Cormorant Council

Try the dawn moths

2012-02-01T20:13:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to find the Estonian word for 'you' (in plural, the object form). I'm using google to find out, but the search hit paragraphs soon turn into the streets and houses at the edge of an Estonian town. I walk up and down the streets reading the doorplates to find out.
And I do find it: kõidas. Possibly at the house where a fit, middle-aged man with cropped hair, an expensive car and a dog, gets very irritated and tells me off. The dog stands barking a few steps behind. The man thinks I'm spying on him. I do a silly dance on the garden path just to annoy him even more.

'Kõidas' turns out not to exist, but similar words include kõi (moth), kõit (dawn) , kõita (try). According to google translate, at any rate.
/ IÖ

Rediscovering Stockholm

2012-01-01T06:14:00.000-08:00

I am temporarily staying in Stockholm, in some cheap hotel, mostly walking the streets.

I am standing at Slussen, looking out over the Saltsjön. There are all kinds of objects or vehicles in the sky, but it's difficult to interpret the perspective and understand if they are close or huge. In fact, there is a bombplane which is both. It is shaped like a small shark or perhaps a cigar cylinder, its wings are remarkably small and the cylindrical body very very long. It swoops down slowly while spinning, actually dipping parts in the water, it is as big as the open water here, and its course is set for the big oil cisterns at Stora Höggarn (the ones in Nacka would be closer, but this east-by-northeast course actually points towards Höggarn and the aircraft is so huge that the distance isn't long).

I am mostly walking the streets of Södermalm. As usual I am walking on S:t Paulsgatan, and I appear to have previously proclaimed this the "surrealist street" because walking there is the best way to avoid all people and superficial coincidences that abound on the street next to it (apparently Hornsgatan). I'm having second thoughts about this, maybe it's not such a good idea to avoid people. Especially when I'm only visiting anyway. This street has a notch in the middle, and continues westwards after a slight north-south deviation (apparently the second part is then Krukmakargatan). However this notch reminds me of a small square in the suburb where I grew up, and there was a dive of a cheap bar there (I remember a particular childhood anecdote about this place), now transposed into Blå Dörren at Slussen.

It is a rainy early afternoon and I'm having a coffee at this bar together with some of the surrealists. /.../

three aspects of identity

2012-01-01T06:07:00.000-08:00

Three dreams (from two nights) in the genre of subverting the self as a fixed reference point for orientation in dreams:

memory continuity identity

A noisy mediterranean canteen/bar, which I claim is one of my favourite places, because they have a big photographic print on the wall of the memorable evening when I was the bass player at a reunion show of the 90s punk-ska band "Monster" (I was fat and barebreasted and happy). But at the bus stop outside, where I'm seeing my friend off, some evil truthsayers calmly inform me: that Monster show has never occurred, it was just a dream. First I completely deny it, it just has to be true, it is one of the few really bright moments in my life the past few years. Then I slowly start accepting the possibility, which is even worse. Since I remember it so vividly, and have been so sure it has happened, well if it is a dream, how can I be certain about any part of the entirety of my life experience? I wake up in panic. Even awake, for five minutes I don't know if I've played a gig with Monster or not. I fall asleep again and only after next awakening I have no problems accepting it's been a dream and I've had no close connection with this band.

gender identity

A boring suburban square north of Stockholm, probably Täby, all my friends or fellow students are pushing themselves into a premise looking like an old tobacconist's, but is a very small education facility, it's going to be cramped, we're going to have to listen to a talk about incomprehensible computer/statistics stuff, there is going to be obligatory physical exercise, and I'm panicking about it. I just can't endure it, I have to leave that godawful place, I can't wait until my classmates are ready, because then it will be late afternoon and dark, and people will ask me why I've skipping school, and we will have to wait for so long in the dark for the crowded bus and not know which is the right one and it will probably take us not into the city but to some other far-off bus terminal where we must change again, etc etc, it is unbearable and I have to get away immediately. My best friend (female, though I don't remember whom) comes along with me, and we catch a bus which is probably the right one. But we don't get the seats next to each other; in front of me there is a teenager in heavy make-up and next to her my friend. My friend starts slowly singing "I'll be your mirror", to soothe me and cure the neurotic teenager at the same time, she sings with a clear and steady soprano; I join in with a deeply resounding humming bass, and the fact that I have a male voice is such a surprise, it seems my womanhood has been magically removed as a punishment for ditching school.

life identity

I am struggling to somehow reserve a place for myself in a summerhouse where several people live but all equally vaguely as me, under all kinds of conflicts. One old wino is coming in regularly, whom it seems I was the one to first invite and voucher for him, one of those guys who walks around swearing and ranting but is basically harmless. But this time he has a big black blotch over half his face, and it seems to be an indication that he is going to die very soon.

The rest of us go bathing. With a couple that is just almost part of our company; someone's careerist brother who spends most time abroad and his american girlfriend. And the killer whale (big, beautiful and rather scary) that turns up is most eager to play with them. It swims around them, barely touching them with its back and its fluke. I am sitting on a small raft with some girl, and I am saying "just wait till it gets the idea of playing around with this raft", and of course soon it does. Mostly it just places its chin on one end of the raft, making it stand up vertically out of the water, my companion and I are struggling to remain at the top end. The killer whale likes this trick and repeats it several times. It also realises it can swim around with us in that position, and eventually it swims forth to present us to a giant emperor penguin, who embraces the raft with us in its small flippers. "Ok, I think now is the time to take a very deep breath" I say.

Next thing were all sitting in our collective house again, my companion from the raft is sitting next to me, she is one of these thin intellectual redheads, she is saying she likes a cartoon of mine (supposedly a political cartoon, an allegory about the nobility), I get horribly flattered and almost embarassingly so and I realise I am probably in love with her. But then I also start mixing things up and just because she mentions a cartoon about the nobility I suspect she is of a noble family. Yet I am primarily worried about the gap in continuity, and I ask "but what happened after we dived down with the penguin? Do you have a memory of ever resurfacing? Or are we perhaps dead?"

Under the bridge

2012-01-01T06:03:00.000-08:00

An excursion to a big shooting range again, a nature reserve, a big ruderal area, Hampstead Heath, yet in Sweden (I've dreamt about this place before). It is adventurous to leave the road and enter the forbidden zone. The footpath windles between sandhills. We are brought under a railroad bridge. Someone gives a talk or reads fairytales. But we must all think fast and duck every now and then, because the railroad bridge is rather a cableway, and occasionally huge iron girders come swirling, which would decapitate us if we ducked poorly.

(I had this dream in a hotel room in Philadelphia but remembered it only a couple of days later when standing under a railroad bridge at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia (though on the Maryland side of the river) and the train came.)

Holography

2012-01-01T06:02:00.000-08:00

While waking up I am looking for a really tiny insect specimen which is difficult to find in the ethanol vial. The hypnagogic solution to the hypnagogic problem is simple and elegant: just put the vial in the holographic viewer, and the entire contents of the vial will be projected in the free air of the room; the room will be transformed into an aquarium of the vial's content. Just go around the room and look for the specimen. It has the intimacy of the typical aquarium-reflected light, softly but idly bouncing-dancing-settling, but rather more marine blue than aquarium green. Especially if the vial is given a good shake before put in the visualiser, the contents will be slowly raining down like the snow of these commercial snowy landscape globes, and everything will be easy to find; it can be viewed from all angles freely in the open space of the room.

A Foreign Land

2012-01-01T06:01:00.001-08:00

The night before a journey, with uneasy sleep and the mind already on the way, projecting a generic foreign country:

* I am the only one who walks along the beach in a foreign coastal city; many walk along the road a bit up. I don't mind appearing as the pedagogic madman, so I holler at the children and ask them to notice the strange big pufferfish/crabs/horseshoe crabs living in the very surf zone, and may be mistaken for old plastic bags if one doesn't look carefully, or rather old canvas mail sacks, or fragments of seal mummies.

* At some camp in a foreign country, I am sitting in a cafeteria in a big cottage in an opening in the forest, waiting for all the others to wake up and have breakfast so we can commence today's activities. An asian cook is working in the next room. One by one people drop in, and eventually I wonder if I remembered to eat anything myself; obviously we get freshly made thai food for breakfast here.

* My colleague wakes me up in a hotel room in a foreign country, rather tenderly but not suggesting we would have an affair or so. But she is obsessed with something, jolts around looking for something, half-dressed; her presence is so vivid, rather uncomfortable, somewhat obscene and magnetic, intimate and rather incommunicable; the different smells of her are sharp and unresting.

Word monsters

2011-08-09T13:54:00.000-07:00

As I´m currently writing an essay on the occurences of puns and word-playing in dreams, I´ve illustrated two examples from my own dream experiences. Both examples, that were seen as well as heard, were dreamed as pictures that I feel were derived from verbal puns or word-play.

FRANKENSTEINWAY

This image and its title came to me in a dream after having read a good book titled The Methodology. Around the "Frankensteinway" at the bottom at left I have also drawn the components of this invention, which read as a chain of associations around replicating processes: a Steinway piano, Frankenstein´s monster, a Komodo dragon (recently known for being able to reproduce parthenogenetically) and the greek Parthenon temple.

The word Frankensteinway is an example of what Max Ernst called a "phallustrade", which, according to the surrealist dictionary is defined as "an alchemical product, composed of the following elements: autostrade, balustrade and a certain quantity of phallus. A phallustrade is a verbal collage."

CRUST FAMILY

This image and its title is a pun trying to invert "nuclear family" by opposition; the earth or mud that stains the laundry seem to allude both to a geological crust and to the gritty crust-punk lifestyle (crust is perhaps an onomatopoetical name for how this style of punk music sounds, but the name could in turn also have been chosen as a pun by opposition on the hardcore influence upon the genre.)

The commentary section below is the right place to gather more examples of word-playing and verbal or visual puns in dreams.

/ NN

Heating and defense of dream city

2011-07-01T07:05:00.000-07:00

"The big house" is in a rundown industrial area near the water, Norrköping or London. Above all, it has a magnificent ceiling height. The building didn't cost much, but heating costs are tremendous.

Olof's sister is a beautiful and wise Iranian of zoroastric heritage. She knows that one's DNA can be stored in a bucket of raspberry juice. When the day finally comes, there will emerge a homunculus. He will take care of our interests.

It will all work fine even when we are under attack, because the gutter system of the city is fully functional. If the sewerage is inverted it could be lead out through the gutters, creating an effective barrier of dirt, a moat.

And even though the social habits in "the big house" is a bit stiff at the moment, people are rather overdressed, and it all feels like an official birthday reception a summer afternoon in a rented mansion, or like a visit to the Thiel gallery, still there will take shape something meaningful from here.

MF

(When I told Christofer D about "the big house", he immediately recognised it as "Värmekyrkan" - a huge old heating boiler station in the industrial area in Norrköping which has served as a venue for cultural events. I have never been there awake and can't remember having heard of it before.)

New York er eyja í Atlantshafi

2011-06-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

The plot is set. Years after my father’s death his top secret research project coincidentally is being revealed; and the intrigue evolves in a familiar thriller fashion:

In our family’s summer house a hidden door has been found. After making the decision that it should be opened, it leads us down to an unknown basement where we make the discovery of a clandestine archive, full of dust and documents. The research material maps out the mysterious circumstances of the disappearance of a number of important persons. Now, unexpected facts come to our knowledge and formerly unknown connections of historical events emerge. As we study the material, including some shimmery, blurry images of old video tape recordings from the seventies, on which different, obviously nervous (and perhaps frightened) people appear, talking about strange matters, we slowly become aware of the proportions and the magnitude of our discovery, which leads us to the conclusion that—yet to hesitate—we must travel to New York.

Stanislaw Lem's Futurologial congress as percieved while being riddled by a nightmare

New York. A gigantic cosmopolis, even bigger than what the latest records show (apparently not quite up to date); it has failed to seize growing throughout the years, indomitable and heedless, in spite of governmental restriction programs, continuously striving upwards in celestial vain. Within this urban dream shape we experience an overlapping city landscape with ground floors reaching higher grounds and street levels interconnecting through exquisitely engineered pipe-tunnel roads enclosed with chrome and glass, spiraling their way through the sky. We stay in a luxurious hotel, thousand stories high, surrounded by equally high buildings. Our hotel room, at first glance, has a modest design—less furniture than space, more room, less gloom—yet exclusively ultra modern futuristic; the room shifts in colour, blending perfectly: from white to beige to grey, with a slight resemblance of mosstone. The shape of the room, not easily to define, could be described as a trapezoid semi-superellips and has an entire wall section consisting of a large window glass, and thin white draperies. The room goes with an Italian balcony; un letto matrimoniale, a royal wedding bed; and an original Steinway, white and shiny. Built into the walls is an intricate system of small rippling rills of water flowing through lightly lit panels of frosty glass. A surround speaker system is part of the interior architecture as well: down from the beautiful cupola roof different sound environments and atmospherics are spreading out and filling up the entire room, mood by listener’s choice: Scottish highland, German forest, African savanna, Mediterranean coast, Catalan monastery, Swedish midsummer, misty moor with dancing fairies, deep ocean life on Mars … We fill our glasses with champagne and drink a toast to the bride and groom. The wedding cake is made of love, hope, cream and strawberries.

Out in to the Jungle. Since we are newly married and hypersensitive, we are overwhelmed with the enormous traffic intensity; but what strikes us even more is the fact that the air is clean and that we can joyfully breathe. We fill our lungs and blank our minds—from that moment on our mission is forgotten. At first relieved, but then suddenly troubled again, it seems that what now is at stake is our marriage. However, that is a worry we chose to ignore. Futuristic figures of all sorts pass by, among ordinary 21th century people, as we stand there on the sidewalk, in sunshine and gazing amazement. The street, so it appears, is a reconstruction of S:t Eriksgatan in Stockholm. Not knowing what the next step should be, we decide not to make up any plans but to submit to the spur of the moment, and so it happens: we found ourselves involved in the rather dodgy act of following a queer-looking gentleman wearing white clown makeup, a red and yellow-striped sweater and purple trousers with blue suspenders, who is riding a 16 feet high unicycle northwards … in the direction of Brooklyn! Soon we are confused; the lack of bridges and water is what puzzles us, while the biking clown disappears around the corner of a fashionable and impressive brick stone building. As we compare reality with our own map, we come to the conclusion that we are no longer on an island in the Hudson river, called Manhattan as we presumed, but that this future version of New York city actually consists of a conglomerate of islands, a pseudo-continent, like a reversed minor Pangea. As a matter of fact, large parts of the North American east coast has been torn off from the mainland, melting together with other parts and nearby islands and then been drifting away, out to the sea. All of a sudden I remember the first line that I learned in Icelandic: “Ísland er eyja í Atlantshafi”—“Iceland is an island in the Atlantic”.

