My Actifit Report Card: September 18 2019

Finished reading Zamyatin’s We. It’s interesting. As a writer I feel like there are lessons to be taken away from Zamyatin’s decisions that don’t always reflect well on the novel, and as a reader I guess I’ve lost some of my taste for stories with endings that churn the gut, but as a historian I think it’s particularly interesting for what it shows and the message it holds.

Also did a little work on a bunch of different things. Nothing much worth commenting on, but that’s sort of the nature of not having target discipline and jumping between things too often. I’ve been sort of drafting stuff out in my head.

Had an interesting dream last night; I actually distinctly recall having two dreams, but only one that I can remember. I had traveled to a distant city with some students (I got the impression that we were on a field trip).

The students were all former students of mine, and their faces did not match their voices (though both were always taken from students I was particularly familiar with, perhaps even ones I would consider favorites).

While we were on the field trip, they would ask me repeatedly why I would not return to teach them. I would respond by pointing out that I am only taking a temporary sojourn, or not at all.

A short time after the dream began, though I do not recall anything before it, a large building caught fire, sending smoke and flame out toward where the field trip was taking place. I was not impacted by the smoke or the flames, and I went about helping the children that I could find away from the epicenter, though there was a time before I was able to reconnect with them where I wandered toward it myself; I recall being unconscious of the fact that I was heading closer, but not having any real impulse to move away from or toward the burning building.

Near the end of the dream, I had succeeded in bringing the children to safety, though we took an unorthodox path that involved, among other things, climbing up to the roof of a restaurant (from behind the building) and then inside it to reach safety.

Since I believe that dreams often have a message from the unconscious (and also because I am aware that I have had a couple dreams recently which I have permitted to slip away unanalyzed), I figured I’d do a brief analysis of my own dream in the Jungian mode, though as always it should be taken with a grain of salt.

The relationship between guardian and child is a deep archetypal bond; I would often refer to my students as “my kids”, and since I am not a parent despite being at an age where such an experience may be “typically appropriate” from a biological or social perspective I think that it’s worth saying to a degree that my students serve (or served, as you see fit) as a sort of surrogate child for the purposes of my psychological development.

The burning building was a tower of some size, and I had the impression that it was important. The relatively recent anniversary of September 11th could have inspired this symbol in my dream, but I had the feeling that the flames that were consuming the tower were not deliberate. I also had the impression that there was no or very little loss of life in a peculiar dream-like way; the message was the burning of a tower, not the destruction it wreaks.

Now, I think that it’s important to consider the symbolism of the tower here.

Towers represent order and society. It is a testament to our organization and our combined learning that we are able to build towers, and that we are able to turn densely populated people (which is implied by the presence of towers) into a cohesive unit.

I’ve often found myself confronting the question of postmodern society and a world in which our role in the cosmos is treated not only as undefined but also undefinable. While I cannot be sure that it is this, and not some other anxiety, that my dream points at, the broad stroke of the dream indicates this.

This, I believe, is also a reason why the fire and smoke were immaterial to me in the dream. When I stepped into the smoke for the first time I had expected to smell it, perhaps to have it choke me. Yet it had no effect on me, and I could even see through it with little difficulty. It occurred to me that this was both unnatural, something that I should not expect in reality, but also something which is entirely reasonable in the symbolic world.

Now, there’s a couple possible reasons for this. The first is that I have something of a stable belief structure in the form of religion and my philosophical interpretations of the world, which would render me immune to the crisis of postmodernism (though it is also worth noting that I have felt anxiety about this in recent days as well; I may know God, but it is the same God that Nietzsche proclaimed dead–perhaps I can never know the God of Abraham, at least not as Abraham would).

The second is that I have endeavored to undertake the completion of my psyche, and as a result have entered into a heroic process. As I do not fear any conceptual undoing, since I have resolved that such an undoing may be necessary, the fire and flames of unmaking and chaos (as opposed to the everlasting flame that is associated with the pneuma and order) serve as a symbol of something that is relevant to me only in an academic, intellectual sense. Hence, the awareness that I would be endangered by these things in the real world, but not the symbolic one.

I have gone on too long, and it is past my bedtime.

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