Dream journal: Leaving
by Iggy Robinson
“And it may well be that group is a defence against the experience of the formlessness of matrix. The social dreaming matrix, purposely convened in the here-and-now, is a reflection of the primordial matrix of humanity.”
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I lived in a shoe box and when I went to sleep in it, I would be tiny, to scale with the shoe box. The shoe box house was on the shore, and I was worried the wind would blow it away, or would blow away the tiny furniture inside. There were carpets made of textured paper, chairs and tables made of chopsticks and bamboo – all very light. I packed up the shoe box in a grocery bag and carried it around town with me during the day, so it wouldn’t blow away.
It’s not a dream. One night I stayed up really late, and looking out over the field I felt so much fear. It looked so vast and full of spirits and energies I couldn’t know or understand. I closed the window and went to sleep. The next morning I woke up and the door was locked, so I jumped out of the window. Then I went back inside the the door locked again. Now I was freaked out – is it me who’s locking it? Is it a ghost?
One of the kittens has escaped and I try to put it back in the cupboard. But it’s a tiny, overstuffed cupboard, like a little squishy box, not the laundry room cupboard they really live in. Then I open the door again to let the mama cat in. Hours later the kittens are climbing over my friend on the bed, and they growl at me and I realise that I had put them in the wrong cupboard, and I had separated them from their food and from the mama cat. I let all the kittens out, but they don’t trust me anymore.
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We dream of being boxed in, closed in – and then of vast landscapes that might snatch us up or blow us away on the wind.
When we had arrived on the island, to the farm, the expansive landscape of fields and sky seemed vast, boundless, after cramped cities. But then we started to feel claustrophobic. By the fourth day, I had been itching to get to the sea, and if I couldn’t leave I would scratch my way out.
We talk about where we are going next, what time our trains are leaving. The lives that felt so big before we left them behind to come here. When you see things from a distance, suddenly they’re not so urgent. The land here makes us feel so small; the flies make us feel like a mountain.
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When I was working on my graduation show, I used to hide under my desk while the security guard went round with a torch, so that I could stay and work all night.
I fell asleep during the first dream and woke up when people were talking about mosquitos.
When I was a child, a wasp landed in my hair, on the top of my skull. I don’t think it stung me… maybe it was there for a while. For days afterwards I was pulling out this strange sticky liquid from my hair, like the wasp had injected honey into my skull.
All week I’ve been pulling out the tics hidden in Nacho’s golden, copper, and brown fur.
When we were in France with DAI, I realised that if you put really hot water on a bug bite, you get this satisfying sensation of pain and pleasure on the sensitive skin - it's the most erotic pleasure outside sex. I’ve been doing that here with all my mosquito bites, in the dystopian plastic space capsule shower.
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Writing this, I remember a Victorian novel we had to read in sixth-form English. We all found it dull, sexist, impossible to relate to - including the teacher, I think. But one passage I found beautiful, and have remembered, and re-remembered, as moments in my life have called it up.
His eyesight ruined by too much studying in poor light, the hero finally has an excuse to give up his career ambitions and spend his days cutting furze on the heath. At 17, I was captivated by the description of this new “microscopic” life, by his “familiars”, the bees, flies, and grasshoppers, described in such detail that they took on a cosmic scale as I read; and the ears of rabbits became suns themselves as the sun shone through them, “firing them to a blood-red transparency in which the veins could be seen”.
I remember feeling that this was the only moment in the book in which its writer, Thomas Hardy, was telling the truth about something. Here was something real that I needed to pay attention to. The hero is forced to stop looking towards the city, towards the future; and suddenly, his telescopic vision obscured, he begins to notice the living, humming, present world around him.
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The sand with flies coming out of the holes is just like crumpets.
The comfrey in the garden is like little purple trumpets.
Someone was talking about the kittens’ “sandbox”. I think it means the litter box. It gave me a blurry image of kittens being locked in a black box, and the projector screen as a black box, and the sandbox as a space to film, with mirrors and glass walls, the kittens being filmed in it. All these images were going through my mind because I didn’t understand what a sandbox was.
My grandparents’ dog in Argentina used to get big grey tics that ballooned up with blood. I was told not to remove them because hundreds of baby grey tic balloons would come out if I did. But now I have this confusing memory, where it’s not just some story I was told, but a memory, like I actually saw this happen.
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At the start of the week, dreams were shared self-consciously, weighted with a pressure to pull up a good-enough, interesting-enough, strange-enough dream to share. Now we immerse ourselves in each others’ daydreams and dreamy memories, unquestionably as precious as the night dreams.
We speak in English across different languages, misunderstanding and mishearing each other - making new meanings from each other.
In the future, when we look back, we will confuse these dreams and borrowed memories and think they happened to us.
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On the last day, I open a closed window in the far corner of the living room. When I come back a few hours later, the clouds of flies that covered the walls and ceilings all week are gone. We thought they wanted to be inside, annoying us - we thought if they wanted to leave, they would fly back out the doors they’d come in through. Or maybe we didn’t think at all about how to let them out. We had given up our agency, our personal space, and our separateness, for the week, and we had accepted without much question this gathering crowd of maddening roommates. The room feels suddenly calm and quiet, and the flies drift out across the fields to tell the rest of the island what they overheard.
Read Dream Journal : Arriving