bad metaphor

I hate having dreams in which my teeth fall out!

I also hate dreaming about spectacular public failure, such as last night’s feature, in which both my sister and I were publicly called out for mawkish columns for the New York Times. I was watching Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC, and the guest host (she has been out all week in real life) started tearing into the NYT columns: “In other, completely embarrassing news, just look at this editorial on the front page of the times today.” The camera zoomed in on a screen displaying the NYT website, and fancy touch screen technology circled my sister’s name, and highlighted the awful headline. The camera panned down to another headline beneath it, with my name attached. I don’t recall the headline of the one attributed to me, but the gist of the article was supposedly about Joe Biden’s warm relationship with his son, and apparently I had used the term-of-endearment “Pop-pop” multiple times, to cloying effect.

My sister was just returning from surgery, and groggy, when I had to break the bad news. She protested angrily, of course, but I didn’t tell her that I kind of agreed with that MSNBC talking head – her article was bad (mine, of course, was just fine, if not necessarily deserving of any Pulitzers). We read some of the comments and they were just downright nasty.

Later in the dream, I was standing around eating a plate of apples at an outdoor fair when I ran into my friend Anna and her girlfriend, sitting at a table with their own plate of apples (at a real life fair, these would be deep fried and coated in cheese). The burning indignity still on my mind, I told her about the incident.

“Oh yeah,” said Anna, laughing. “That was you? We cheered when that guy called out those columns; they were so wretched.”

“But did he have to be so mean about it? Rachel Maddow would never do anything so rude. I wish she were back on the air.”

“That’s cause she’s new. In time, she’ll learn.”

“But,” I protested feebly, “it’s the Times! Their regular correspondents actually write out “Heh-heh” in articles!”

Here Anna gave me a withering glance. “We both know that’s not as bad as ‘Pop-pop,’” she said.

Cowed, I timidly bit into an apple. Out came some teeth.

Last night Elijah and I were talking about a question that has been floating around the back of my mind: what do blind people dream of? Not people who have lost their vision due to accidents or macular degeneration, but people who developed having no sense of sight whatsoever. This came up due to a recent Something Awful thread posted by a blind person, who had been asked about this very subject:

It’s a little hard to say for sure since it’s not like I’ve experienced someone else’s dreams. I don’t really see in my dreams if that’s what you’re asking, but I will have more of an awareness of what’s around me and I’ll intuitively know whatever I would ordinarily be able to sense. For example if I’m standing next to a building in a dream, I’ll know where all the entrances are, how to get to them from my location, the types of doors, if people are around them, etc. but I don’t scan the building with my eyes and pick up the information as I go.

As one who has extremely vivid dreams, the idea of dreaming without vision is absolutely fascinating to me. So I mentioned how inconceivable I find it to dream with no imagery, no visual information whatsoever, and E said, “It’s not that hard to imagine. It’s not like you actually see things when you think of them.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Can you? Like, if I tell you to think of a pie, can you actually see a pie? With your eyes closed?”

“Of course I can. Wait, you mean you can’t?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, I think of a pie, but I don’t really see anything.”

“No colors, nothing?

“Nope.”

This proceeded to blow my mind on multiple levels. “You don’t see anything? What’s in there then? What happens in your brain when you try to conceive of ‘pie-ness*’?”

“I don’t know. It’s just…blank.”

We then spent the next hour trying to communicate what the other ’sees’ mentally when trying to evoke various images, images that haven’t necessarily been ‘perceived’ by the eyes but nevertheless are within the realm of the familiar. For instance, the pie I ’saw’ is not a pie that has ever existed, at least to my knowledge, but rather a composite pie, incorporating elements of both pies I have seen and what I tend to associate with pies. The pie has a golden flaky crust, scalloped edges and is sitting on top of a blue gingham tablecloth. A cliché pie, two parts Betty Crocker and one part Country Time. It looks delicious.