At this point there is a shift of perspective: high from above, while the sun is setting, we look down on our dream named New York, where it lies like a tiny dark spot in the grand shiny ocean. One long, single railway bridge leads out over the water, away from the black island/continent.

/μσλ

Paul in Paris (syrup and carbuncles), 1978

The Wandering Jewess

2011-06-26T03:59:00.000-07:00

There is a red double-decker London night-bus called the Wandering Jewess. Tickets are free but you're only allowed on board if you have Jewish ancestry. I get on. It goes out into the countryside, among big arable fields. It makes brief regular stops, but no one gets on or off. At one stop my travelling companion and I get off to inspect the wildflowers by the side of the road, along the edge of a huge flat field. The bus starts to move off and we have to jump back on quickly before it pulls away.

/MFl

The joy of not knowing where

2011-06-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

(Pater Noster Square)

I have an appointment in a part of Stockholm which I don't know. I find it very exciting, in an ambiguous way, that there is a part of town which I don't know. I am taking a particular bus, from a terminal I know, and will go only one stop, yet end up somewhere completely unknown to me. The terminal appears to be Jarlaplan (a bus terminal in northeastern part of inner Stockholm which was abandoned and destroyed in the 70s) and thus the unknown part of town must be in the eastern parts (the quiet and upperclass parts).

During the short busride I am flirting with an ugly yet very attractive woman who is leading a crowd of little old ladies with walking difficulties.

My appointment is at Fadervårtorget (Pater Noster Square). Fascinated by the existence of this unknown square I walk back and forth, pondering the environments, wondering which one of the strange pedestrians who might be the person I am supposed to meet. Most people seem to be small women in raincoats. Like a happy child I enjoy my disorientation; since I haven't seen a map, and the sky is overcast, and there are no natural landforms, I can't even tell which direction is which! At the neighboring streets there are all kinds of small stores and some big restaurants or bars, particularly fish restaurants.

Half-awake, I start hypnagogically rationalising this remarkable dream. I'm trying to stick to the subject matter, but it seems elusive as I have to edit two volumes of Kafka stories, with all the emotional strain it involves to empathise with them in order to reconstruct their inner sequence. But Kafka always lived and wrote his stories in this tiny apartment in Helsinki, in an old building which is now accessible in the exotic eastern parts of Stockholm. I'm trying to write my signature on some applications, but all I can produce is Kafka's.

It seems like I have several times hypothethised unknown parts of Stockholm and usually in the eastern parts. I get an image of explaining the Fadervårtorget to other people, claiming that it is one of the many swiss-cheese-holes in the otherwise socially homogenous eastern parts, this one specifically being a square around which the specifically degenerate branches of the upperclass families accumulated, those branches who were declassed, badly alcoholised or just perpetually sidestepped, who all turned small-shop-owners, bike-repairers, day-laborers or public square winos; still refusing to live in any other parts than their traditional eastern ones. And then recently, there had been some preliminary attempts to gentrify this exotic piece of land, hence the big bars-restaurants.

Later fully awake, I seem to remember that whenever I postulate unknown parts of Stockholm they are always in Östermalm, the eastern parts. Indeed the quietness and often ghost-town-feeling of these parts as well as the alienation before its very distinct class character might be a good breeding ground for such ideas. In the few dreams I vaguely remember about this, there is always some larger north-south-street which marks the sharp boundary between the common central Stockholm and the Östermalm wilderness. Sometimes this border has been Birger Jarlsgatan (fits with this dream, since this streets starts at Jarlaplan where the old bus terminal was) and the unknown east is then often like a chaotic big city with old buildings, similar to parts of Paris perhaps. Sometimes it has been further west and has been Sveavägen. I remember standing at Sveaplan looking south, and the Vanadislunden hill to the left has been a "hic sunt leones" wilderness, where I have dared venture only briefly; it has always been abandoned, dry and overgrown.

/MF

Nautical miles

2011-02-06T06:40:00.000-08:00

My friend N and I have been visiting London. He's heading back to Finland, I'm on my way to Stockholm but, because of the ferry routes, have to change ferries in Mariehamn. Bit of a daft detour, as Stockholm is closer to London than to the Åland Islands.

/IÖ

The landscape of our dreams

2011-01-30T04:46:00.000-08:00

The cormorant council proudly announces that many of its early speculations on the theoretical foundations for its activity are now available – some for the first time in English, some for the first time openly – in a pdf anthology, which is one of the many suddenly offered to the reading public at merdarius's pdf library "Bibliotheca onthoplanctorum" at the Stockholm surrealist group site.

The continent forgotten

2011-01-09T04:31:00.000-08:00

Another version of not reaching Africa: I actually settled down in a house in Mali – but, apart from that general fact, I can't remember a thing!
… if you manage to trespass the southern border of (Scandinavian) imagination, the memories will be confiscated?

/IÖ

Small town bar

2010-12-16T12:08:00.000-08:00

It is winter in Mjölby. I have just got to a newly opened bar near the train station. A troubadour called Loke is going to sing some old country-classics at this place tonight. I step into a small room with a bar and a stage. My clothes are wet and outside it´s dark and the snow is falling.

I keep my outdoor clothes on because there is no place to hang them. At the bar, which is made of steel and looks like a buffet, some bearded men with leather-hats sits muttering over their glasses of beer. By my side is a tall women wearing a very short black skirt and black leather corset.

The owner of the bar is a man from Linköping. He has opened this bar especially for those who moved to Mjölby and are having a hard time to make themselves at home.

The background music fades out and the lights turns on. The owner enters the stage, he is a bit fat, wears glasses and a blue-checkered shirt. He welcomes us to the opening of his new club. Then Loke, the troubadour, comes on stage. The crowd applauds and the lights are dimmed. Before he starts the show he takes a look at the crowd and says: "I want to dedicate this song to all of you who moved here from Linköping, believing you would find a café where you could sit down with your new friends, but never found it. This song is for you…"

Ten percents of the population in Mjölby are alcoholics. I often see a bearded drunk man wearing a leather hat by the train station.

// CD

The baseline for coordinates

2010-11-12T13:03:00.000-08:00

Earlier here, we have been asking what kind of observations, what kind of parameters, one uses in order to deduce where one is in a dream. Of course very often the actual dream landscapes are created using scraps of several different locations from memory, and the actual spatial semaphors (signs signalling where one is) used might relate to just one of these, or several – or just additional signs added without being based in the biographical landscapes the dream landscape is built upon (an example: there is the devil so I must be in hell; or, there is a sign saying Mogadishu so I must be in Somalia). But often, these spatial semaphors can be secondary to the immediate knowledge of where one is, if the location is part of the explicit execution of the dream. This immediate knowledge might also contain a delimitation against places where it's not, and it may either coincide with, take sides among, or entirely contradict, what the spatial semaphors are saying. The little dream I'll be relating is just a small example of this more general observation based on a larger dreaming experience. And furthermore, it starts nicely with a spatial metaphor getting a material expression.

As the conclusion of a long dream of idiotic joking, self-aggrandising, and amorous complications, I'm feeling frustrated over the whole mess, and in order to be able to get an overview, I take my bulldog and start climbing the steep hills of the little town. The bulldog is huge, with a spike collar and an enormous mouth; it is Maldoror's bulldog. The inclination is just like a Norwegian city (Narvik or so), but the vegetation is nemoral and the buildings are English; anyway I don't need to interpret such signs because I know I am in Greenwich, and I feel a certain need to emphasise that this is of course not Greenwich Village, New York, but the real Greenwich, the starting point of all coordinate systems.

/MF

Watch out for the pelican council

2010-11-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

On the childhood island, I want to take a bath, or I am just convinced that the water is a good place to be, but it is frustrating that the main jetty points to the northeast, which means that when standing in the water next to it, spying out eastwards, one is standing in the shade and it gets cold. I'm standing there anyway.

A coot comes swimming towards me, and I notice common coots are beautiful birds. The next bird is a grebe, calmly sailing by me very close, and I'm thinking it's a good thing with the shade after all, when I stand there rather immobile I become like a heron and form a part of the general environment. When the grebe passes it changes, grows bigger and darker, eventually it becomes a cormorant.

I am standing there in immobility and shade. Around mere there are huge birds, continuously and diffusely uttering a low uninspired cackling, indolently yet threatfully, like when one has to make way through a crowd of lazy large gulls occupying the jetty. I thought these birds were cormorants, but they are actually even bigger and have very long beaks; they are pelicans!

A small company of my relatives comes down to the beach, and walk out into the water next to me. It makes me angry, the pelicans won't stay calm; pelicans smell so bad, and they can be so aggressive, they will raise hell for this. But my relatives have a strange ability, in their resolute hostility, to drive the pelicans in front of them, they are just swimming away, towards the northwest in the strait. A beautiful cousin forms the rearguard, she is somehow the prisoner of the others, at least she can express her dissent by keeping her distance while slowly walking through the water. I keep her company, and tell her about the danger of the pelicans, but it is so pleasant so I'm thinking that if I could wade through life with her I could stand the pelican smell. Cormorants do smell worse after all.

/MF

Towards the Tintin gate

2010-11-02T11:42:00.000-07:00

/.../ The important thing about Tintin City is that you get there through a particular epistemological break, which is called the "Tintin Gate". The Tintin Gate is the centerpiece in a new school of mysticism, the prophet of which I will now become. The fact that I am now homeless will make it difficult for me to get into the restaurants to have breakfast and convince the tourists, but of course many other prophets have been poor and ragged creatures too. Perhaps someone will lend me a bike, and I can bike around and eventually find someone who offers me breakfast. I will have a yellow robe, and I will know six different words for snowball, this is very important.

After other adventures, in a commuter train stopping halfway between stations, I open my computer as a book and read about life in sunken Atlantis. I am somehow struck between the similarities of social and architectural organisation between Atlantis and Tintin City, and I get very enthusiastic when I read that the most holy artifact in Atlantis is the "smoking heart of motherhood", a piece of ember issuing a long trail of bubbly smoke that looks like the seaweed forming the long hair of a medusahead. This is obviously analogous to the state of things on the other side of the Tintin Gate. There are engravings illustrating all of this, with pastoral lovers running around performing strange rituals in underwater ruins (the engravings look like 18th century post-alchemical preromantic mystic christianity emblems rather than actual alchemical allegories).

/MF

In Arcadia

2010-10-24T07:45:00.000-07:00

To complete my posts about pastoral landscapes, I once dreamt about the mythological / utopian Arcadia. The sketch above depicts a water-terrace arrangement on the slope of Mount Helicon, which the dream situated there. I have written more extensively about the dream here.

" /.../ at the vast terraced slopes of Mount Helicon (as I´ve seen it depicted in alchemical illustrations) with a bewildered look of concentration on his face, while the well-springs of the rock´s inspirational muses were bubbling and forming huge dandelion-like water globes behind him."

/NN

Heaven and Tax-Refund

2010-10-22T10:33:00.000-07:00

I´m attending a political lecture, where Kristian Kristansson, editor of Kris, is just stating:

"People actually believe that the taxes they are paying somehow returns to them."

He shows an illustration of this:

Then another illustration is shown. It reminds me of Waldemar Lorentzon´s Cosmic Mother, but instead of that painting´s mother-figure in the clouds a flute-playing Pan-figure appears:

At the same time these words are accompanying these pictures:

"Panpipe tones in the boy-depth

Clouds descend into the landscape

One rejoices at the soft sincerity of the sky"

/ NN

Looking Down

2010-10-15T14:33:00.000-07:00

Dream-sight:

An old woman sleeping in the vast landscape of her blue dotted dress.

Associations:

Habitable exoplanets:

Taeniura lymma. An attractive bottom dwelling fish:

/NN

The Hibakusha Free State

2010-10-13T01:28:00.000-07:00

A dream of Africa from last night:

My friend H and I find ourselves confronted with a map of Africa. There are only a few names printed on it, we are to come up with the names of all the countries. At fourteen, I wouldn't have hesitated, now we have to guess a lot. We start at the east coast, south of Somalia, with Tanzania and Mocambique.
Then there's a rather large country with a free state, named Hibakusha, in the middle. Liberia? No, no, I know where Liberia really is. Big country encompassing Hibakusha Free State? I have no idea. H produces the name, but I can't hear it properly, and don't ask for it, as we move on to the next one, between South Africa and Congo Kinshasa.
Again, I can't remember the name. We are told by a third person it's Zambia. That puzzles me: it's five times bigger than Zambia should be. And where is Zimbabwe on this map? The borders seem to have changed.
South Africa is easy, we pass over it more or less without a mention. And then, on the west coast, which one is that again? We get a hint from the third person: the misty mountains with gorillas. We hesitate. Namibia. I have a feeling something's fishy, those rain forests should be a long way up north, shouldn't they? Oh well. Angola is next.

[Madagascar is missing from the map, but in the dream I don't pay attention to that. And although Zambia is somewhat enlarged and the shape a bit distorted, the dream-me had actually mixed up Zimbabwe and Zambia, while the third person's information in that case was more accurate.]

/ IÖ

The coastal life of tomorrow

2010-10-09T02:03:00.000-07:00

In the future, when the sea level has become prone to changing back and forth by tens of meters within just a few hours, the most convenient way to move along the coast – or indeed live by it – will be by kayak. The only situation bound to cause some confusion, is when you have stayed the night on a very narrow shelf in a vertical rock wall. You may wake up to find the sea surface has dropped by several meters, and the kayak, tied by its handle, is hanging straight down the granite wall.

/ IÖ, 9.9.10

Cormorant commons

2010-10-05T10:54:00.000-07:00

Tonight I had a political dream of geography, which reminded me we need to start looking on dream space in terms of commons. Now, in the dreamscape, how does colonisation occur? What is private property and what is commons? How do we change a place from one to the other? Is the dream in itself a common, or a potential common which we share by telling and pooling our dreams?

