Re: OT: Conlangea Dreaming

Patrick Dunn wrote:

>
> I am absolutely incapable of reading in my dreams.  In fact, when I'm
> drifting off to sleep, I can't even visualize consciously the written
> word.  It's weird, too, considering that most of my life is tied up in
> literature and writing.  *laughs*  Maybe that's the reason!  My brain
> wants a break!
Okay, I'll join this thread.  I can't read either in my dreams, and
I guess for the same reason.  I will often dream that I have a paper
to present, or a lecture to give to a class based on notes.  In either
case, when I look at the notes or the written essay, it's a hopeless
jumble of nonsensical sentences, which sometimes devolve into scribbles
and partial drawings.  I am reminded of that wonderful scene in C.S.
Lewis's _Till We Have Faces_ where Queen Orual is finally allowed,
stripped
naked, to present her complaint to the gods.  Her accusations, mulled
over
for years, so eloquently written down in a book, have turned into a
terrible little crumpled up piece of paper covered with writing, and
what comes out of her mouth is none of the measured rhetoric she has
long imagined... only a ranting, petulant stream of imagined injustices
and narcissistic obsessions.  Dreaming words, it would seem, go to the
heart of our anxieties about words and communication.  I harbor
anxieties
about teaching, about making myself understood.  So in these anxiety
dreams I'm always in a muddle over words.

On a physiological note, reading and speaking in dreams may be muddled
because we aren't fully accessing that part of our waking brain, as
we aren't fully accessing our motor control, either.  But on the other
hand, I've waked up on occasion with the very end of a poem on my lips.
All I can remember of one such dream was "...and let Eve dispatch her
ships."   A friend of mine produced a fully rhyming poem about angels.
And then Coleridge... !

I can't phone anyone in my dreams, either.  I can't punch the right
numbers.  I'll be staring at the phone and the numbers aren't where
they are supposed to be.  This will put me into a mounting frenzy
as I fumble and fumble with the phone.  Sometimes it turns into
a paper phone.  Just a drawing of the phone on a sidewalk, and I'll
be on my knees trying to find the numbers.

Sally
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"The gods have retractible claws."
                                from _The Gospel of Bastet_
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