Elijah can see the cliché pie, especially after I describe it, but it doesn’t appear that he does so spontaneously at the mention of a pie, nor can he ’see’ it very clearly. “I can see what you’re saying, but from far away, like I’m looking through a blurry lens.” A blurry lens that blocks out color information.

Now, the cliché pie isn’t perfect in my mind, despite borrowing from the uber-hausfrau Betty Crocker’s aesthetic. The image changes as I cycle through my memories and concepts of ‘pie-ness’ and update the image. When I first visualized it the pie was in a blue tin, then the tin was modified to an aluminum one. But the pie still exists for me. It doesn’t for Elijah. He has to really concentrate in order to visualize that pie, and even afterwards, it sounds as though it is a much dimmer version of what I get.

Should Elijah get himself to a neurologist, stat? Am I the one who is strange? Do androids dream of electric sheep, and if so, are they black or white? I know some of you (three) who read my blog are cognitive scientists; please chime in with your ideas!

* Edited to make this look less like another word.

Does it count as Kafka esque, if it actually features Franz Kafka?

Last night I had a dream about trying to save Kafka’s life. Only Kafka was a middle aged, prunish looking woman instead of a German man. There were about three or four of us living in a ramshackle Victorian house. I was puttering around downstairs, minding some business, when I heard from upstairs a commotion, and someone shouting “needles.” The shout evoked some sort of prescient memory (like in Dune, where the guy “remembers” events from the future (nerd alert!)) – everyone who lived in the house knew what that shout signified, and it meant that Franz Kafka was about to die.

“It’s inevitable!” shouted one of the others, a woman (Dora Diamant, perhaps?). The other two were a middle aged man and a teenage boy. Kafka hobbled down the stairs, dressed in school matron garb, blood pouring down the sides of her face. At some point, in spite of said inevitability, we decided it was our duty to put our best efforts into saving his / her life anyways, Kafka being such an important figure in history (dream Kafka also had political clout of a murky nature).

I had the only means of transport, so I loaded the bloodied Kafka into my trusty Toyota Corolla, and headed off towards Lawrence Memorial Hospital. Kafka was losing consciousness, and I had to work fast – I labored against time and history. As I drove, the streets shifted and changed positions. Upon approaching the hospital, the street would change and the car would end up driving in a different direction, or on the other side of town.

Frustrated, I turned the car around in a parking lot and, speeding, attempted to exit the wrong way. The headlight beams of a monstrous SUV were the last thing I saw before I awoke.

My sleeping habits have been all but regular lately. This morning, I woke at an unnecessary hour to the blaring of a hungry cat, so I stumbled downstairs and spooned some mash into his bowl. Crawling back into bed, I found I couldn’t go back to sleep right away. Through the fuzzy lens of my near-sightedness, I noticed a strange shape of light on my ceiling. The light from the street lamps, or possibly the moon, streamed in between my blinds in such a way as to project a kitchen-knife above my head. When I finally did get back to the business of sleeping, the knife of light had managed to work its way into my subconscious.

I dreamt that I was standing in a strange bedroom, chatting with two other people. One was one of my girl friends (though I don’t remember which one); the other was Max, a friend-of-a-friend. I was tidying up the dresser space, sorting gaudy jewelry and other items in front of a huge oval mirror trimmed in oak. The topic of conversation I don’t recall either. I did grow increasingly uncomfortable as the two continued to chat.

At one point, Max laughed at something I said; probably something naive or hopelessly dumb, as I am wont to do in waking life. Then he came up to me and, almost gently, held my face with his hands. “Hold still for a sec,” and he had the knife in his hands. He didn’t so much as slash my face, per se, but rather, swiftly traced quick lines up and down my cheeks.

As you can imagine, I was quite put off by this. I looked in the mirror and saw two deep, vertical red trenches cut into my face. Raised pinkling bumps surrounded the trenches on either side. I screamed, and he and the other companion laughed. “God, calm down a bit,” he said nonchalantly, as if I had been screaming about a paper cut.

“But my face!” I protested.

“It’ll heal,” he said. And, by the end of the dream, it did.