Heute endet nach 6 Wochen der Aufenthalt des isländischen Autors Bjarni Bjarnason im Bleibtreu. Nach einem schreibintensiven Aufenthalt und einigen blog Einträgen, freuen wir uns für Bjarni Bjarnason, dass er während der Zeit in Berlin zudem die Nachricht erhalten hat, dass sein Roman “The return of the divine Mary” im Frühjahr 2012 im Klett Cotta-Verlag in Deutschland erscheinen wird!
Nach einer warmherzigen Begrüßung durch Islands Botschafter Gunnar Snorri Gunnarson, lasen, diskutierten und erzählten Thomas Böhm (Moderation), Bjarni Bjarnason und Künstler Nobert Bisky (Gast und langjähriger Freund) am vergangenen Donnerstag im LiteraturRaum im Bleibtreu Berlin:
After the reading last night here at Bleibtreu hotel I noticed interest in my speculations on dreams so I want to tell you more about them. As I told you I have recorded 516 dreams since 1988, but the first five of them where older, recorded from memory, the oldest from when I was about six or seven years old. About twenty of my recorded dreams include words and sentences in English. I am now going to focus on some of them because I find dreams with correctly remembered words interesting and because this is a good opportunity to speak about these dreams to you since the blog is in English. One possible reason for why I sometimes dream sentences in English is that my sub-consciousness, which I will assume in these speculations exists, wants to create a distance. I would normally not express myself in English if I had a choice, so when I wake up with an English sentence in my mind, I almost feel like I have been addressed by somebody else. The first dream I recorded with an English sentence is my fourteenth recorded dream which I had in March, 1989. Apart from the sentence in it which I state that I remember correctly like all the sentences I mention in these thoughts, I only remember a flat, beautiful landscape and a small hill. The sentence goes like this:
“Your life is all set and done,
And here you sit under the sun.”
Why should an Icelander dream this in English and what does it mean? I won’t give you any final answers on questions like that concerning the ten dream sentences I will mention, partly because I’m not sure they exist, and if they exist then I certainly don’t know them. I think dreams like this can first and foremost lead to speculations that can sometimes be interesting. So my aim is nothing more than interesting speculations around my dreams with what I claim to be correctly remembered English sentences. The dreams with sentences not correctly remembered I leave out. It is important for me to be able to claim that a sentence like the one just mentioned, your life is all set and done, and here you sit under the sun, is a correctly remembered sentence from a dream. The reason being that if I am right when I say the sentence is correctly remembered then we have in the sentence a part of a dream that has been taken out, into what we call reality, exactly as it occurred in the dream, and is here for everyone to look at. It is easier to do this with words than melodies or pictures. Therefore words and sentences from dreams may be the easiest particles to move unspoiled from a dream into waking reality where we can study them. Maybe they are the only parts of dreams we can do this with.
The words; your life is all set and done, and here you sit under the sun, can sound like somebody saying to you – now you are alive, you have a waking conciseness, are you just going to sit under the sun, or are you going to do something about it. This interpretation might explain the mild shock I got when I woke up with these words in my mind. But one can also see it differently and say that the sentence, your life is all set and done, and here you sit, under the sun, means that your life is all set and done partly because you just sit here under the sun – meaning that it is the whole point. I have not found out which way to interpret this sentence, so still days go by when I just sit under the sun – doing nothing.
In March five years later, that is, in 1993, I was living in London for a while. I had a girlfriend from Beirut, Lebanon. One night I dreamt I was walking with her past Hótel Saga in Reykjavík when she turned to me and said:
”Some day love will be,
God prevent it hurting me.”
Again the sentence is in solemn poetic English which does not come naturally to me daily, giving me the schizophrenic feeling of being addressed by somebody else. That is, not only from the sub-consciously made up character in the dream. But if I stick to her saying it, some day love will be, god prevent it hurting me, I can wonder if she was really in love with me. Some day love will be does not exactly mean she has to be in love today. In London I also met a Japanese girl I had a relationship with some years later and had a similar dream. When I was living with her in Covent Garden one morning I woke up with these words in my mind:
If you are with somebody
That’s far away
You look into the snow and say
If you’re there
If you’re there
Let me go.
