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Dream journal: Arriving                        

    by Iggy Robinson


I was invited to the summer school while recovering from Covid, which I had somehow evaded until that spring, three years into the pandemic. After several months of fatigue, of weighed down limbs and foggy mind, of slow walking and gradual rebooting, what I had to share – to teach? – unfolded from this: an acceptance of haziness, of slowness, of confusion.

I offered to host two social dreaming matrixes, at the beginning and end of the week. I imagined them as a portal between the temporary shared world of the school and our separate lives; as moments of transition into and out of this space. What dreams were each of us bringing, and what new dreams would surface between us? 

Social dreaming is a practice developed in the 80s and 90s as a way to explore dreams for their social, rather than individual, meaning. In a social dreaming matrix, we gather to share dreams free from interpretation, linking them together with images and associations; from this accumulation of dreamy material, new thoughts may emerge.








































































We arrived late last night from the train station to strawberries and freshly baked bread, little glasses filled with wildflowers in our bedrooms. 

Now on our first morning together, I sit with my notebook in my lap and I ask everyone, what have you been dreaming of?

***
I’ve been having this dream since I was little. I’m walking down my street behind my mum while she gossips with her friend. Their hands bump together and a mandarin falls from her shopping bag and rolls up the hill. I chase it and pick it up and another one falls and starts rolling uphill, and another. I try to tell them the mandarins are falling. I chase the mandarins and I get lost.

It’s so easy to get lost as a small child. You’re the height of a puppy, nothing is designed for you to find your way around.

There’s a powerpoint presentation in the bus and then the bus drives into a pond and everyone sighs, “So annoying”, and climbs out of the windows.

The train carts separate and I jump into the cart that has all my bags in it. I see the rest of the train continuing around the mountain without me. 

I’m standing on the train and feeling its movement like a spine.
 

***


We lie on our backs, trying to keep our heads close together so that our voices won’t be lost to the sky. The swallows – or are they swifts?– swooping over us, the call of a bird of prey, the rippling of wind in tall trees above us, the startlingly bright blue of the sky, all join in the dream sharing. 

Someone says they like throwing their voice out like this, the head disconnected from the body, a dissociated voice that isn’t so sticky with projections. 

Someone says they feel like they are lying on their psychoanalyst’s couch: the invitation to “say anything” makes them scared of what they will reveal. “What if the dream sticks to me?” 

***
There’s a street fight outside the house and someone is trying to break the door down and I’m looking for weapons. I say, “We can’t just wait, we need to go out and fight”, but my friends just stand around and then I open the door and it turns out my old housemate was trying to break in because he thought I needed rescuing from whoever was in my house. I am so sad and angry because now the door is destroyed.

I’m back at my high school but I’ve already gone to university and it’s a nightmare, why am I back here? There’s a class I have to repeat, there’s another floor of the school I have to go to that I’ve never seen before. All the awkwardness of my high school self comes back to me, I’m stuck in myself. 

During lockdown my friend had a scanner we all played with, putting in body parts, our faces, flowers, bits of plants. We made these scary funny images like we were trapped in a glass box. 

***
Here we are – back to school. We remember the Zoom screen boxes of lockdown, and the grid of 2D faces that had met every month to plan this summer school. Now grass brushes against our faces, and the wool of gathered blankets scratches them, and too-bright sunlight warms them. 

I’m happy to feel so oblivious of the months of planning, debating, and organisational wrangling that have led up to this moment. I have enough gossip to feel included, and I’m ignorant enough to stay here playing and resting on the edges. 

Later, someone will confess that they had left some of the violence out of their dream: “I was worried it would be too much. Everyone else’s dreams were nice and soft.”

***

I fell in love and kept walking off trains leaving my bag, my phone, my keys on the seat, but someone always called me back to get them in time. 

You’re holding an amulet the size of your hand: thick, gold, bejewelled. It has diffuse layers of cloud over it, like Photoshop layers turning on and off.

I’m thinking, “What is going on with these layers?”

The keys of return. In Palestine the old families have these huge old iron keys of the houses they were forced to leave, and it’s this important symbol, this sacred kind of object like an amulet, but at the same time, I bought one of these keys from a box-full in a Palestine junk shop. 


*** 


These keys register as a soft flicker of light on my periphery 
I make a note, there are murmurs, we move on.

In six months, something will happen to my mind - 
it will become far too narrow to associate freely,
and everyone else’s dreams will remind me of Palestine.
I will see the key of return in my notebook and suddenly there is Palestine 
Shining out from last summer’s dreams.
The oranges will roll up the hill and I will think of Palestine 
The child can no longer find her mother and I will think of Palestine
The bags get lost, the door is destroyed, the strangers are kind
I will misremember the chestnut tree, they will be olives.
My friend will tell me about their friend’s dream: 

The children of Palestine come back to life and pick red strawberries in the field. 
He will be so grateful when these children visit his dreams. 
Everyone else’s dream will remind me of this dream.

***

I’m picking up chestnuts in the graveyard with my grandfather. They’re falling down and rolling and I’m getting lost in the graveyard chasing them. I want to get lost so that I can stay for longer - then I’ll have the most chestnuts when we count them up at home. 


***


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