Listen:

prelude:

I am walking home from Tumba station in the middle of the night. It's a noisy night, drunk teenagers everywhere, and pools of their urine. I am taking a shortcut through a vast sparse shrubbery. Many voices warn me against this route; it is supposed to be packed with flashers. That seems to me to be an effective quasireligious taboo rumour, because everybody knows it, nobody goes there, not even the flashers, so it is a beautiful abandoned free zone, without all this urine. But, as it is spring, the stream is flooded, and I can't cross where I want. I have to go back and find another route. I could stay on the railroad bank, the railroad tracks must make a bridge over the stream. When I reach the bridge, I realise this is where I have to climb the fence and cross within the restricted railway area. It is also a somewhat dangeous jump I need to do to get onto the bridge, but since it is winter there is a vast slope of snow that would cushion my fall if I wouldn't make it, so it is a good opportunity. But before I jump, someone greets my from below. It is a botanist friend. She asks me why I'm not taking the stairs. Well, of course I could do that, at least if it gives me the pleasure of her company. She is on crutches, and during our climbing the stairs I occasionally have to help her, and I enjoy the physical contact.

main dream:

There is a vast area of parkland outside the central city, which either has been, or will be transformed into, a commercial funfair, unless we present a good plan for how to use the space in making an open popular park, a common. The area is very clearly defined, it reminds me most of the Northern cemetery in Stockholm, or Crystal Palace in London. But just like any vast parkland, some borders are blurred, and that's those parts where there is neither public access nor clear walls or fences; the area with maintenance buildings, plantschools and large composts. In this case, it is the southeast parts.

We are studying the map. My idea is to structure the area in four quadrants, and each quadrant into three columns, thus representing the twelve months of the year. Other people have made synaesthetical suggestions for most months, but the problematic southeast corner (november-december) remains. I start working in november. I divide the column into rectangular slots and starts digging in them, like flowerbeds or large graves. I am "the digging man" of the old version of the official emblem of the swedish academy of sciences. But I still don't know what this amounts to. So somebody explains to me: November has to do with Incest. I am given a long phrase of wordplay which I don't remember clearly, something like "Inner conceptual sinister incense-gardens of incest". It only makes me think of Octave Mirbeau. Incest? But the only person in this dream that I've been attracted to was my botanist friend! Someone explains to me: no, it has to be incest, but it is not any incest, and definitely not the "nasty" kinds, no this is the "innocent" male adolescent pornographic fantasy, it is about consenting brother and sister, or consenting healthy son and young beautiful mother! I still don't understand the point.

postlude:

A major demonstration, with some serious plans to annihilate some buildings by spraying them with some magically corrosive acid. Thus it is imperative that we are not stopped by the police before we get there. Several of us are very nervous and start out in different directions, and the plans to intercept and join in with the demonstration develops into a cartographic delirium. We have started out from a southwest Stockholm metro station (Aspudden or Telefonplan), and the main mass of people may already have passed Övre Malmgatan (what?), but they will have to arc and get back south again at a particular broad triangle of park adjacent to the main park, be it Solna cemetery adjacent to Northern cemetery (Stockholm), or S:t James's park adjacent to Green Park and Hyde Park (London), but it is called Mala Straka (Praha), and we could take a shortcut just going straight east on Nevskij Prospekt (Petersburg), and I know for certain that we are still in Wien and not in any other city.

Question:

Interesting dream. While we develop tools to understand dreams in terms of commons (suggestions?) there is also a perhaps easier task: "Other people have made synaesthetical suggestions for most months": Please contribute with suggestions for general themes of the other months than the incestuous november!

/MF

Sacred Geography Headwear

2010-10-04T16:53:00.000-07:00

A great atlas lies spread all over the table in front of me. A map of the lower and central Norrland, with creamy yellow fields and bright green lines. I study the map with interest, almost aware of its fleeting nature. I look in vain for the name Cat Sand, which I think is either the name of a city or a mountain. Instead, I make a completely different discovery: a few tens of mil east of the Great Lake in Jämtland lies a lake which has remained hitherto unknown to me. It is about the size of the latter, and according to the map it is called Ural.

The map turns into reality in front of me. Now I can look out over Ural from a location at its closest beach, while the lake imperceptibly must shrink; for a black Volvo car is emerging in the growing forest silhouette on the far shore.

Two male persons get out of the car. One has a head which consists of the flame of a candle, the other's head also emits light but is white and round as well, like a snowman's head. Recognizing them as my brother and a friend of his, I wave at them.

Right then I hear a voice from out of nowhere:

The eyes are washed by a new water, from outside, from the air.

The lake between us is gone and I can talk to my brother and his friend who owns the car. By now they have ordinary heads. We are in a forest of tall pines, which are so thinly spread out that they could drive through with their car and park there. Patches of snow lie between the pines which make me think that it's April. They tell me they gather the snow and build pyramids of it around the pine trees. I doubt it, but a look at the nearest pines and I can confirm that it is true: each bole really has a snow pyramid around its foot, about as high, wide and sloping as an ordinary snowball lantern.

I ask them if it is not difficult to build these pyramids.

"No, it's similar to blowing one´s nose," my brother answers unassumingly and looks away.

"Yes," his friend agrees, "or to a dog covering up its excrement."

For some reason or not, my brother takes up his driver´s license and shows it to me. It is a "dual" license: on the same piece of plastic there are two different names with different photos. The first name and photo is my brother´s, but the second photo is just a black box, and beneath this box it is printed:

Robert Frost: The Mending wall.

This is an American poet and a famous poem by him, which I recall having read in an anthology a long time ago, but I do not remember more than the title right now. In my hands the driver´s license is then transformed into a LP record sleeve. A blue pyramid and a blue face against a star-strewn night sky. The band name, or disc title, which I have never seen or heard before,

Jxploited

makes me associate to a quaint blending of cultural styles : New Age and Punk. I contemplate the picture on the cover, especially the head. Could it be, I ponder, that the face of this image in some emblematic fashion is using the rock-crystal-topped pyramid as a wig or a hat? And I think:

"The face is interestingly crafted, since it neither looks entirely male nor female, neither entirely European nor Oriental or African ..."

Then the voice from nowhere is there again. It feels closer this time, as it takes up my train of thought and embroider upon it with kind of enigmatic lyrical stanzas, of which I am only able remember the last two lines:

The judge before his sword
Smiling before the last water

/ NN

Diagnostics at the waterline

2010-09-27T13:12:00.000-07:00

A seashore, two friends and I. Further away, there's a man working in a garden or an orchard. He is far away enough for us not to ask him where we are. We have been suddenly transferred to this place while reading aloud and discussing a text depicting that very gardening activity; in a children's book, perhaps, or some publication concerning food.
We don't know where we are, and we can't ask the man. The landscape is restless and varying, with great contrasts in altitude, and a rich, unfamiliar vegetation which indicates we're not in Scandinavia (not even the Norwegian coast, despite the steep cliffs). I look at the sea.
"What if this is the Mediterranean", I say.
The others become silent and ponder the possibility. In my head I try to picture the coastlines of France and Spain, because if the sea is the Mediterranean, this place surely would have to be within that region.
I think of a combination of three characters that would be diagnostic:
1) To confirm this is a sea at all, we'd have to taste it. But for some reason I don't feel like tasting the water.
2) If this is the Mediterranean, its surface should have a distinctly green hue. It does, partly, show a blue-green shade, but I'm not convinced it's enough.
3) I feel the temperature of the water with my hands.
"It's warm", I state. "That means this really could be the Mediterranean."
But I'm not yet thoroughly convinced. I think it feels warmer than the Atlantic would (and that's the only alternative sea), but my experience may not suffice.

/ IÖ

Sinusiniri Bay

2010-09-25T23:38:00.000-07:00

I’m living at a hotelroom by the coast and I’m just about to go to bed. Kalle and Mattias look by, and point out that it’s full daylight outside, and it would be nice to take a walk in such a bright night. We start to do that. The news reach us that there’s an attack on an American naval base at the “Sinusiniri Bay”. The name comes from the fact that the bay is formed like a sinus curve. We want to go there to see what’s going on. Mattias gets his Mac up and starts to do different searches. We use a searchprogram where one can place out different ships etc to search for their specific formations. We are, however, a bit uncertain as to what should be included in the American naval base. A square platform, some battleships? The search program suggests different areas: A map over London (with a possible sinusformed bay), Venice, a map over the “solar observatory” in the middle of Africa. Nothing suggests the place where we want to go. Niklas joins up and we go to a restaurant to eat. The food portions are too small, everyone returns them, except for me who is happy with ham, ananas and rice.

Iceland

2010-08-26T06:12:00.000-07:00

I was on a quiz show with an American youngster wearing hip-hop style clothes. He got a map of Iceland and looked at it. The island was almost completely covered by glaciers on the map. The game show-host asked the young man what he knew about Iceland. He answered arrogantly: "Iceland? It´s like the icepole of the world." With that answer he won a trip to Reykjavik. I was also going to Reykjavik to take part in an exhibition outside the town hall.

Onboard the plane I read about Icelandic architecture and common Icelandic phrases. I noticed that there were a lot of starving children on the plane, on field-trip or maybe on their way to the exhibition. The children were being entertained by some people skydiving with polar-bears. Town hall in Reykjavik looked a lot like the opera house of Sydney, fronting a large futuristic piazza.

The night before the exhibition I was walking through town. I discovered that a lot of the small wooden houses where public baths, maybe the city had been built by perverted Romans? The streets were full of dirty water and I had to watch my step. Back at the hotel I studied a map of the city and saw it was divided into two districts. The old part of town had the structure of a wagon-wheel. A large church represented the hub of the wheel. The new part of town was called Bergen, had a grid plan structure and was about five or six times as big. A wide river separated the two areas and I came to the conclusion I was looking at a map of San Francisco.

How do we shape our inner cities in our dreams? Picture postcards, memories, atmosphere etc.

/C D

dream travelling in august

2010-08-22T05:31:00.000-07:00

During the past week or so I have had a series of dreams elaborating some of the dream geography themes often covered here. The dreams were very long and full of details so they were hardly blog-suitable. As my friends were reproaching me for this, I have now picked some of the central geographical highlights and am presenting them piecemeal here (Surrealist headquarters 1-4, Travelling with surrealists 1-3, Yet another strange route to Göteborg). I'm adding the important disclaimer that the major part of the dream accounts and most of the detailed descriptions are left out and for any purposes whatsoever much of the significant content may lie in parts here excluded.

/MF

Surrealist headquarters

2010-08-22T05:30:00.000-07:00

1
After long waiting, I am being let into an apartment in Marieberg, Stockholm, where there is some surrealist activity going on. I had been walking around in a suburban shopping center with a visiting foreign surrealist, whose name I can't remember, and as my surrealist friends here have been taking apart and only halfway reassembling my computer, I can't search for the name in my files.

2
I am walking through the city at night, in a very good mood. If I am in such a good mood, why don't I go into a pub and mingle with the other nightwalkers, isn't there a place that I like so much around here? But of course going into a pub is usually quite de-enticing and perhaps it would be too much of challenging fate anyway. Nevertheless I keep thinking about this place, perfect for meetings as well as for social hanging out, its details are just like the famous "Harlösa Grand Café" in a small village in Skåne, but it lies within reach of the big Stockholm Northern Cemetary, and looks out over the trainyard north of the Central Station.

Inside I find Erik B sitting there having his lunch, entertaining the other customers with paranoid political comments, as if he was of the ordinary local alcoholic character gallery. I sit down at his table, and at first I try to make him lower his voice, but then I realise that some of the other customers are actually far more into his monologue than I am. So instead I start flirting with the waitress, who is also the owner, and the only member of the staff. She gives the impression of being a stranded spy from another planet or dimension. I offer her my help. She says she would much appreciate if I would come by during her lunch break to have sex with her.

At that point we all go out to see the sunrise from the Barnhusbron bridge, and a big confusion reigns.

3
The thing I actually enjoy about lucid dreaming is to attentively look around in fantastic landscapes. And on the other side of the narrow sound there is a beautiful islet. In fact it is the islet facing my childhood bathing place near the family summerhouse, but much more dramatic. It is actually so dramatic that I don't think more about lucidity. The islet is just a big granite rock in the sea, the higher parts are exposed rock, surrounded by ordinary "hällmarkstallskog" (again that word with no everyday english equivalent: a semi-open granite bedrock scots pine forest with lichens and lingonberries). The open area, like a bald crown, has two buildings, one ordinary archipelago house (early 20th century two-storey red-and-white villa with a glass veranda and many carpenter ornaments) but one house which looks older and sinister, it must be a chapel, in the shape of a cross with a semicircle, it looks like a ruin from an alchemical engraving, it could be an elaborate columbarium or something even worse. Some steep but not high cliffs, interesting vegetation (very much like Fredhällsparken in Stockholm). It looks like this would be magnificent new headquarters for the surrealist movement. We would go climbing there, in the sunshine it would be like "Picnic at hanging rock" and if it rains it will be "Wuthering heights".

I have to get there immediately. I somehow launch myself swimming in rocket speed, and when I quickly reach the eastern tip of the island I realise there are houses there, and a lot of people bathing, hidden under the weeping willows leaning over the water. I slow down as I turn westwards to follow the shady coast of the islet, and there I find a small pier. I go ashore and find myself in a huge open barn, with large containers of stuff, and various computer and surveillance monitors.

4
I am taking the westbound train the southern route from Stockholm. I am impressed by the dramatic primeval forest. We are climbing a hill. I am told that this is such a wild area, and the rise is so steep, that only some trains make it, the others have to turn back to Stockholm. The mountain we are climbing is the famous "Södermanland's watershed" which is symbolically and geographically the divide between western and eastern Sweden, western Sweden being drained through Vänern-Göta älv-Göteborg and eastern Sweden through Mälaren-Stockholms Ström. (In fact, I am making this up. There is a geographically important hilly region in this direction, but that is further in, namely the Kilsbergen hills of Närke, representing the border between the hilly Norrland terrain and the south-swedish plains; but there are no larger hills in Södermanland.)

We make it up the hill. It is extremely beautiful, with this wild forest and the vast view. And we just keep rising. Eventually I see a vast sea, with some big islands. Somebody tells me it is Hjälmaren, and for some reason I accept that (even though Hjälmaren is actually a completely unimpressive shallow plains lake). Everybody gets off at the summit station, where there is a small tourist café. I think this is so great. The whole national park that we are in should be proclaimed the terrain of the surrealist movement, and we should have all our meetings there.

