Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Dreams...


might be where the body and the mind come together -- the physical and mental/emotional nexus where both argue against the other's formal and legal existence. That's as good a place as any for them to meet up, since their meeting up at all is a philosophically intransigent problem (see David Chalmers).

Think about it.

Out here, we get all involved in the out here: politics, flying saucers, spaghetti. As if that's the only place where anything happens. But consider the weird chambers and textures of things inside: enzymes, tissues, marrow, and junk. Even farther afoot -- freaking molecules doing strident things. We have no idea about the existential standing and compulsions of the stuff inside our own skin. Surely though, it's a dark and macabre territory.

Now consider the unconscious! Whatever it is, when it meets up with slumbering aspects of body in that  tavern called "dream," all hell is going to break loose. Hence, brooding nightmares, depressing atmospheres, miserable ecstasies, forlorn exigencies. And surreal paintings by those dire psychonauts in the early 20th century.

Dreams are just too bizarre to think about.

But they do suggest to me a renewed appreciation for the primacy and potency of the unconscious. Just as our body parts are a swirling, squishing mass of improbable beingness, the unconscious must be even more centripetal, deranged, and impossible.

It's a miracle we aren't always exploding into shrieking confetti.


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