I don’t know what to call this text but for want of something better I call it a dream poem. I never write poetry in English so for me it is strange to wake up with one readymade in my head. And there is a funny thing with the rhyme in this text. The end is very open for another word with the reverse meaning. Let’s look at it again.
If you are with somebody
That’s far away
You look into the snow and say
If you’re there
If you’re there
Let me go.
The last sentence let me go, rhymes with snow, in the sentence which goes: you look into the snow and say. But that sentence makes the possible end, let me stay, just as good an option. Then it would be like this:
If you are with somebody
That’s far away
You look into the snow and say
If you’re there
If you’re there
Let me stay.
The rhyme can just as well cope with stay as with go. But the meaning and context indicate go as more logical – because if you are with somebody that’s far away, and spending your time looking into the snow, you are probably not so keen on staying. I was probably the one in the relationship who was usually far away, like writers tend to be, so it is not clear to me if the words are addressed to my former Japanese girlfriend or me. I recited them for her when I woke up and she thought stay was a better ending then go. I was not sure on whether the words were addressed to her or me or which end was better stay or go. But the dream had an impact anyway since we started discussing it. Several years later I was living in Norway, having a relationship with a Norwegian woman and the relationship was coming to an end. Two days before I moved out from her I dreamt a pop song being sung at the end of a melodramatic romantic film. The text went like this.
“Her mother could
Take a mirror for
A love scene,
Seasons for love.”
It is almost too easy to intrepid the words in accordance with my ex Norwegian girlfriend and say that trough my sub consciousness I am describing her as a narcissist. The woman in question can take a mirror for a love scene, seasons for love. She seems to be content with a mirror when making love and considers her self as such a center of the world that even the seasons are just a part of somebody’s loving emotions towards her. But even if the text is about a woman I am not too keen on projecting the whole thing over on my ex- Norwegian girlfriend. I might just as well be the one in question. Then the mirror I need for my private love scene could be my dreams which would make me into an introverted Narcissus drowning in his own dreams. The fact that the text is about a woman does not exclude me from responsibility since it sometimes occurs that dream words are addressed to me as if I was a woman or as if I was a woman speaking. The eleventh of March, 1997 in Paris I woke up with these words in my mind.
“Thank you for waiting,
I was waiting for you,
I regard your bones,
As part of my womb.”
The last sentence as part of my womb sounds strange, even clumsy, but still it is the sentence which gives the whole thing color. The speaker presents himself as a woman since he has a womb but he is close to me, the ego, since my bones are part of that womb. When I had this dream I was reading a lot about alchemy and was in the middle of a book based on mystical ideas, sometimes recording many dreams every day. Maybe my sub- consciousness was content with the amount of time and energy I was wooing to it and wanted to thank me – that is – if we stop speaking in dualistic terms for a while – I am at this moment content in myself and it is expressed in these dream words:
“Thank you for waiting,
I was waiting for you,
I regard your bones,
As part of my womb.”
While in Paris the same winter in 1997 I had another dream indicating the complexity of ones gender in dreams. I dreamt I was at a bar where a fat black jazz singer in a tuxedo was singing these words:
”She is almost as good as my habit,
Love of Whisky,
Love of Whisky,
Always brings her back
Again.”
Here the question could be, which does the dreamer love most, the woman who is mentioned in the text or the habit, that is, his love of Whisky.
”She is almost as good as my habit,
Love of Whisky,
Love of Whisky,
Always brings her back
Again.”
When you say that she is almost as good as the habit, it is clear that the habit is better than she is. But the funny thing in the text’s logic is that what makes the habit, the love of whisky, better than her, is that the whisky brings her back again. So the meaning goes in a circle, and that of course is a point in itself, pointing out our delusions when we think we are being neutral and wise in our way of thinking, basing our values on something substantial. The text also seems to be about a man who prefers remembering a woman while drinking whisky rather then speaking directly to a woman. Since I can hardly say I drink, the habit in question must be something else, maybe writing. So it is easy to take the text as an ironic self critic.
