Sleeplessness confuses me. Sometimes I even seem to have slept but feel as if I haven’t. There’s a barrel of neuroscientists out there telling me why and how this is, but the only help I’ve really found in getting me to sleep so I feel as if I have slept came from a rather older, more arcane consideration of sleeplessness. I shall come to that in a minute.
Michael Eigen alerted me to Bion’s thoughts about what is ‘undreamable’. Thomas Ogden wrote a wonderful paper about supervision, and how the inability to ‘dream’ a client leaves analytic work shattered, deflected, and turned back on itself.
I have lately been failing to dream past a terrible fear. I’ve felt this, and experienced the edge of whatever it is in my dreams in my feelings upon waking (I have dreamed awful nightmares). I’m raw, exhausted, weak and irritable. the following day after non-dreaming like this, my nightmare being like the terrible guard to an unspeakable room, I have been so anxious I might as well have been waiting for an assassin to strike. My breath has been short, every small sound like a klaxon.
Something has found its way into me. A stab from the past, of which there are a few, underneath something happening now. I’ve come to understand that ignoring these mini-psychic storms is a bad idea. There’s usually something in them: something exposed thanks to my oversensitivity to certain kinds of trouble, a kind of a fault-line trailing back through the last five decades. But whether this is something I can do anything about, or something I even need to be concerned about, and sometimes it is something I simply have to accept, remains to be seen.
What I do know is that the ‘trouble’ will not let itself be seen in my dream.
The trouble, plus the remains of my past troubles, lock me out of dreaming. My mind may not go, for example, to the cradle-like rocking of slow wave sleep in which the memories registered over the day just gone feed into my memory. Trouble stays fresh in my mind, in my body, of course making no distinction between the two (it always, irresistibly knows best). Trouble is like water from a leaking pipe. It finds its way into every crack of your home. It saturates you.
I sleep without proper sleep and I wake up haunted by the enormity of all this trouble. It will always be bigger than the past on its own, or the present seen in its various moments. It’s an aggregation of all kinds of things: memories, sensations triggered by these as my system propels itself to fight, to flight, to freeze; chemicals; discomfort as my body fails to renew itself overnight; the perils of hoping those who love me understand my panic, my anger when I blunder through tomorrow only part there when the ‘thinking me’ has hardened and refuses to feel lovingly, however much I wish he might. You can’t go into battle full of loving care.
But I am not going into battle.
That last thought is the one that took me out of sleeplessness. It reminds me how much time I have. Time, rhythm, intensity, space, these all change when my awful old ghosts, revenants, are activated by some trouble in the here-and-now.
There were three steps out of my sleeplessness.
1: Understanding all I have written here, in my own way.
2: Yoga before bed, leading into diaphragmatic breathing. The breathing began with an out-breath, not an in-breath. No shoulder movement.
3: I slept the whole night. I dreamed. No nightmare. I woke feeling myself, no racing heart, no anxiety.
The next day I went for a long walk. Things felt so much better. I realised what I needed to look out for. The past felt in the past. The present and the future felt possible, exciting even.
| Oxford, the interior of Christ Church Cathedral, looking past the crossing and organ screen into the chancel, JMW Turner, 1798 |
I was speaking to a friend over the weekend and we started talking about a particular kind of deafness: a lack of listening in the world. At the time I wasn’t sure how I would describe this, and still I’m not sure. The best I can come up with is to think about the way I hear the building, the hall or church, when I listen to organ music. Or the way I hear the history of the USA when I listen to the outcome of the recent election.
It’s a way of accounting for effects, I suppose, and it’s how I listen to people. I listen out for space, time and intensity. Sometimes I miss the obvious things. I can never listen closely enough, but sometimes I need to listen distantly, as if I’m on the very edge of what I can hear. Wherever I listen from, I hear something different.
Considering separations can be a helpful way of thinking about many forms of alienation: experiences that leave us frightened, angry or ashamed. We might separate or be separated from who or what we feel offers us safety; we might feel separated from justice; we may feel unacceptable and unlovable.
The UK government’s simple message of ‘Stay Home’ is direct and clear … until the language around it changes, confusions and contradictions arise, and when we read or listen to the central message of ‘Stay Home’ we struggle to think of any real person saying it. Maybe in America, but not in Britain. ‘Stay home’ is a catchy phrase without a real author, or speaker. It is not ‘stay at home’.
A phrase associated with safety needs to be associated with a person – even a fictional character like the Green Cross man who used to lead public road-safety campaigns. When the author disappears, so does accountability and a sense of care. ‘Stay home’ sounds like a careless mistake, a word left out.
A mistake, not a misstep, which is another word slipping more frequently into everyday use, separated from any sense of … why? A mistake involves a far more severe judgement over something that has happened than a ‘misstep’.
| La Grande Jatte, Seurat, 1884: A Thought of the Future |
If you find a way of thinking about something it can be rather like finding the right sized envelope for a letter. Your thoughts become a message to someone or something who might understand you. Before that your thoughts might have an alarming tendency to race around in your head causing chaos, anxiety.
Finding that way of thinking means finding that addressee. I suppose when I think about things I might be writing to Bion, Bowen, Freud, Kafka, Reeves, or Van Gogh. Or I might say Athens, Bauhaus, Library, Paris. Places, institutions, these count just as much, if they can be found. If there’s a thought that I might, in my thoughts, be understood then there’s someone to read my letter.
Once there’s a way of thinking about something it feels as if life can go on. Traumatic memories are ones frozen out of thought. The future becomes unthinkable, and perhaps a fantasy or a vast frightening space, when the past is unreadable.
My memories seem to be appearing unexpectedly these days, and not as pictures to begin with. Most seem to start as uncertain sensations that I notice in their intensity rather than in their form, whether that would be a picture or a sound, or a feeling of touching something. I assume they are memories because they seem, eventually, to suggest something of the past – but I also feel they are ahead of me, whatever these things are that I am becoming aware of me.
Something about this picture by Vilhelm Hammershøi reminds me of what I am trying to describe here. His work is enigmatic. I’d describe it as ‘open’, though, rather than ‘closed’, which is how I often experience enigmatic art. Usually the enigma, the secret, is so apparent in its absence that there is little to be said. We all know there’s an elephant in the room, and it’s trumpeting. Hammershøi seems less keen than many to betray his secrets. You might simply say there’s a room full of possibility in this painting, even if we can only see a part of it, and the dust it contains. His ghosts may be ghosts of the future, things he is in touch with but which he hasn’t known yet.
I was reading the novel N.P. by Banana Yoshimoto and my mind seemed to find something helpful in it. She writes about those moments of intensity, surprises, shocks, that escape most writers.
I’m in the slipstream of something happening in front of me, like a comet and I am in the tail. I have no idea what is happening ahead of me, although someone like Freud might have spoken about it as unconscious, and others as something magical, and others still as something already written that I am simply following.
None of these things I shall ever know apart from in the way they come to me, which I imagine is probably delayed – from the face of the comet, where I am not, to the tail, where I am. Hang on.