Travelling with surrealists

2010-08-22T05:28:00.000-07:00

1
There is a surrealist taskforce in postcatastrophal New Orleans. What the taskforce is for is not clear, we are mostly snooping around, occasionally finding abandoned children or taking beautiful photographs. Not only is it dangerous because all flooded areas are full of alligators, there are also several sites and buildings discovered to be full of human skeletons, seemingly in ancient roman armor. Johannes and Chris are frustrated and insist that no irrational explanations can be allowed. I, on the other hand, am getting convinced that it really is a matter of a chaos nexus opened by mathematical-magical manipulation. It seems to have to do with the swedish pension system. If I can just calculate when the people born in 1965 will reach pension age, I might be able to solve this. But I fail to do the simple calculation before waking up.

2
I keep walking astray, and I find myself again only in Bucuresti. It resembles Uppsala, I only find dull residential areas, and no good place to spend the night. Because now my entire travelling company catches up with me. It is a fairly big group, including people from different surrealist groups I've been in over the years. Anna and Emma, both hardly taller than a car in the street but extremely hardboiled with leatherjackets, chewinggums and sunglasses, reproach me for having rushed ahead, and especially for still not having been able to arrange lodging. Fredrik knows what to do, he calls an anarchist friend back in Stockholm and asks him to call the swedish information service and have them book a hotel room for us. But during this, all our children, who are mostly Fredrik's responsibility, sneak away. One of them hides under the car, and threatens to rush out into the street at any moment.

3
On a biking tour with a large group of surrealists, going through a small town (english or hungarian), taking shortcuts over vacant lots (nice atoposes). I am getting lucid and trying to make people react but in vain. It rains and reminds me of Ludvika in Dalarna, Sweden or of Tromsø in northern Norway.

MF

Yet another strange route to Göteborg

2010-08-22T05:27:00.001-07:00

I keep seeing a strangely shaped balloon in the distance. Spying from the bedroom window of the apartment where I grew up, I notice that the balloon is shaped like a grand piano, and it is moving fast. The fact that it is not an ordinary commercial balloon makes me interested, and I realise I can fly with my boy bedroom, so I take off with it. It takes some effort to gain height, and I am surprised how hilly this part of town is, I have to steer away from colliding with mountain sides and tall buildings all the time. Soon I lose track of the balloon, and I land at a table in an outdoors restaurant, on a hill in Göteborg, next to a big hospital. I ask the guy who already has the table if he minds, and he doesn't, so I pick up the menu and study it.

MF

bus #7

2010-08-10T09:05:00.000-07:00

To the subject of public transport:

In a rural landscape we are waiting for the bus. It is a late spring afternoon with a setting sun and the air getting chilly, the place is a small-scale agricultural area, with a typical rural main road, cattle-grazed pastures with sloe shrubberies and invading small inlets from the sea with alder forest.

Bus # 7 arrives, it is our bus, I climb onto it, but Jonas, who is the tour leader, keeps waiting, holds people back, I don't know why, and eventually the bus takes off, with me but without everybody else.

I realise that what I need to do is just to get off the bus at a good spot and wait for the next one.

But we are in Göteborg. There are few nice places and I don't find my way very well.

It is however remarkable that the bus will pass through a normal house, descend the stairs in the house, and emerge at a patio facing the sea. That is a good place to wait. But it takes such a long time, it becomes night, several buses go in the other direction and a few with other numbers in the right direction. I start talking with some seamen/drunks hanging out there, and eventually with the old couple living in the house.

comments:
(the group may be the cormorant council or some other group. The setting for the opening scene resembles very much a place on Ljusterö in the Stockholm archipelago)

(Somebody said there was a popsong about Göteborg tram # 7, which I can't remember having heard.)

(I just noticed that in my novel about "Art and the Deathstar" there is a dream from approximately three years ago which is partly similar, where I am waiting for an evening tram in a rural landscape outside Stockholm (in that case one of the big Mälaren islands rather than an archipelago island) and instead gets a ride with a car taking me into Göteborg.)

(The unexpected and undesired shortcut to Göteborg from the outskirts of Stockholm is obvious, but what i find most interesting in this dream is the the fact that the dream bus route has no respect for private property and the sacredness of the domestic sphere, it goes through somebody's house when it needs to)

/MF

Piccolo

2010-05-25T03:46:00.001-07:00

London has become the latest capital to introduce a one-way system across the whole city.

This type of traffic system is known as a Piccolo.

MFl

geobiographical dream

2010-05-14T04:34:00.000-07:00

The introduction to this dream was an awake reflection, which I have posted on the icecrawler instead, uncertain how narrowly to interpret the dream geographical focus of this site... So go there for an introduction. The dream went as follows:

Midnight in the suburb where I live, I am trying to intervene in people's lives with supposedly scandalous revelations, for example shouting that someone's red car is actually red. But I also have far to walk along the edge of the residential area towards the forested hill. Only a small fence keeps me from walking in the forest instead (a normal "hällmarkstallskog" semi-open lingonberry-lichen granite bedrock scots pine forest), so I cross it, and soon reach a beautiful vantage point by dawn.

(Next step is in a student corridor not far from where I grew up, I am breaking up with an old girlfriend in a sleepingbag on the kitchen floor. She is less angry than I expected, she is talking about how much time she will now have to rehearse with a theatre group. I fear this theatre is going to keep haunting me for the rest of my life.)

On the actual street where I grew up, I see a lot of old entomologists, and the reason is that there is a conference in our old apartment. I join them on the way up, but some jokers bend up the floor of the elevator, so we are all looking down into the shaft. I am afraid of heights, and I yell at them furiously. They don't care, but somehow I manage to save myself into the attic. The attic is a huge hidden place in certain horror movies, in a haunting light of dawn. It is divided into two parts. The northern one is like one of the attics at the natural history museum, and I particularly remember a stuffed sea turtle lying on top of a cabinet. It takes me some time to find the passage to the southern one, where the sea of pillows is, and I throw myself jumping in there with the children.

But someone's calling me, I am wanted down in the apartment. Unwillingly I comply. It is now a big apartment from the upperclass city parts. An ex-friend, apparently living there, says he wanted me to meet someone who came on an unexpected visit, namely the comicbook character Olle Ångest (≈ Ollie Angst). The apartment is huge but horse-shoe-shaped and rather narrow, there are doors leading out and to different staircases in every single room. But the whole apartment is furnished to be a surrealist apartment, meaning that it looks like a cramped old antique shop, with musical instruments, anatomical models, and old clocks stacked everywhere. My ex-friend, and his ex-girlfriend now chambermaid, have had to move around a lot of stuff to open the door where I came in, and the door where Olle Ångest was knocking. But the apartment is full of people, mostly teenagers, some in their underwear (like me) but most in ugly suits, looking like 60s mods from a documentary, and like in a documentary they explain to me: "We modern youth like to do the new thing. We want to surprise you. For example, we come on social visits early in the morning!" Can one of these people actually be the real Olle Ångest? None of them look angst-ridden.

Vertical Geography: Afterlife

2010-05-07T16:56:00.000-07:00

Dreams of the afterlife, heaven, hell, rebirth, are the most profound dream-experiences I´ve had. Sometimes we wake up in fright when we die, but in some cases we can keep on dreaming to see what comes next. Sometimes we dream of a place we know is the afterlife, or maybe before life.

Some years ago I had a dream I was walking along a river in a neighborhood where I grew up. By the river I met a girl from my school and her parents and sister. It was dark and the company was illuminated by a hovering lamp-post. I asked if they wanted to join me for a walk, but they said: "We can´t speak to you, we are dead." I figured that I had to die too and asked how. They looked at me with strange eyes and said nothing.

I started walking around the neighborhood. I found all the houses deserted and a grey mist was in the air. In one house was a radio I could remember from another dream but I just walked by, to the back of the house. I stood in front of a window through which I could see the backyard. I jumped right through the glass and when I fell into the grass outside I sunk into the ground.
I woke up in the underground, inside a long and damp tunnel made of green cloth.

It was very tight and the only way to move was to crawl. Outside the tunnel I could hear the sound of washing-machines. At the end of the tunnel everything went black and I woke up by the river without any wounds from jumping through the glass.

I walked over to my friend and her family again and told them that I now had seen what the afterlife is like. They looked at me with sad eyes and said: "That´s not the real afterlife" and walked away with the lamp-post hovering above them.

In another dream I found myself standing before a stairway somewhere in space. I could see a light at the the top of the stair and when I got there I could see a 20 meter high statue with its arms pointing straight out the sides. The statue consisted of yellow and red gems. I couldn't´ see the face of the statue because of a strong white light that covered the head. (I was reminded of the dream when I visited the Louvre, walking up the stairway to the Nike-statue). Some nights later I visited space again. This time I saw all the planets and everything in the universe as pieces in a jigsaw-puzzle and god a squirrel looking at it.

Recently a friend of mine died. I didn't dream for a week after I heard about his death. The first dream I had was about him. We were somewhere in the wilderness surrounded by yellow grass. The place was very peaceful and all my emotions were in a strangely perfect balance, faded in a comfortable way. We talked for a while like we had just met yesterday.

But I was curious and told him I was writing about dreams of the afterlife, and asked if he could tell me something about the other side. Right then, someone called him on his cell phone. He answered the call and talked for a while. When he hung up we chatted some more until I asked again. He smiled and told me he had to go but gave me some vague instructions how to write this text.

Are there any ways to prepare oneself to get to the other side while awake?

Are there any common symbols, apart from what we have learned or experienced, in dreams of the afterlife?

What are your dream-experiences of the afterlife?

C D

Spoken waymarks and xenoglossia

2010-04-02T06:05:00.000-07:00

When lost, might it be possible to use language as a hint? Although in reality, the mobility of people means that languages don't necessarily reflect the current geographic position.
While dreaming, I frequently find myself speaking Finnish, searching for words and struggling with grammar. That can happen anywhere, but it usually does mean I'm not at the place I call home, a small village on the west coast of Finland where the Finnish language is almost absent.

The other night, I wandered into a myrtillus-type spruce forest, where the rotten snow of March covered the forest floor. Moving in a semi-circle, I reached the edge of a village, hills and fields reflecting the sunlight from bright green grass and crops. It was spring. Two farms could be seen. I tried to reach the gravel road behind one of them, but was unable to do so without crossing the yard, and thus was obliged to enter the house.
Convinced I was somewhere in northeastern Finland, I started the conversation in Finnish. The family members answered in Swedish, however, and I realized this was no further away than the village next to mine.
[The rest is a bit off topic, but I enjoyed the moment.] The father of the pale, dark-haired, adolescent sister and brother was born some distance up north and, accordingly, was a very religious man. He showed me an army jacket worn thin and littered with textile patches (surprisingly crustpunkish). One of them depicted a lion or a griffin in black on red, and read "Kurdistan". Apparently he'd spent an important time of his youth there, and now wanted to commission a new patch from me to replace the old, fading one.

A failed attempt: a dream where I'm in a tourist bus, looking out at a putative Andalusian landscape. There is nothing to confirm my belief, however. No road signs. Everyone in the bus speaks Nordic languages. At the front, Stephen Fry is talking into the microphone, but at awakening, I don't know whether in English, Spanish, Swedish or Finnish, only that he spoke at length, and (not very surprisingly) was very eloquent.

Also, analogous to perceptions of place (and cases where you're certain you are in a specific place although there's nothing in particular to prove it – even contradictory evidence), you may experience communication in a language you don't know. Any experiences of being able to speak or understand a completely alien language?

IÖ

The chimney house

2010-03-30T06:35:00.000-07:00

More vertical geography:

I've just moved into a new apartment. I live on the upper floor of a converted house, and my friend SD lives on the ground floor. A chimney runs up one side of the house, and we each have a window which opens into the chimney.

The inside of the chimney is airy and well-lit, and lined with bright books. If SD ever happens to be by the window downstairs, or is looking for books in the chimney, I can attract his attention by waving a shiny pencil, and he will climb up the bookshelves to come and say hello.

Later on, while we're inside another building, there's a frightening episode when deep fissures open up in the ground, and angry vampires hurl human bodies back and forth. But the verticality is less pronounced during this episode, in that I'm not able to see very far into the fissures, and certainly not about to try climbing down them.

Disorientation

2010-03-03T11:12:00.000-08:00

We have been talking about how one's actual geographical orientation in dreams functions. Especially the non-euclidian aspects of dream geography, and the multiple overlayering of place. But these are usually based on secondary analytic responses. What is the psychic operation we actually perform within the dream to know where we are? I posted a piece on "associative geography" at the sister icecrawler site two months ago, but I could have posted it here as well.

However, in dreams, the determination of place can be considered part of constructing the very place in the dream, and so the geographical knowledge may come much more directly and be a part of the place itself. When it isn't, one keeps jerking with imagining overlaying of the various places which have provided buldingblocks, or mere mnemonic associations.

But there are single dreams where we actually ask ourselves "where am I" and invent on the spot a method of investigating this. This is one of the basic questions of the cormorant council. Please give us your examples.

PS mainly for those who read Swedish, I just posted a long dream including geographical themes (and some dream art), and a heroic appearance by the people behind the cormorant council as an explorer's expidition at the hälleflundran blog. For some reason I had written it down in Swedish.

My love is better than the dead cinnamon buns - The Shortcuts, Peepholes and Wormholes of Dream Geography

2010-02-26T06:09:00.000-08:00

One theme of dreaming and creativity, which is especially valuable to us considered from a poetic perspective, is the discoveries of special objects or phenomena that opens up impossible doorways between hitherto separeted spaces (or spatialized mental states) and times. Below in the comments area we will begin to gather accounts about poetic shortcuts, peepholes, wormholes and other dimensional collisions. The investigation launches off with this wildly illustrative report from CD.

My love is better than the dead cinnamon buns

One day the phone rang in my room, I got up, left my body in bed and answered. It was my mother who called. She said: It's raining outside. I looked out and there were a couple of feet of water on the street and the sky was black. I hung up and sank into my body again, I lay there for what seemed like the endless eternity. The phone rang again and I went out of my body to answer, it was my mother again. This time she said that it was snowing outside. I looked out and there was half a meter of snow on the street, the sky was white. When I hung up this time I started to wander around a bit, outside of my body that is. I walked down the stairs of the terraced house to the lower floor. The entire lower floor had gold-colored walls, curved as in some Orthodox church. I went over to our cat who sat on a bookshelf. When I reached out my hand towards him, a small hole opened in him where I could see my ceiling. I was aware that I was in bed. When I pulled back my hand, the hole was contracted. I went over to my sister who sat and talked over the phone in the kitchen. On the wall hung a framed tapestry or what to call it. It had a black velvet background with pink text "I am the queen of my castle" in graffiti-style. I heard someone on the phone asking for me but my sister said that "He is up there hallucinating" and waved me away.