The irony increases drastically when my inner black singer turns from jazz to blues. In my 345th recorded dream, which I wrote down on the 27th of February 2003, I dreamt of a blues singer who reminded me a bit of Lightning Slim. He was telling a story about another black blues musician who had been a great inspiration to him. He said that in a period when he based a lot of his texts on complaints because of his poverty and poor fate he got a message from the old and unrecognized master telling him to come to a certain bar after midnight. When he found the bar in a slummy neighborhood he had to spend some time finding a chair which wouldn’t crack. When he managed to find a safe seat he listened to the old master play on a very old guitar and sing these words:
Look at me
And this ugly crowd
I’m the one
Who’s down and out.
I thought it was amusing to wake up from this short concert, not least because a competition in self-pity as inspiration for art between two blues singers inside of me was a funny thought. I wasn’t sure if the guest who went to listen to his old master was alone in the bar or not. If he was the only guest the text is even more ironic:
Look at me
And this ugly crowd
I’m the one
Who’s down and out.
If he is alone listening then he, of course, is the ugly crowd. But speaking about a crowd listening to music, it seems to be a theme in my dreams with sentences in English that they often occur with music, and if not, the sentences seem to include some kind of music in them. Maybe there is a complicated reason for this, maybe not; maybe it is only a result of hearing a lot of English and American popular music on the radio. These sentences continue to come with music, so this side of me is still active. Just the other night I opened my eyes with David Bowie singing in my head:
“If I had the nerve to die for you – I would.”
It’s not as if this sentence is exactly describing a hero. But there are also dream sentences sung to me in dreams that are not that sarcastic. On the 26th of January, 1994 I dreamt of an electronic band playing music that might be called some kind of jazzy urban country. I was admiring the coordination of the musicians when I heard a beautiful female voice sing these words:
”I want to meet you in the twinkle of your eyes.”
Like with the sentences “your life is all set and done and here you sit under the sun,” and “I am glad you waited, I was waiting for you, I consider your bones as part of my womb,” you wonder who is speaking, if you suppose it isn’t my fantasy. Is it my sub- conscious which wants to meet me in the twinkle of my eyes, so as to make me more aware of it? It is hard to say, but this sentence is carried by a singer and a band like many of the sentences in this blog. Actually, I experience these speculations as kind of an LP-record – it only lacks the title. Maybe I dreamt it in summer 2001. One morning I woke up with the name of an LP in my mind. It was:
Pepper clouded little record.
I wondered what a Pepper clouded little record would sound like. Maybe now I know, and maybe you know too after reading these thoughts. Maybe the reason for why the dream sentences are in solemn poetic English, often accompanied with music and carrying an introverted meaning is that the dream is either creating or expressing a strong sense of wholeness and harmony in itself. The sentences are not obvious, simple points which take for granted the thing we call logic – and they don’t use language as if it was a dead neutral tool which scientific pragmatism might have us believe it to be – the self, or the center, in my case at least, seems to experience being differently and radiates a sense of wholeness when expressing itself, which might sometimes seem primitive in a way, but if we are aware of the limitations of logic, language and understanding the world piece by piece but hardly understanding much anyway, then it is impossible, even with traditional mainstream ways of thinking to rebuke this approach of the sub-consciousness. That said, it isn’t a reason to make too much out of it either. If one wants to take a mystical approach to the type of consciousness dream-words can give us a glimpse of, then we have to do that as individuals of our own accord, taking all the responsibility for it ourselves. And then we are, as I see it, beyond being able to speak about it much to others. That way may lead to something worth seeking; it may also lead to utter nonsense, so I am not recommending one way or the other to anyone. Like I said, I have been trying to open up speculation around dream sentences.
Thank you for listening to my Pepper clouded little record.
