was inspired by a recurring nightmare. The dream itself is quoted in that novel:

The dream is always the same. This dream is always a nightmare. This dream is a recurring dream: etched in my brain not once but a hundred times. The dream is always the same.

A twelve-year-old girl trembling terrified hiding in the linen closet watches through a crack in the door a threatening mad man with a shotgun violently destroy her entire family.

She cannot speak nor yell to sound a warning alarm no matter how much she tries. Her voice box is broken. Frozen, motionless – her limbs are deadweight.

Her mother is silent. Her brothers are silent. She has not seen any deaths only heard the sound of the gun - a thunderous crack through the walls, the wallowing of a family dog as it draws its last breath of life, then the sound of spent shells hitting the tiles.

Why can’t the neighbors hear the mayhem? Why can’t the neighbors see this madness? Why can’t the neighbors smell the stench of something rotten?

The mad man wanders down the corridor now only inches away from her. She is desperate not to be seen nor heard. It’s only a matter of time before he finds her.

I wake up just as the linen closet doors are opening. I am utterly helpless and about to face my worst fear. Cold sweat. (My bed sheets are soaked through.) Sense of dread. (My heart beat races at a million miles an hour.) Disoriented. (I have no idea who or where I am.)

Sometimes this dream merges into a waking dream. The threatening shadow is in my room. I cannot move – I cannot breathe. I cannot beg for mercy – it is a word that has no meaning for this dark shadow. I cannot even gulp for air because I am too afraid he will hear me. There is no escape.

From that dream, I created my protagonist for a novel – a person that might have such a recurring nightmare ‑ to delve into the life of this person. So a single dream inspired me to explore an ageless philosophical question: what defines our actions and the core essence of who we are as a person, along with a corollary psychological question: can we pinpoint snapshot moments in time that drive our behavior?

Most of my recurring dreams involve trying to escape (often from very dire dystopian circumstances or places). They are usually a more positive construct - an adventure - over hills to faraway places. Sometimes I am a skilled spy solving a world crisis. Sometimes the dreams involve planes that never seem to land smoothly. Occasionally they involve trains on a track that has no end. Extreme weather phenomenon, like tornadoes, is almost as common. Death, rebirth, and transformation are also prevailing themes.

With vivid dreams like these, it is understandable why I spend a fair chunk of my time trying to make sense of them. I read almost as many books on philosophy, psychology and neuroscience as I do fiction novels. I do not propose to write a full thesis on the function of dreams and whether they have any meaning at all, more so given I am not an expert in the subject matter and will no doubt offend some expert with whatever content I choose to include here. I will merely offer some comments, paraphrased below from a neat summary of the issues, The Purpose of Dreams, by G.W. Domhoff[1] to help frame comments I will make following the first short story in this fiction collection.

Early psychoanalysts, like Sigmund Freud, believed the function of dreams was to preserve sleep. Freud’s theory pre-dates the discovery of REM (rapid eye movement) in 1953. Carl Jung, an earlier follower of Freud, developed his own theory that postulated the function of dreams was to compensate for those parts of the psyche (total personality) that are underdeveloped in waking life. Experiments undertaken by Calvin Hall suggest, however, that dream content is continuous with waking thought and behavior. That is, if we are outgoing in our day life, we are not introspective in our dream life. Other theorists say that dreams have a problem solving function. Supposedly, dreams deal with problems we cannot solve in waking life and offer solutions. Studies undertaken do not support this theory either – though the very process of thinking about dreams, we may sometimes come up with new ideas or insights while studying them.

When REM was first discovered, it was thought that dreams only occurred during that stage of sleep. But clinical evidence suggests REM sleep does not automatically equate to dreaming. David Foulkes goes further and says they are a cognitive achievement – we only gradually develop the ability to dream. The fact that we remember so few of our dreams, a few percent at best, also argues against any function for dreams.

With the advent of computers, it became fashionable to say that dreams are clearing out the software from a busy day, or that they are a form of off-line processing to save the good stuff and get rid of the useless. A problem with this theory of dream function is that very little in dreams deals with the events of the day.