So I went out into the terraced area and touched things like mailboxes and the asphalt. Everything felt like it was real, I even licked the bricks of our house. I walked around the street for a moment while flowers shot up from the asphalt and withered. The sky was a blue tarpaulin with dollops of whipped cream as clouds. A bit like in Toy Story, one of my favorite movies.

When I was heading towards a playground in the area, I heard the sound of engines above me, looked up and saw the Spitfire and Messerschmidt planes shoot at each other and form long streaks of smoke. At the playground, there is a small hill and a sand pit really. When I arrived at the hill it was a high mountain with snow on top and people were standing on the top and around watching the air battle. On the way back towards the house I met a man who somehow radiated an inexplicable feeling that he knew me, was my relative, a close friend. I still remember his face but I can not in any way describe it.

It dawned on me that I could take this opportunity to sneak in to the houses of neighbors I didn´t know. There was an old lady, a danish who used to curse at all the kids on the street. I thought it must be interesting to see how she has it.

Once I was standing at her door it had been replaced with a huge marble arch with glass doors, like a mixture of a church and a bank. I opened the door and there inside I was met by everybody I've ever known, almost like a surprise party. All patted my back and threw streamers. I was aware all along that it was not for real, although I could feel things, taste things, move freely and fully explore this state of mind. I went further into the neighboring house through a dark corridor. The participants of the celebration became fewer and fewer the farther in I went.

Eventually I came to an underground parking garage with a concrete ramp leading downwards. My curiosity led me to continue down into the underworld. When I had walked for a while, certainly 50-60 meters below ground, I saw a room behind a thick pane of glass in the concrete wall. Inside stood a piano, which I practiced on as a child. My piano teacher who was a big fat woman with thick fingers also sat in the little room. A dirty yellow light was thrown out from the room out on the concrete. Through a door at the end of the room a man and a woman dressed in 1950´s fashion appeared, the man wore a suit, wavy hair, was smoking a pipe and wore a pair of thick bakelite glasses. The woman had red dress, blond hair and wore pearls. They sat on opposite chairs and wept. Somehow they were my parents and the piano teacher was the therapist. She delivered them a long speech and I knew that I wanted to come in from the darkness of the parking garage.

I thought that since everything took place in my imagination, I should be able to think away the glass pane. So I focused on the absence of it and ran towards it. It was a big bang and I felt the pain in my head.

I started to go downhill again and I heard my piano teacher play the piano and singing "my love is better than the dead cinnamon buns".

The farther down I went, the darker the music became and finally it sounded like iron bars beating against each other (I had bought Kraftwerk, at that time newly released album, Tour De France. The iron bars music reminded me a lot about some songs from that record.) Now I was tired, barely managed to proceed any further, I began training to visualize a door in the concrete wall. It was difficult and I began to feel some ecstasy and a completely crazy playfulness.

Suddenly I had a door in front of me, a sheet metal door resembling those found on boats. The music had transformed into a runaway heartbeat and I was afraid, while I felt I was increasingly losing control. Megalomania began to take over. I came through the door and entered a large saloon with levers of slot machines around the walls and circular tables with smoldering ashtrays and unfinished drinks. Heart beating faster and faster.

Farthest back in the auditorium someone was sitting in a chair, hidden by a newspaper. I approached with quick steps, both scared and curious, tore away the paper that hid the unknown person's face.

Behind the paper was a woman with brown page-clipped hair and brown eyes. I was sucked into her pupil, into the darkness until it turned gray then white. I began to see the ceiling again, took a deep breath and it felt as if I had not breathed for weeks.

My eyes smarted, I must have lain in bed staring at the ceiling all along.

/ Christofer Dahlby

The Gift of Cartography

2010-02-09T06:10:00.000-08:00

The perception of the world

like a Trojan Horse

/KF

Dreaming of Africa, continued

2010-01-15T16:29:00.000-08:00

I’m going to participate in a conference, in order to stop the privatization of Africa. Different African delegates will be at the conference, where Western businessmen will divide and sell different parts of Africa to themselves. It’s highly absurd and unmoral, and I’m supposedly participating as a unified representative of Africa with the goal of stopping the act of selling. I’m a bit unsure who gave me the mission, I’ve never met the Africans and all that I can put forward are moral counterarguments. I’m especially uncertain about my legitimacy since I’m a completely external participant. I’m running around in the big conference centre, the actual meeting is in western Africa, but I’m in the eastern part and it has to take a lot of time to travel over an entire continent, but soon the conference begins! I finally arrive at a meeting that has gathered a large amount of Africans, but they seem to be mistaken, the meeting is all about coffee and different samples is given away. I continue to run towards the western part.

On the sea of sound and vision, direction down

2010-01-11T11:53:00.000-08:00

This dream displays the Cormorant Council in action, doing some mobilis in mobili dream-geographical thinking/discovery.

Noted dream geographer MF invites a group of people for a tour around the Stockholm archipelago on his yacht. This is all nice, but everybody agrees that we need a specific destination. A woman of the group then invites us all to spend the weekend in her parents´ home in Skåne, should we go there. In order to avoid an embarrassed silence following this more insolent than ridiculous suggestion, I try to joke about it by absurdly agreeing with her. "It´s in the north of Skåne, so it´s really only a few kilometres away from Stockholm." Noone gets the joke, so I begin considering if this absurd geographical assumption is actually true. Instead we enthusiastically decide to go to the Canary Islands.

The navigational chart on board the boat shows the vague outlines of a great sea monster that can be further discerned by connecting some dots on the chart with a blue ink pencil. This is actually how you navigate on this ship. There is no steering-wheel or rudder, just this chart and a pencil to set us going. As I start connecting the dots the sea monster soon appears around us, surprisingly in the form of intensifying sound. As the sound gradually takes the shape of a song or a melody we realize we have arrived at the Canary Islands. Again surprisingly, the Canary Islands are situated beneath us instead of somewhere on the horizontal plane - and to get there we have to climb down a lead line.

The dream to me signals two themes and their possible interrelation.

First, "sound-geography", which could account for synaesthetically percieved journeys or landforms, possibly derived from music or other sonorous structures.

Second, "vertical geography", which could retell hell-visits, rabbit-hole plunging, abyssal exploration and the like.

NN

Map of Moscow

2009-12-31T08:49:00.000-08:00

PC and I are in Moscow. We're standing in a long upstairs gallery in a museum and can look out of the windows across the city and all its profusion of 18th-century marble monuments and buildings. We consult a small tourist map. We are only staying in Moscow for one day and two nights, so have little time to see all the things we want to see, and I especially don't want to miss Red Square. The map shows a wide boulevard running along the straight bottom edge of a huge semi-circular lake called Napoleon's Semi-Circle. Red Square is shown on the map to the south-east of the lake. It is surprisingly small (and marked as a solid red square on the otherwise black and white map). I think the map must be wrong. We hurry down the boulevard past the lake and look down towards what should be Red Square, according to the map. I'm still sceptical and ask PC whether he can see any onion domes. He says he can't. Well that's definitely not Red Square then, I say.

MFl

The Limes norrlandicus of the imagination

2009-11-05T08:09:00.000-08:00

railways and cosmology

If we allow ourselves the adventurous abstraction of a "national psychogeography", it would have to be noted that the Norrland limit would probably be an important border in the swedish imagination. The northern two thirds of this elongate country are darker, much more sparsely populated and in popular imagination (both northern and southern) far less civilised than the southern third. The biological and geological border is called "limes norrlandicus" and it partly follows a vague cultural border (if there is one) and runs along the river Dalälven. The lower Dalälven is famous for huge floods and wild nature, including many rare beetles, a lot of eagles, and one of the highest mosquito densities in the entire world. One of the large flooded areas, Storfjärden, with all its flooded dead forest emerging from the water, is probably the original habitat of the original cormorant council (not the dilettants running this webpage). Just north of the outlet is the first norrlandic town, Gävle, with papermills, a coffee roastery and an icehockey team, and not much else. Gävle has appeared in several dreams and interpretation deliria on this site and elsewhere and appears imaginatively important. But we must also ask ourselves more specifically what the Norrland border is about from the viewpoint of the imagination.

Dream this morning:

I am going with the trans-dalälven railway, in a new set of tiny plastic cars. First we're going north, and when we meet the river we turn right and most of the route goes west-east at the edge of the water. It is beautiful but the actual views remind me more of Florida swamps. Opposite me sits a guy looking like a rock musician, pretending to sleep, I'm sure he doesn't have a ticket. I don't know if I have one.

(Flashback: I have recently moved in with a girlfriend in a new apartment in a hypermodern apartment complex - or perhaps rather 60s Science Fiction style. She´s not there, and I'm not comfortable there with or without her. The walls towards the main corridor are transparent, so everybody can see me as I sit down in the hallway, spreading out all the stuff in my pockets on the floor in front of me. I sit there looking at the assorted items in despair, trying to make up a combination of objects that would possibly be valid as a train ticket.)

And here comes the conductor. To my surprise, the rock musician does have a ticket, and something I produce works too. So that wasn't really a problem. The conductor splits into three persons, two continue along the train and one remain with us, looking out the window and holding a soliloquoy in danish. I don't quite understand what he's talking about.

The swamps are lush, and there is large amounts of debris floating around as if from some major wreckage. I keep thinking this is all part of the restauration process, but I can't remember what it looked like before.

On the walls of the car there is a series of framed blackandwhite photographs. The first one depicts two stereotypic teenage girls in white summer dresses looking into the camera. In the following pictures (or do they replace the first one rather than follow next to it?), the girls make some efforts to incarnate some 50s or 60s concept of swedish sin, basically by making really stupid-looking american cheerleader moves, and occasionally flashing their breasts. It's awful, but I fail to look away, because I get the impression that the whole world is suspended between the facial expression of rational resoluteness of one and that of flabby improvisation of the other, and of the firmness of the breasts of one and the softness of those of the other, their opposite senses of being sisters. Yes, those oppositions do sound a bit stupid too but it's very subjectively captivating.

The two teenagers standing next to the pictures might be them. Their stupid name is "Rudy Gullet" (in english). They look ordinary and sound ordinary, but the questions they are posing are interesting enough for me to cut into the conversation, providing whatever information I might possess to contribute to answering the questions. So I tell them about the huge restauration project, the new dams and flooding of new areas. They reply that they consider it similar to their own ongoing experiment of reinventing the world by making a thin dough, covering it with the blood of innocents, then spreading out bits and pieces of everything there might be, and finally smoothing out the surface by applying a transparent lunar matrix. They bake it on the radiator of the railway car. I am somehow very excited to realise how they have reinvented the art of pizza-making in their cosmological quest.

THE STUFF THAT CLOUDS ARE MADE OF

2009-10-14T10:17:00.000-07:00

It has been foolishly suggested that there is no such thing as weather in dreams, but many of us have taken great interest in experiencing dream weathers.

Intentions have been referred to of introducing the concept of dream meteorology at this site, paralell with promises to introduce the concept of synaesthesia. Waiting for the proper introduction of the former I cannot refrain from calling attention to an early morning hypnagogy poem of mine, posted (in swedish) at the Biografier åt okrossbara hälleflundror site, where I experienced a synaesthetic dream weather.

It is one of those half-awake syntheses of desperately struggling to deliriously rationalise an incoherent set of remembered and strongly felt minor dream fragments.

The sky was becoming overcast, a disjunct cover of altocumulus or stratocumulus was painted on the sky as I watched, consisting of the sound of breasts.

This image seems to me simultaneously ridiculous and effective, and I really enjoyed experiencing the reality of it.

We would like to see others' experiences of how weathers are manifested (and what they are actually made of) in dreams-

MF

THE GIRL WHO WAS THURSDAY - Investigating a week of personificated nights

2009-10-07T09:46:00.000-07:00

New research on synaesthesia has been presented, where especially the synaesthetic cognition of time as a spatial arrangement was exemplified.

In a study of synaesthetic children Dr Simner has showed that "synaesthetic associations (e.g. a = carmine red) develop from chaotic pairings into a system of fixed, consistent cogno-sensory responses over time". This study and other related research suggests that the neurological basis for synaesthetic cognition is open to change through habits, choices and efforts of systematizing.

In this type of studies a distinction between being a synaesthete (which only a few are) and being a non-synaesthete that can have synaesthetic associations (which most people have) is made.
A developed synaesthetic condition consists in the ability to perceive spontaneously and consistently connections across the separate senses.

Researchers into this field have often repeated that the synaesthetically cognated colours for musical notes or for vowels are specific to the individual synaesthete, and does not represent an objective substratum of reality.

A lot of this research is about measuring activity in neural pathways and comparing the two test-groups. Nevertheless, "full-blown" synaesthetic phenomena are to some degree open to anyone´s experience under certain conditions, for example during periods of insomnia, in hypnagogic reverie or in fever dreams.

Also, non-synaesthetes can have synaesthetic associations in ordinary states of mind. Such synaesthetic associations are of a more ephemeral nature, where social conventions and mental effort play in. Mnemotechnical methods that utilize mental images of spatial arrangements would be an active example of this. Everyday cognition that makes use of visual metaphors to make sense of the world would be a passive example. Synaesthetic associations of this kind are usually not perceived as vividly as the eidetic imagery of non-ordinary states, neither do they occur with the certainty about the correlation that proper synaesthetes seem to experience, but rather take place within thinking (if such a distinction is meaningful).

A reasonable interpretation of the research presented here, is that the neurological basis for synaesthetic cognition is open to change through habitual choices and efforts of systematizing even for non-synaesthetes.

The surrealist group of Stockholm once conducted an experiment in the intersubjectivity of synaesthetic association, where abstract concepts were imagined systematically, in a joint effort, as if they were concrete objects possessing sensual traits. The focus for this experiment/game was on poetic materialism; thus an emphasis on material qualities such as texture, colour, morphology prevailed. If you want to, you can read about it here.

Naturally, an investigation into the concrete dimension of the abstract could be taken in other directions too.

One of the aspects of synaesthesia of space-time was for example called "ordinal-linguistic personification". Example:"You might not have a colour for Thursday, but you know that it's a young girl who has spent too long kept in the house and wants to break out into the world."
This type of animistic thinking resembles mythological imagination, for examples:

Kronos: greek god of general time.
Aeons; immense successive units of time, that were personalized in gnostic mythology.
The Four Riders of the Apocalypse.

