Dream Density
the navel of the dream and David Lynch
Happy Aquarius season. First, 3 important links:
Cosmic Valley Girl Questionnaire. We want to know what gets under your skin. Please tell us, wow us.
Still time to join Psycho-Cosmos, a year-long course already filled with great people. Email me for payment plan options. Researching and making notes for the first slideshow/lecture, which will happen this Sunday, January 26th, has made me feel…drugged. So, I hope the course’ll be a good strange container for 2025.
I’ve got ONE astrology or tarot session left for the great month of January. Who will seize it? [Discount code at the very bottom of this email for subscribers…]
OK…..
“There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown.” — Freud
“The Underworld is converse to dayworld, and so its behavior will be obverse, perverse. What is merely shit from the daytime perspective–or what Freud called day-residues–becomes soul food when turned upside down.” — James Hillman
Faces tinted and afloat.
Not quite…almost…
What we refuse, the refuse: David Lynch knew, and showed with underworld/nighttime logic and velocity.
He did not explain his work.
The severed ear that is a labyrinth at the opening of Blue Velvet.
Because ears are not for hearing, Lacan said.
The Mystery Man in Lost Highway. To call him is to call your own home, changed.
The music stops.
What the fuck is happening?
Lynch grasped the weird magic of Bill Pullman’s face.
I won’t interpret his chart!! His chart is a dream.
Or rather, as Jung insisted, the dream is its own interpretation.
All we have to do is see, read. Easier said—-
Altered: dangerous to take the dream image literally.
No operation, said the alchemists, should be performed, until all has become WATER. Like, die and dissolve first. First, the ocean, the dream, Piscean finality.
Our sun’s entered Aquarius, home of the midwinter water bearer.
To learn from the underworld, Hillman writes, is to learn from the psychopathic.
Risky: repetition, return. The Return. A zone with its own rules, that will not bend to you and yours. Down there, you might look like you.
Beyond hospitality, this scene I can never quite shake from Lost Highway.
Like the celluloid itself is burning—-camphor and yellow.
Deleuze: If you’re trapped in the dream of the other, you’re fucked.
When one world changes into another—-the succession of images, at times blurring into abstraction, reads like a Francis Bacon painting. The shift makes no sense in the day world, but makes precise and creepy sense on the other side.
Dreams are exact and blurs. Lynch’s images got this, were carried forth by this, to create a rare and pure tangle of a mood.
Beyond the surrealist marvelous or the psychoanalytic uncanny—there is something profoundly postictal about David Lynch’s sounds and images.
From our darkest repetitions and most horrific-enticing encounters, a familiarity, art that doesn’t cough itself (the dream) up, but circles the drain, the navel. Not quoting himself but repeating himself, each time a little more good and well—in dream logic, fucked-up.
James Hillman, again: “These dream things we call symbols. They are made, or given, as densities, and the German word Dicht (“dense,” “thick,” “tight,”) occurs both in Verdichtung (Freud’s term, which we translate as “condensation”) and in Dichtung (“poetry”), Dichter (“poet”).”
Interpretation, astrological or otherwise, should circle around the navel, the drain. Shouldn’t gloss over the creepy chasm but make dense, thick poetry from moving around and within. Should not, explained away, thin out or make cozy.
Lynch’s movies are precise, like poetry or like a dream—they stick to the image, the mind at limit. Luminous cries and the odd velocities of cinema, cosmos, clinics—-
Memory almost, but not quite, washed away by the water of Aquarius. The sun freaked by silent blue screen.
The Mystery Man in Lost Highway:
We’ve met before, haven’t we?