This doesn’t mean that dreams have no meaning, that they make no sense. To the contrary, dreams correlate with age, gender, culture, and personal preoccupations, as evidence in many research studies suggests. Meaning has to do with coherence and with systematic relations to other variables, and in that regard dreams can have meaning. Furthermore, they are very revealing of what is on a person’s mind. Domhoff’s studies show that 75 to 100 dreams from a person can give a very good psychological portrait of that individual. Take a thousand dreams over a couple of decades and it can provide a profile of the person’s mind that is almost as individualized and accurate as her or his fingerprints.

Domhoff also makes the point that a person can make as little or as much out of a dream as they want to make of a dream at an individual level. If an individual does not like what they dream, they can forget about the dream. For those who choose to remember, dreams can serve several purposes. Some individuals regard certain dreams as premonitions. Others (including some shamans) see them as a tool to guide those individuals they advise through their life choices. I choose to use my dreams as a deep well of ideas to sustain my creative process.

This book pulls together a small number of my short stories that have been inspired by my dreams. I have chosen a selection of dreams that haunted me as a teenager as well as dreams of recent years. Being able to do this is a strong testament to the merits of keeping a form of dream journal all these years! (If nothing else, journaling and writing has been a great form of stress relief for me over this period of time.) For each of the stories that follow in this book, I have included a brief description of the source of the inspiration – whether it was an original dream that permeated my sleep or a daydream or a flight of fancy.

For those readers interested in delving further into the psychology of dreams generally, there is plenty of contested research on the subject. For those readers who are themselves psychologists, then short stories and the dreams that follow may provide some insight from a professional point of view! Irrespective, I hope that the stories that form part of my personal journey are entertaining.

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[1] http://psych.ucsc.edu/dreams/Articles/purpose.html

Monster

22nd July 1979

Dear Jack,

I cannot believe it has been a month since we moved from the city.

It is taking forever to get a telephone installed. I do not know what mum and dad were thinking when they decided to buy this place. They said they wanted a fresh start somewhere peaceful and quiet. They got what they wanted because everything is so quiet in the middle of nowhere. We cannot even get the phone connected because the local council has to build some power poles to bring the wiring to the house from the main road! So here I am writing a letter to you because the nearest pay phone is almost fifteen miles away and some weird stuff has been happening over the last couple of days.

I feel a bit stupid writing a letter. It is not the same as kicking the footy around in the park with our mates. The new school is okay and most of the kids are friendly, but the boys are a bit suspicious about a girl wanting to play football with them. The town is too small to have a girls’ competition. The physical education teacher at school told me to play netball or basketball instead but then told me I was too rough when I did try out for those teams. We have mixed hockey but the boys complained to the teacher that I was way too mean with the stick and now the teacher won’t let me play that either. No team sports for me!

So I am stuck in the middle of nowhere with only my little sister (you remember Vicky?) to play with and she is such a girl. All she wants to do is talk about boys. She has been spending most of her time in front of the mirror practicing putting on make-up and brushing her hair. Not that it helps – her curly hair is as messy as mine and no brush will fix that – though Mum never had to pull twigs out of Vicky’s hair like she did with me. I’ve lost track of the number of times she threatened to cut off all my hair and told me to stop climbing the trees in Queens Park when we still lived in the city. Mum says it’s Dad’s fault that I am this way because he wanted a boy. I know – you reckon it’s a good thing that Dad gave me a footy when I was three because it gave you a tomboy as a neighbor. Really wish I was still in the city.

Mum told Vicky that she is too young to be dating boys – neither of us will be able to go out on our own until we are old enough to drive. I reckon this is all right, even if I have to put up with Vicky moaning she has to wait three years. Country boys are wimps anyway.

Look at me waffling on about silly things when all I wanted to do was tell you about what Vicky and I found on the farm when I dragged her outside a couple of days ago.

We finally managed to hike the distance to the back of the property. It took us a few hours. We mostly followed the boundary fence because there is a creek at the bottom of a gully that runs between the two hills that make up the bulk of our property. There is a man-made bridge and track, full of boulders and stones, that cuts a path across the creek where the slope of the two hills is not so steep that the former owner was able to bulldoze a path through the gully. The