(Arguably, modern anthropomorphic personifications from everyday language and scientific jargon, like Planck time, indian summer, the wolf hour, the Gaussian year (365.2568983 days), also play a part of mythic imagination.)

According to present-day metaphorical standards time is usually conceptualized as a journey. But this also implies the traveller; time is crawling, flying et c.

So, what types of moments of time can be "ordinal-linguisticually personificated"?

Taking a lead from the swedish author Göran Palm, who once asked, through a book title of his, "Why don´t the nights have any names?", I´ll ask:

- Who is the night before monday, which person or entity personificates the night before tuesday et c? Let´s fill out a week of personificated nights.

Any method will do, of course, but perhaps finding the answer in a dream from the particular night which is being investigated lies close at hand.

/ N N

Israel = Norway

2009-09-29T23:52:00.000-07:00

I look at an old map of Northern Europe from 11 000 B.C. All of Sweden is under water, but Norway is elevated enough to be clearly distinguishable. The name of Norway is, however, "ISRAEL", with the S being a Lambda-sign. We start to speculate: Is Jerusalem in Norway? Is this somekind of Rudbeckian explanation of Scandinavias origin of different golden-age myths (Atlantis, Jerusalem, etc?).

All Harvests Are Unreal

2009-08-11T01:57:00.000-07:00

This image was seen in a moment of hypnagogic revery, accompanied by the phrase "all harvests are unreal". It seemed to present itself like an idea for a painting. However, I reproduced it by photoshopping a found landscape painting which conveyed a similar atmosphere. I have as yet no immediate ideas about it and welcome your thoughts and interpretations.

/NN

KORMORANTRÅDET - SAMMANFATTNING PERIODEN NOVEMBER 2007 - APRIL 2008

2008-04-23T12:13:00.000-07:00

I kronologisk ordning:

1. KORMORANTRÅDET – Station för drömgeografiska studier

Kormorantrådet bildades i november 2007 som ett forum för kollektiv drömforskning och utbyte av drömerfarenheter. Enkelt uttryckt: Vi berättar drömmar för varandra - och försöker göra det på ett systematiskt sätt, ämnesvis under rubriker. Härutöver kan märkas ett starkt intresse för teoretiska perspektiv, men bland Kormorantrådets medlemmar finns knappast någon enighet kring metodologiska utgångspunkter och ämnets avgränsningar. Kanske behövs heller inte några sådana. Likväl startade Kormorantrådet här sin bloggverksamhet med en preliminär sammanfattning av vad vi menar med drömgeografisk forskning.

2. Platsens mening

"Själva platsen är ett drömobjekt, och vi kan ställa oss lika frågande inför dess innebörd som vi gör inför allting annat. En tågstation, stjärnhimlen och väldigt ofta olika vikar."

3. DRÖMKARTOGRAFI OCH GÄVLEDRÖMMAR

Vi drömmer om kartor och försöker orientera efter en karta i drömmen. Vi villar bort oss. Samtidigt pågår en drömgeografisk undersökning av Gävle.

4. Nära Afrika

En redogörelse för ett kollektivt drömexperiment utfört av Surrealistgruppen i Sthlm 1999-2000.

5. Drömgeografins naturgeografi

Hur kan djur, växter, väder och naturmiljöer förklara var man är även i drömmen? Vilka markörer övertygar drömmaren om att det är vår eller höst, morgon eller kväll?

6. Drömvärldens skägg

Är än så länge bara ett löfte. Vi väntar alla på drömvärldens skägg.

7. Drömobservatorier

Till exempel särskilt gynnsamma sovplatser eller "drömhem" som man återvänder till. Hur ser de ut, hur finner vi dem, och vad upplever vi där? Ett drömobservatorium (Exempel på ett sådant, saxat ur Kormoranrådets inspirationskälla Drömgeografi Naturgeografi av Mattias Forshage, utkommen på Styx förlag)

8. What is this place, really?

Att gå runt i välbekanta miljöer men med den svaga aningen att det egentligen är någon helt annan stans. Eller tvärtom, fullkomligt främmande landskap inger den grundmurade övertygelsen att man är i sin hemstad. Hur orienterar man sig i en plats man egentligen vet är en annan?

9. Platsens population

Ett vilt försök att applicera demografiska perspektiv på drömmen.

10. Att stiga ned i samma dröm två gånger

Likt fåglar som återvänder till samma häckningsplats varje år, återvänder somliga drömmare till samma plats i drömmen om och om igen. De rör sig i samma landskap, möter samma personer och utför samma handlingar. Ett sådant repetitivt beteende, vad tyder det på? Exempel?

11. Liten drömkartläggning

Att utforska drömgeografin handlar även om att analysera(s). I denna dröm hittas element som platsöverlagring, drömgeografisk drömgeografi, spatial bortstötning, gradvis delpopulering, total antepopulering, spatio-fysiologisk förskjutning, rumslig dubbelprojektion.

12. Att gå genom dörrar

Det finns förstås Zenons paradox att man aldrig kan gå genom en öppen dörr. Rapportera in era iakttagelser av vad som sker då man rör sig genom en dörr, eller snarare, rör man sig genom dörrar överhuvudtaget i drömmen? Hade Zenon rätt?

13. Om Sörmland vore vackert

Upplevt "vackra" platser i drömmen, vad har de gemensamt? Eller är utpekandet av vackra och fula områden i drömmen helt avhängigt godtyckliga kriterier?

14. Drömlandskapens kollektivtrafik

Vad har den att lära ut? Och hur ser de drömda tunnelbanenäten ut i olika städer?

15. Det åttonde klimatets topografier

Drömd geografi (dokumentära teckningar).

16. ÖVERLAGRADE ICKEÖVERLAPPANDE PLAN

Drömsk perspektivomkastning och ickeeuklidiska övergångar.

17. Begärets rumsligheter

Hur gestaltar sig begärets relation till drömmens rumsligheter?

18. För er som drömmer:

Hur tolkas drömvärlden olika utifrån olika organ, och hur tolkas andra organs operationer av ett särskilt organ?

19. Förflyttning i drömmen

Hur transporterar vi oss i drömlandskapen?

Förflyttning i drömmen

2008-03-04T15:15:00.000-08:00

Hur transporterar vi oss i drömlandskapen?
Hur transporterar vi oss mellan scener, medvetandetillstånd och upplevelser?
Vilka akter och metoder upplever vi oss kunna tillgripa för att ta oss fram o tillbaka, från o till, upp o ner, och är det möjligt att helt förvandla drömmen eller delar av den?

För er som drömmer:

2008-02-27T07:12:00.000-08:00

"We have to imagine a system with "n" internal binary operations. Every machine redoes its own additions, its own multiplications, for itself. Every machine works for itself according to ITS operations: a mouth reads everything in mouth terms: eating, talking, kissing, shitting; eyes read erverything in seeing terms: eating, talking, kissing, shitting, etc., etc. All logic coexists and "speaks" at the same time." /010

Så hur tolkas drömvärlden olika utifrån olika organ, och hur tolkas andra organs operationer av ett särskilt organ?
Hur många organ kan ni uppleva drömvärlden genom, vilka förlängningar (101 pratar ju om att blommor egentligen är näsor eller tvärtom,att den sniffar snarare än blommar, hur tolkar en blomma tal och kyssar o tvärtom) finns att göra?

Är förmågor maskiner? Tolkar dansorganet alla andra förmågor i termer av dans?
Vilken synestetisk variation av perspektiv och kopplingar kan ni sätta i rullning när ni i drömmen sjunker ner i och utforskar eran kropp eller era sinnen på detta sätt?

Kanske två separata undersökningar, en som håller sig till den klassiska floran av sinnen, och en som uttnytjar förskjutningen så att vi får reda på hur till exempel Gävle tolkar ätande, tal, kyssande, o bajsande utifrån sina termer?

Begärets rumsligheter

2008-01-02T13:08:00.000-08:00

"...att rumsförändring intet annat är än tillståndsförändring... "

Den här posten handlar om hur den inre rumsligheten konstitueras av begäret. Resonemanget bygger till stor del på Henri Corbins text Mundus Imaginalis. Vi inleder med en liten historisk-filosofisk utvikning kring problematiken med att applicera rumsliga begrepp på psykiska skeenden. Den som inte är intresserad av slika utredningar hoppar direkt till de två sista styckena, där drömmar efterlyses vilka exemplifierar relationen mellan rumslighet och begär.

Med drömgeografins idé kommer vi nödvändigtvis in på ett gammalt kunskapsteoretiskt problem; tautologin i att kalla något för rumsligt som samtidigt inte är det. Inom den sentida fysiken har för övrigt detta problem blommat ut i en del direkta språksvårigheter, vilket Rupert Sheldrakes oxymorona begrepp "non-local informational fields" utgör ett intressant exempel på. De antika filosoferna förhöll sig till problemet genom att skilja på varat (absolut, icke-lokalt, evighetsförknippat) och blivandet (konditionerat, förändringsbenäget, evolutionärt). Bara varandet konstituerar sig självt, causa sui. Den visionära erfarenheten ansågs inte vara situerad inom ett medvetandetillstånd (d v s i gestalt av ett subjekt som står inför sin egen projektion) på det sätt som 1900-talets psykolog(ist)iska modell föreskriver. Inte heller sågs den som en religiös erfarenhet (dvs i gestalt av ett subjekt som står inför en högre verklighet) utan just som ett varandetillstånd med ontologisk och epistemologisk integritet, som innebar ett deltagande i det "formernas" rike som ligger dolt i själva perceptionsakten. Platon använder två begrepp för rum; topos, det fysiska rummet och chora; som har föreslagits betyda ungefär "inre rum" eller "det omedvetna". Med utgångspunkt från Aristoteles, hos vilken distinktionen mellan dessa två rumstyper upphävs till förmån för det naturvetenskapliga intresset för topos och materien, inleder det materiella rummet samtidigt sin poetiska historia som metafor för det inre. Särskilt alkemisterna har i sina "philosophiska" bestämningar av materiella substanser excellerat i denna aristoteliska förvirring, där beskrivningen av psykiska nyanser ömsom kodas, suggereras, tappas bort alldeles och misstas för mirakulösa kemiska skeenden eller bara alstrar en säreget kryptisk poesi. Till denna metapsykologiska eller kognitionsteoretiska linje från Platon och antikens mysteriereligioner, som sedan kan följas vidare via hermetismen och den islamska sufismen, anslöt sig Henri Corbin med sin idé att den imaginala processen är arketypisk i betydelsen av en ursprunglig aktivitet som föregår uppdelningen i objekt-subjekt och synligt-osynligt. Det är inte att förundra sig över att C G Jung från liknande utgångspunkter kom in på samma spår, fast med andra förtecken, ty där Jung ohämmat projicerar mystika betydelser på primärprocessuella bilder skiljer Corbin strikt på imaginärt material och imaginalt skådande. Likaså lanserade surrealisterna ett begrepp om det numinösa genom att komplettera Freuds driftsformativa teori - vilken i omvänd riktning gentemot Jung, men lika ohämmat, projicerar komplexen på varje psykisk förekomst - med "den sublima punkten", ett läge i medvetandet där alla motsatser upphör, rimligtvis även alla tolkningskategorier.

Enligt Corbins sätt att resonera innebär övergången från det yttre till det inre en topografisk inversion, under vilken det homogena fysiska rummets lagar inte alls påverkas utan snarare lämnas obeaktade en tid, och under vilken en psykisk-andlig plats tillkommer, som är resultatet av det ordinära medvetandets omorientering inåt. Om vi i det vakna tillståndet hade en upplevelse av att kroppen inhyser vårt medvetande, råder nu det motsatta förhållandet, vare sig vi är uppmärksamma på det eller inte: anden innesluter det vi upplever som vår kropp, bär den genom de rumsligheter som utgör aspekter av vårt psyke genom ett rike som är icke-rumsligt, latent och struktererat av kvalitativa händelser, affekter, kognitiva övergångar, transmutationer. Anden kan alltså inte fullt ut dela geografins betingelser, dess objektivitet, dess multiplicitet, dess beständighet osv. I relation till den kroppsliga platsen är den andliga platsen ett ingenstans, ett a-topoi, principiellt omöjlig att lokalisera eftersom det andliga självt är det som situerar, även om korrespondenser med sinnevärlden nästan alltid förekommer, motiverade av en drift till konkretion och igenkänning, eller som det tidigare har formulerats här; en "vilja att möblera". Att en övergång från en plats till en annan snarast bör beskrivas som en förändring av sinnestillstånd kände Swedenborg, en av de främsta korrespondenterna från andliga platser, väl till. I Himlen och helvetet (§§ 191 to 195) noterar han:

"alla rumsförändringar i andevärlden orsakas av tillståndsförändringar i det inre, vilket betyder att rumsförändring intet annat är än tillståndsförändring... De som befinner sig nära varandra är de som är i liknande tillstånd, och de som befinner sig på avstånd från varandra är de som är i olika tillstånd; och platser i himlen är blott de yttre omständigheter som korresponderar med de inre tillstånden. Av samma orsak är himlarna skilda från varandra... När någon går från en plats till en annan... anländer han snabbare när han innerligt åtrår det, och mindre snabbt när han icke gör det, då vägen i sig förlängs och förkortas i enlighet med begäret... Detta har jag till min förvåning ofta bevittnat. Allt detta klargör återigen hur avstånd, och således även rum, står helt i överensstämmelse med änglarnas inre tillstånd; och eftersom det är så kan inget begrepp eller någon idé om rum uppstå i deras tanke, fastän det finns rum hos dem på samma sätt som det gör i världen."

Åtrån förkortar avståndet. Att rumsligheten är en funktion av begäret köper vi utan vidare. Men efter den höviska trubadurlyriken, efter Kafka och efter Lacans begärsdialektik är vi förstås även öppna för synpunkterna att åtrån bibehålls av avståndet, att åtrån förlänger avståndet, invecklar det, att motsatser också förmår attrahera varandra osv.

Här nedan insamlar vi exempel på begärets relation till drömmens rumsligheter.

/NN

ÖVERLAGRADE ICKEÖVERLAPPANDE PLAN

2007-12-29T03:49:00.000-08:00

eller, livet som monster i Kalmar

Typexemplet på en drömsk perspektivomkastning är ju den novell av HP Lovecraft där hjälten lever instängd i ett slott och en dag får för sig att klättra allra högst upp i tornet, högre och högre, och till sist upp genom en lucka, ur vilken han kravlar ut på marknivå i staden!

