Dream Log

When I am waking up, in a state of semi-consciousness, I grab my phone, open the Voice Memo app, and start recording.

Sometimes I'm still half enmeshed in my dreams, sometimes I am just not fully awake.

I babble in the phone mic with my face still sunken in the pillow.

What I do is recount the dream backwards, the latest details help me trace the dream back to its beginning, if I even manage to go back to the beginning. A lot of times I can't.

What I can do sometimes, when the dream seems to be gone, is holding onto a tiny detail - a shape, an object, a scene - and I intensely focus on that until it brings me back into the dream, and all of a sudden I can remember - a whole parable or just details and flashes -- the connections between them blurred and impossible to picture.

I never try to find a logic.

I just talk.

I sometimes listen back to these dream logs, but most of the times I don't. I am still not sure of what I could do with them. And sometimes I just..."don't have the time" - to either just listen back or to decide what to do with them.

Well..as you can imagine:

I have been listening to them during the last days. I go back to these recordings, listen to my voice - which sounds like I'm either very high or in a kind of disarticulated trance. Sometimes I sound very lucid but I hardly remember even speaking the very words I listen back to (and yes, this is trippy af - this morning for example, I was terribly hungover, I fully stood up and went to fetch some water while speaking into the phone and I don't remember ANY of it).

Quarantine dreamlogs are insane. Truly insane. Every single thing (emotion, thought, task, obsession, etc) is amplified in the consciousness. 

I am navigating my living space in physical loneliness, trying to alternate activities in different areas of my apartment, to pretend I can keep up with a seemingly normal schedule. The reality is that those tiny things (emotions, thoughts, tasks, obsessions) are just bouncing back from one wall to the other, and at every hit they become bigger. They are amplified. They become massive. They saturate the space.

I have found these preoccupations in my dreams. I dream of love and jealousy, I dream of funding applications, I dream of making art, I dream of displays of new works, I dream of impossible interactions, I dream of what has been suspended or postpone, I dream of my desires and my responsibilities as they cannot unfold in my waking life at the moment, I dream of renditions of the movies or series I'm watching, their logics superimposed on the unconscious rumination underlying this seeming normalcy which is not normal at all (for example I dreamt of some sort of Westworld-type of live game I was playing, the goal of the game being the detection of "very unfeminist actions" within the game, using a bizarre scoreboard made of sticky bulges of paper..)

I am writing this on day 7 of quarantine, which has been a kind of shock-therapy, even though it feels like a month has passed since last week. The intensity of every little thing is bearable within rationality but it explodes in the R.E.M. phase.

I'll see where this leads; for sure for now this is just creating an extra lens for me to reflect on whatever is happening and whatever I'm feeling right now. And that's the individual side of it. 

For what concerns its use..well..I'll get there, if and when the time comes.