Dream journal: Gossip by Iggy Robinson
Throughout the week, we land again and again on sound, on listening, on call and response. I am turning the social dreaming matrix over in my mind, feeling my way through the group, listening out for new thoughts.
We think about listening as an opening-towards, a stretching of the senses; Liza tells us to listen to the things we cannot hear, and notice the slippage of senses and suggestibility. I walk around the farm humming, a call-and-response to the more-than-human environment, an invitation to dialogue, a reaching-out.
When Azul asks us to listen to the field of sound, I lie quietly on my back and hear hundreds of flies in a humming column that stretches high around and above me; a bridge to the sounds of the birds, the grass, the horses breathing. I feel the sky above me, the space between us, as a tangible live presence. The field of sound is like a wrapping, an enveloping.
Verena asks us to stand in the barn with our eyes covered and let the sounds of the farm flow through us. She gives us a safeword to ask the group for silence, but silence becomes impossible, so we lean into the cacophony: homing in on the sounds we like, echoing and amplifying, building chaotic alliances.
Kari teaches us that the brain is made of skin and I think about listening as stroking the skin of the brain, tuning in to the wrappings of the brain; listening as being held, sound as a skin, a container.
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“I was sitting in my princess tent mosquito net, watching mosquitoes landing on the outside and sticking their mouths through the holes. Azul said anyone who’s struggling with not feeling desired should come and sit in here.”
Whenever we stop to listen, we hear flies. We are driven inside, out of the field at sunset, off the balcony at night, by the sharp bites of mosquitoes; we are driven outside, driven from room to room by the gathering buzz of the bluebottles who slowly fill the kitchen, landing and rising up in clouds, landing on us, on the dogs, on every surface. We are wrapped up in them, and then plagued by them. “I’ve never seen so many flies”.
We feel the insects’ desire for us, their movement between us like breath. The itch and tickle of our skin by bluebottles and mosquitoes, the puncturing by ticks. Annoying, pleasurable, elusive, funny.
Every morning I bring out my book, Anzieu’s The Skin Ego, to read over my coffee - I only manage a few sentences of theory at a time before I switch over to practice, the practice of skin. I walk across the fields daydreaming, and I feel sense-memories of my childhood summers returning, called up by that once-familiar constant buzz and hum of insects, which catches all the other sounds in a net - the birds, the leaves, the wind, and the sound, somehow, of the sun’s heat. Have summers in London always been as quiet as they are now? I think of the “silent spring” of DDT - the pesticide sprayed liberally across the United States in the 1950s, and then decried by Rachel Carson as an indiscriminate killer of bees, songbirds, and perhaps, people. I think of silent air that hangs vast and empty, nothing to hold us together - I think of Winnicott’s primal terrors, of falling forever.
Social dreaming invites us to suspend our attention, to resist landing on one body, on one meaning – a dream without interpretation, a dream without a dreamer. A de-centring of meaning, peripheral listening. If we listen with our bodies instead, will we hear something different? In our dreaming matrix, the attention of the group mind drifts between objects like a swarm of flies – landing lightly on a symbol, following the sound of a passing car, buoying up on a wave of laughter.
The skin as a brain. We register the elusive contact of the flies, as they move between our bodies; the flies as gossips, tuning us in to our subtle influences on each other, the unseen messages passing between us.
Every morning a different person drifts over and tells me, conspiratorially, about last night’s dream. Coming down the stairs, queueing for the shower, leaning on the kitchen counter waiting for the toast to pop, they see me and remember, “I had a dream!”. And I say, “Bring it to the matrix!” But these are dreams that want to be whispered, murmured, giggled over, shared like a secret; dreams as gossip.
Read Dream Journal : Leaving