Denna modell där olika stratigrafiska nivåer inte överlappar euklidiskt är inte ovanligt att känna i samband med vissa gamla hus, där vissa trappor bara leder till vissa våningar och inte till andra.

Själv har jag ofta drömt om detta (liksom allting annat) just med avseende på Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet, där det finns sätt att ta sig till helt olika ställen beroende på om man går via tornet eller inte, osv.

Inatt fick jag ett nytt exempel, som drog in ett par andra intressanta rumsliga variabler.

Jag klev på ett fjärrtåg söderut vid Södra Station, och eftersom ingen konduktör fanns blev jag tvungen att gå runt och kolla folks biljetter. Redan mina egna var förvirrande, jag vet i själva verket inte vart jag skulle, var det så att jag har ett bortglömt kontor i Linköping eller bara i Södertälje? En svart snubbe bredvid mig hade en handskriven biljett som angav att han skulle till Schwob, och sedan vidare med buss till något som jag försökte uttyda som Clay, men som han förklarade egentligen var Clig. Av någon anledning visste jag mycket väl att Schwob var en gammal småstad i Vallonien.

Jag gick vidare framåt i tåget utan att hitta några andra passagerare, vilket förvånade mig, så efter ett tag började jag leta även på de många toaletterna, köksutrymmena och telefonhytterna. En av hytterna ledde upp till övervåningen, där några av mina kusiner sov ruset av sig i en stor sovsal eller teatersalong. Från detta rum fanns det utmed väggarna ett stort antal trappor tillbaka ner att välja på, och jag tvekade länge, eftersom jag inte ville till fler släktingars sovrum. Till sist satsade jag på en, från vilken jag plötsligt kom ut på en bred gata i Kalmar.

På denna gata kunde jag gå fram och tillbaka och inte minst skämta eller mucka gräl med folk som satt på uteserveringarna. Jag hade trasiga gröna kläder och en alkis skrovliga röst. Av någon anledning bar jag på en stege, så jag klättrade upp på stegen och sjöng för full hals en arg punkmelodi och trummade till med knytnävarna på stegen så mina knogar blev blodiga. På väg nerför stegen förmådde jag inte riktigt hålla balansen utan välte några förbipasserande.

Påfallande är att Kalmar har så breda gator, så mycket folk och så tätt med snobbiga uteserveringar, men vid den allra snobbigaste ville helt enkelt ingen sitta. På väg över en korsande gata med min stege tog jag plötsligt tag i armen på en kvinna och frågade om hon inte ville följa med mig ner till sjön; hon skrattade på ett underligt införstått sätt och sade att det verkade så jävla jobbigt. Med min långa stege hindrade jag också två smågrabbar från att svänga där de ville, de letar förvirrat efter en stor skräckutställning och kan inte minnas om den ska vara utomhus eller inomhus. Ett trist busstorg, en trist biograf, stora parkeringsplatser, stora avstånd.

Detta Kalmar liknar egentligen Kalmar utan snarare Kristianstad men uppblåst till en storstads storlek. Hursomhelst, att vara den lokala dåren finns det ju olika mer eller mindre behagliga versioner av, men att på så sätt vara Kalmars punkmonster fann jag vara en ganska behaglig tillvaro. Hjälten i Lovecrafts novell visade sig ju också vara ett monster när han orienterade sig i människornas värld, en icke-euklidiskt överlagrande paralellvärld på en annan nivå.

/MF

Det åttonde klimatets topografier

2007-12-23T15:24:00.000-08:00

Drömd geografi 1: Det låga molnet
Drömd geografi 2: En enorm svävande klippa, kanske rentav en planet, som sakta sjunker ner bakom bergens horisont.

Not: Det åttonde klimatets topografier är en lånad kapitelrubrik från Henri Corbins drömgeografiskt högintressanta, och på flera sätt banbrytande text Mundus Imaginalis, en text som vi snart skall få anledning att återkomma till.

"/.../ if we usually speak of the imaginary as the unreal, the utopian, this must contain the symptom of something. In contrast to this something, we may examine briefly together the order of reality that I designate as mundus imaginalis, and what our theosophers in Islam designate as the "eighth climate"; we will then examine the organ that perceives this reality, namely, the imaginative consciousness, the cognitive Imagination; and finally, we will present several examples, among many others, of course, that suggest to us the topography of these interworlds, as they have been seen by those who actually have been there."

Drömlandskapens kollektivtrafik

2007-12-20T02:49:00.001-08:00

Särskilt tunnelbanan bör kunna ha genvägar, förlängningar och många fler stationer i drömmen. För någon månad sen drömde jag om en tunnelbanestation som hette "Kallmyra", och strax innan dess fanns det en mycket bra konstutställning om Tintin i Solna Centrums T-bana.

Men även andra städer kan få talande kollektivtrafiknät. För ett par år sedan försökte jag åka tunnelbana i Malmö, men det fanns bara en linje och tågen var märkta "mot Pigholmen" eller "mot Laholmen" och jag förmådde inte utröna vilket av dem som var in mot centrum (kanske befann jag mig i Limhamn). Denna tunnelbana var ett fiasko, liknade mest Göteborgs spårvagnar, hade varit fruktansvärt dyr och var till föga nytta och mest av allt ytterligare ett monument Ilmar Reepalu rest över sin person.

Det finns andra städer som jag är långt mer intresserad av hur deras tunnelbanenät skulle se ut. Eller kanske mer futuristiska kollektivtrafiklösningar?

/MF

Om Sörmland vore vackert

2007-12-20T02:19:00.000-08:00

För den som är berest i småstäder och naturmiljöer runtom i landet erbjuder alla landskap vissa påfallande vackra liksom många banala och enahanda element; Södermanland är inget avvikande i det avseendet. Men när jag letar igenom gamla drömmar ser jag två drömmar från olika tidpunkter som båda bygger på att godtyckligt måla upp Sörmland som något påfallande vackert. Går det att hitta gemensamma drag hos sådana platser som väljs ut för att fyllas med skönhet, eller är det verkligen godtyckligt? Finns det exempel på motsatsen, att vissa områden i drömmen utnämns till entydigt fula?

1
En fantastisk turistresa med tåg genom Sörmland, som jag gör i ett större sällskap med många barn. Jag håller låda för barnen om olika geografiska sevärdheter längs vägen. Mest upphetsande är den “kinesiska vägen” där tåget åker i ett dike längsmed kanten av en sjö, och spåret är faktiskt lägre beläget än vattenytan, man kan t o m se vattenytan bukta sig i ögonhöjd. Sedan bär det uppåt och vi far ut på vattenytan av Sörmlands påstått berömda “fagersjöar”. Snart når vi fram till något utflyktsmål där allt är halvdant, glest och lerigt, och vi håller på att tappa bort vissa barn.

2
Jag ska dela ut ett diplom till en markägare i Sörmland som skött sina marker på ett exemplariskt sett ut naturvårdens synvinkel. Hennes skog, mestadels låglänt och fuktig, är full av gamla alar och ekar, linjer och kluster av morotformade träd, många avbrutna vid en viss höjd av någon lokal katastrof, det är mycket vackert. Jag talar med henne i hennes kök, och sover på hennes tältsäng, och läser hennes lokaltidning, ja jag funderar på att flytta dit eftersom det är så vackert och hon är så vacker. Och när hon visar mig runt så visar det sig att det inte bara är denna skog utan också vidsträckta sydlänta torrbackar, precis vad jag behöver. Hon lägger sig ner i den sluttningen och särar på benen för att ta emot mig i ett förseglande av våra planer.

/MF

Att gå genom dörrar

2007-12-16T07:56:00.000-08:00

Det finns förstås Zenons paradox att man aldrig kan gå genom en öppen dörr. Matematiskt upplöses paradoxen enkelt genom att en oändlig summation kan ge ett ändligt resultat. Man är den upplöst i drömmen? Låt oss för ett ögonblick föreställa oss rummen vi rör oss genom i drömmen som symboliska gestaltningar av omedvetna processer. Men hur gestaltas då övergången från den ena processen till den andra? Eller låt oss helt enkelt tänka oss rummen som uttryck för en spontant arkitektorisk skaparglädje, en vilja att möblera. Blir fokus i denna vilja konstant i passagen mellan två rum? Rapportera in era iakttagelser av vad som sker då man rör sig genom en dörr, eller snarare, rör man sig genom dörrar överhuvudtaget i drömmen? Hade Zenon rätt?

Liten drömkartläggning

2007-12-16T07:55:00.002-08:00

Att utforska drömgeografin handlar förstås inte enbart om att samla in drömmar. De måste även analyseras. I följande dröm har följande drömgeografiska element identifierats: platsöverlagring, drömgeografisk drömgeografi, spatial bortstötning, gradvis delpopulering. total antepopulering, spatio-fysiologisk förskjutning, rumslig dubbelprojektion. Kan du också hitta dem?

Jag går på vägen som leder ner mot Hasseludden. Det är i Örebro, men demonstrationerna som Seba anordnar får mig att tro att det är Nörrebro. En man klättrar upp på en stolpe och får applåder av sina vänner. Roh-Nin möts på en restaurang, där Annika frågar Mathias vad som hände med boken hon ville sammanställa om facklig verksamhet. Jag sitter i en soffa tillsammans med en kvinna i 40-årsåldern och tittar på en karta över området. Vi diskuterar platser som vore intressanta att utforska, och jag ser på kartan en plats som jag utforskade i en annan dröm. Den ligger 500 meter söder om en bensinmack, men kommer till den via några trappor, men vi blev ertappade av väktare och fick springa därifrån. Det hela är ett lågindustriellt forskningsområde. Jag går runt längre bort i Hasseludden, klagar lite på att jag är sjuk igen och sätter mig ned tillsammans med min resekamrat på en klipphäll. På andra sidan vattnet är en annan klipphäll, och vi ska observera de djur som vi har lockat dit. Jag känner nu igen min resekamrat, han är programledare för en engelsk resefilm som går på Discovery. Andra personer börjar dyka upp. Tre japanska judokas sätter sig bakom oss. Det är brant, och en av dem visar sina kraftiga handleder och vader som han har fått av år av träning. Han bjuder på te, och jag bockar innan jag dricker téet vilket gör dem andra judokas upprörda. Några beger sig av för att hämta pinnar så jag ska få bättre balans eftersom jag hela tiden håller på att trilla av klipphällen. Då kommer djuren på andra sidan. En giraff med två ungar, som tumlar fram vid klipporna. Kraftiga gorillor, kanske en dinosaurie. Det är mycket intressant att se hur de rör sig.

Att stiga ned i samma dröm två gånger

2007-12-16T07:55:00.001-08:00

Flera av mina vänner berättar om hur de, likt fåglar som återvänder till samma häckningsplats varje år, återvänder till samma plats i drömmen om och om igen. De rör sig i samma landskap, möter samma personer och utför samma handlingar. Ett sådant repetitivt beteende, vad tyder det på? Om någonting är mystiskt i drömmen så är det nog det. Här handlar det inte om att uppsöka samma plats, men med skiftande intentioner, befolkning och handlingar. Här är det samma system av händelser som utspelar sig på samma plats. Driver mina vänner med mig, eller är det flera som har samma erfarenhet av denna återkomst av det ständigt lika?

Platsens population

2007-12-16T07:54:00.000-08:00

Ett av de viktigaste inslagen i modern geografi är demografiska analyser. Det är förstås även giltigt i drömgeografiska bestämningar. Vilka element, växter, svampar, djur, människor och utomjordingar är det som befolkar en plats? I drömmen låter ofta platsen göra sig gällande först, varpå en gradvis populering sker. Eller så är det ofta tvärtom, platsen är helt befolkad och det är befolkningen som utgör platsens primära bestämning. Ständigt dessa extremer, ständigt dessa mellanlägen i drömmen. (Eller är mellanlägen överhuvudtaget möjligt i drömmen? Om konstruktionen av drömmens innehåll följer ett antal förutbestämda mekanismer och primära symboliska funktioner så finns ingen möjlighet till glidningar. Allt som sker i drömmen är då kvalitativt isolerade uttryck utan möjlighet till gradvisa övergångar sinsemellan.) Låt oss vara uppmärksamma på följande kategorier:

- Populationens element (dvs vad eller vilka är det som utgör platsens population överhuvudtaget?)

- Deras förhållande till platsen (tillfälligt besök, permanent boende, hemsökelse, okänt förhållande?)

- Deras verksamhet (Vad gör de? Hur relaterar det till en övergripande rytm i deras förhållande till platsen?)

- Deras kommunikativa beredskap (Kommunicerar de med varandra, med dig, med vilka medel och vad säger de?)

Andra kategorier förekommer förstås, och läsaren uppmanas delge dem i kommentarerna nedan. Det handlar inte heller om en population i en plats, utan det kan mycket väl röra sig om flera, med överlagringar, hierarkiska nivåer och inbördes förskjutningar. Lämna bidrag till en demografisk analys av drömgeografin nedan.

What is this place, really?

2007-12-16T07:51:00.000-08:00

Drömmens platser later sig inte enkelt bestämmas. Att gå runt i välbekanta miljöer men med den svaga aningen att det egentligen är någon helt annan stans. Eller tvärtom, fullkomligt främmande landskap inger den grundmurade övertygelsen att man är i sin hemstad. Mellan dessa poler en kontinuerlig skala av platsers överlagringar . Det är som om platsen egentligen är två: dess geografiska manifestation, och tanken på vad det är den representerar. Ofta sammanfaller detta (nästan alltid i det vakna tillståndet?), men då en separation uppstår blir det riktigt intressant. Hur orienterar man sig i en plats man egentligen vet är en annan? Vad är det för topologier, geografiska texturer och atmosfärer som gör att en plats upplåter sig till att vara någonting annat än dess manifestation? Men låt oss inte teoretisera alltför mycket. Låt oss enbart, i inledningen av detta forskningsprojekt, notera denna dubbeltydighet i platsens bestämning och inbjuda andra till att delge sina iakttagelser.

Drömobservatorier

2007-12-16T04:01:00.000-08:00

Om man är intresserad av drömmens rumsliga bestämningar, av drömvärldens kartläggning, naturgeografi, stadsplanering och psykogeografi, kan det vara en gynnsam strategi att försöka identifiera DRÖMOBSERVATORIERNA.

Med det avses här inte själva sovplatserna (även om det kan vara nog så intressant att se de fall där vissa sovplatser gynnar vissa typer av drömmar, i kontrast mot den gängse tendensen för drömmen att visa upp en särskild autonomi gentemot sovandets omständigheter), utan istället just de platser man besöker i drömmen som ger en lite överblick eller koll på drömgeografins uppbyggnad, de utkikspunkter som förklarar läget, som t ex förbinder till synes disparata element, eller ger en intuitiv koll på uppbyggnaden, eller som man bara återkommer till gång på gång och som då verkar vara en fix drömstation med kanaler åt andra håll.

Frågan om drömobservatorier väcktes i Drömgeografi Naturgeografi först i en dröm (se tidigare post), och i anslutning till den väckte MF frågan till auditoriet vid ett muntligt anförande på Färgfabriken 15.xii.2007. Här vill vi bjuda in till att bidra till kartläggningen av just dessa drömobservatorier (och därmed av drömmen i sin helhet). Addera som kommentarer eller skicka till cormorant.council@gmail.com alla sorters möjligen relevanta resonemang och belysande drömerfarenheter; särskilt i anslutning til frågorna:

1. Hur kan sådana drömobservatorier se ut, vilken typ av platser kan det vara, är de högtidliga eller anspråkslösa?

2. Är det effektivt eller alls intressant att öva sig i särskilda tekniker för att hitta dem eller nå fram till dem?

3. Sådana drömobservatorier öppnar ofta så kallade “icke-euklidiska genvägar”, dvs de bildar förbindelser mellan platser som vi annars är vana är långt ifrån varandra. Är sådana genvägar tillfälliga eller varaktiga? Delar platserna som förbinds en och samma atmosfär eller kan de också skapa förbindelser mellan distinkt olika atmosfärer?

4. Sådana drömobservatorier förmedlar, under vissa omständigheter, lätt en särskild känsla av hemmahörighet, och egentligen är väl de “drömhem” man kan ha kanske mest en särskild klass av drömobservatorier. Vilka drömhem återvänder man verkligen till, och vilka ger bara en déjà vu-känsla av att man varit där förr? Finns det något sätt att avgöra när en sådan déjà vu-känsla uppstår simultant som en del av drömmen och när den verkligen bygger på ett reellt återseende? Hur är drömhemmen placerade i relation till andra relevanta platser i drömmen?

Ett drömobservatorium

2007-12-16T03:57:00.000-08:00

På vilket sätt kan man egentligen söka efter en rofylld plats att inrätta sitt drömobservatorium? Som sagornas speglar, tidsmaskiner, dimensionshål. En gul och grå gammal hotellsäng, en månskens-doftande säng med en halvsovande kvinna i en innerstadslägenhet, en behagligt skakande tågbädd, alla fullt tänkbara. Men det bästa måste vara ett mycket litet hus, vars utsida och insida inte har mycket med varandra att göra. Det måste till och med vara riktigt anspråkslöst. En tänkt barackartad stuga uppsatt vid Tjär-hovsplan, där tågförarna kunde gå in och dricka kaffe, t ex.
Jag hade fått låna nyckeln av en kamrat som kör roslagsbanan, men det är inte bra om jag blir upptäckt. Jag vill ju bara kunna gå dit ibland på natten i ensamhet. Men väktarna får tag på mig. De vill få mig att skriva under något intyg, och dessutom ska jag skriva under det på en dataskärm, det är fruktansvärt och tillika absurt. Oerhört upprörd frågar jag väktaren, har inte han någon gång i livet stött på en plats där han känt sig märkligt men odramatiskt hemma utan att ha sett stället förr, som om det var något han ständigt åter-kommit till och utgått från i drömmar, men varje gång glömt… Det är kanske att ta i, men i efterhand ter det sig alltmer trovärdigt, man säger alltid mer än man vet.

(ur Drömgeografi Naturgeografi av Mattias Forshage)

Drömvärldens skägg

2007-12-16T03:56:00.000-08:00

(Kommer att digitaliseras efterhand)

Drömgeografins naturgeografi

2007-12-16T03:54:00.000-08:00

Det kanske är att pressa anknytningen till boktiteln lite grann, men frågan är likväl intressant: hur kan djur, växter, väder och naturmiljöer förklara var man är även i drömmen? Är det en fråga bara för biologer, geografer, metereologer, fjällvandrare, fågelskådare, spågubbar, häxor och bönder, som ändå tittar efter tecken, eller smyger de sig in i andras orientering i drömmen också? Vilka markörer övertygar drömmaren om att man är t ex på en annan världsdel? Eller på en ö? Eller i en bergstrakt? Vilka markörer övertygar drömmaren om att det är vår eller höst, morgon eller kväll? Skriv ner resonemang och drömanekdoter som kommentarer eller i mail till cormorant.council@gmail.com !

Nära Afrika

2007-12-16T03:51:00.000-08:00

Ett enkelt drömexperiment med viss relevans här gjordes december 1999-januari 2000 inom surrealistgruppen i Stockholm på temat utforskning i drömmen av på förhand utsedda områden. Uppgiften var att drömma om Afrika.

Geografiskt sett är detta förstås ett mycket vidsträckt och föga enhetligt område. Delvis kanske detta var en starkt försvårande faktor. Å andra sidan borde det också kunna vara tvärtom: att var och en ändå har en stark bild av ett personligt-mytologiskt Afrika eller ett drömafrika, som är mer eller mindre fristående från och obekymrat om förhållandena i någondera delen av det befintliga Afrika (t ex ett Afrika som det som manifesterades i Raymond Roussels odödliga bok “Intryck från Afrika”).

Erfarenheten var övervägande negativ, de flesta deltagare i experimenten drömde om misslyckade försök att resa till Afrika, andrahandsrepresentationer av Afrika, tankar på Afrika, men ingen lyckades verkligen ta sig dit medan experimentet pågick (de ursprungliga bidragen publicerade som kommentarer här). Några lyckades dock ta sig dit strax efteråt (kommer att digitaliseras). Hur ser andras drömafrika ut? Finns det belysande exempel på när motsvarande experiment misslyckats eller kanske lyckats?

DRÖMKARTOGRAFI OCH GÄVLEDRÖMMAR

2007-11-14T11:57:00.000-08:00

På förekommen anledning sätter Kormorantrådet under denna rubrik igång sitt materialinsamlande. Vi efterlyser:

1) Exempel på kartor i drömmen och orientering efter karta i drömmen.
2) Drömgeografisk undersökning av Gävle.
3) Försök att använda kartan/kartpunkterna från denna dröm.
4) Synpunkter på materialet och undersökningen.

Replik från en drömmande 1

2007-10-31T09:39:00.000-07:00

Natten efter att man uppmärksammat mig på kormorantrådets blogg drömde
jag följande:

Vaknar på arbetet, där det varit fest och en stor mängd påsar med kaffepulver blivit över. En arbetskamrat har satt igång ett tjugotal kaffebryggare, "Man måste ju passa på". Det droppar in massa folk, inklusive barn, det är någon form av öppet hus. Medan jag väntar på att kaffet ska bli färdigt ber man mig berätta lite om hur man ritar kartor. Jag har ingen aning om vad jag ska säga, men håller en utläggning om komposition av kartbilder, avgränsningar, fokus, nordpil och teckenförklaringar etc (jag påstår att det intressantaste i kartan alltid måste vara strax till höger om mitten i horisontalled och strax under mitten i vertikalled); men jag känner mig obekväm, det kanske inte var detta de menade, kanske är de bara intresserade av Rektifieringens mysterier.

På resa i en minibuss, söderut i trakten av Gävle. Plötsligt stannar bussen och en animerad diskussion tar plats i framsätet över kartboken. Jag begriper inte, det är väl bara att följa E4? Vi promenerar vidare därifrån, passerar genom en stor tunnel, och när vi kommer ut på andra sidan och tittar tillbaka visar det sig att tunneln inte gick genom ett berg utan genom basen av ett enormt träd, som lyser gyllene i solnedgången, lite som en sandstensformation i en nordamerikansk öken, men kanske egentligen bara fullkomligt brunrötat. Därifrån blir det också svårare att följa stigen, som blir allt smalare, våtare och bevuxen med sälg och tall. Snart brer en öppen vattenspegel ut sig framför oss, och i snåren på andra sidan är det väldigt svårt att se någon stig fortsätta. Jag konstaterar "Det här kan inte vara motorvägen", och får till svar "Nej, det är klart, det var ju därför vi stannade bilen, för att hitta en promenadväg". De andra klampar på, och det visar sig att stigen bara är översvämmad, så det är inga problem att vada fram. Men när vi så pulsar genom vattnet i skymningen kan jag plötsligt urskilja massor av människor i brynet mittemot. De står ljudlösa, nästan nakna men kropparna helt målade i grått, beväpnade. Vi hejdar oss. De börjar röra sig mot oss med höjda påkar och spjut, men det är svårt att se i dunklet. Jag föreslår att det kanske är en ritual och vi kan prova att bara gå åt sidan. Men de fortsätter emot oss och siktar på våra huvuden.

MF

Platsens mening

2007-10-21T09:06:00.004-07:00

Rådet samlas på en kraftig gren, som dock hotar brista under deras samlade tyngd så det blir ett väldigt flaxande innan några representanter löser problemet genom att komma ner till min nivå och slå sig ner på marken. Och jag kan framställa mina frågor. Var fan är jag någonstans, vad ska alltihop betyda, vart ska jag ta vägen?

Fåglarna tittar åt olika håll, de flesta står med utbredda vingar, några gapar. En stund väntar jag på att något ska hända, men snart inser jag att det är detta som är deras orakelsvar.

(Ur Drömgeografi Naturgeografi av Mattias Forshage)

Tolkningsakten är ständigt närvarande, men att uttyda mening hos händelser och fenomen bortom ens invanda fördomar låter sig inte göras utan besvär. Och tvärtom, upplevelsen av mening som sker utan tolkning; man vet inte vad det hela ska betyda, men den omistliga känslan av mening går inte att undkomma. Kormorantrådet breder ut sina vingar, några gapar. Orakelsvar har getts, det finns en mening, till och med frågan har ställts. Men vad innebär svaret?

På de Chiricos torg gapar en metafysisk tomhet; kvällen, geometrin och de höga husen låter tingens tystnad verka. Vi har mening och svar, men frågorna låter sig inte ställas. Vi kan inte rationalisera erfarenheten. Eller kan vi?

Vi besöker olika platser i drömmen. Ibland figurerar de som bakgrunsfond för drömskeendena, men ibland framstår de själva med en sällsam kraft. Själva platsen är ett drömobjekt, och vi kan ställa oss lika frågande inför dess innebörd som vi gör inför allting annat. En tågstation, stjärnhimlen och väldigt ofta olika vikar.

Dessa platser möter vi i det vakna tillståndet. Vi kallar dem atoposer, poetiska platser, spatial entropi. När möter vi dem i drömmen? Att katalogisera dessa fenomen, ett litet arkiv över drömmens poetiska platser, där själva platsen bär på mening och kräver sin specifika frågeställning och metod.

KORMORANTRÅDET – Station för drömgeografiska studier

2007-10-21T09:06:00.002-07:00

Med drömgeografisk forskning avser vi (f n):

a) Geografiska iakttagelser i drömmen och drömmandet.

Mer specifikt iakttagelser kring hur platser, händelser, upplevelser och förhållanden är fördelade i sömndrömmandet, den aktiva fantasin och önsketänkandet.
Det bör även vara möjligt att göra geografiska iakttagelser i de omedvetna vanorna och föreställningarna, dvs utifrån den förströddhetens aktivism som kan få oss att begå avgörande drömgeografiska misstag som att gå vilse, ta fel på stad, osv.

Den grundläggande frågeställningen blir på vilket sätt drömgeografin skiljer sig från vakengeografin, både i generell mening (teori) och med avseende på hur vi genom denna utforskning kan berika vårt sätt att leva, röra oss, iaktta världen omkring och i oss (biopolitik).

Några slutgiltiga svar på dessa frågor tänker vi inte gärna finna. Snittet vi lägger mellan drömgeografi och vakengeografi kommer med nödvändighet att vara mångstämmigt och anekdotiskt.

b) Psykogeografisk fenomenologi i allmänhet.

Det är: vad som får oss att uppfatta geografin på ett visst sätt och inte ett annat, t ex vad kartor visar och vad de inte visar, i synnerhet vilka begär och föreställningar som knutits eller kan knytas till vissa platser.

Närmare bestämt uppstår frågan om vilka orsakssamband som betingar våra aktiviteter, och var de avgörande faktorerna till sådana formande processer återfinns, samt vilka möjligheter och friheter som genereras genom medvetandegörandet av - och manipulerandet med dessa.

Som en följd härav vill vi förstås kontinuerligt utveckla och tillämpa experimentella metoder som kan få oss att uppfatta geografins begränsningar och möjligheter.

Drömgeografi Naturgeografi är en poetisk-vetenskaplig roman av Mattias Forshage som gavs ut på Styx Förlag 2007. Baksidestexten anger att det är:

Ett slags roman som utforskar hur rummet konstrueras i det imaginära universum, dels via drömmen, och dels via en uppmärksamhet på naturen (flora fauna, geomorfologi, meteorologi etc) som omfattar både poetiskt medbrottslingskap och vetenskaplig nyfikenhet.

Det torde också vara första gången som surrealismens och situationismens urbant präglade teorier om psykogeografi och drivande tillämpas med någon systematisk iver på naturiakttagelsens område, där särskilt den svenska naturens flora, fauna och årstidsväxlingar står i centrum.

Till firandet av denna poetologiska händelse bildades kort härpå Kormorantrådet.

Drömgeografi Naturgeografi (DG NG) är Kormorantrådets maskot, parlör eller startfält. Med författarens tillåtelse eller ej kommer vi emellanåt att publicera utdrag ur romanen samt följa upp några av de frågeställningar som gestaltas eller teoretiseras där.

En inbjudan att delta i forskningen utgår härmed till envar. Deltar gör man i första hand genom att ta fasta på den drömgeografiska andan; man skärper blicken för de egna drömgeografiska erfarenheterna; antecknar, experimenterar, meddelar sig, involverar andra, modifierar sina vanor. Sådana diskreta förskjutningar av beteendet och perceptionen måste i nuläget emellanåt (men långt ifrån alltid) framstå som triviala eller meningslösa, men på sikt har de möjlighet att förändra vardagslivets struktur radikalt.

Inskickande av material till: cormorant.council@gmail.com

eller i kommentarfälten till enskilda poster.