Her presence still
(Lady in dream): Welcome to my dream. It has the appearance of a transparent mirror. A conversation to a recollection to a room to a mirror. In your dream does transparency ever emit color?
Transparency does not embody color in itself, it is an immaterial state that is colorless. Clear visibility or even invisibility. However one might project color in this state of mind, for example feel strongly for some color. Or it could pertain to a certain mood. In our dream it is….
(Lady in dream): …the color of the moonlight. But a sort of darkened panic. I am walking down a hall, there is a bamboo curtain, I enter, you hear my footsteps. I see myself not in a dream, but as a dreamer. I remember a story I was told about my grandfather….
Who was in the war. One night, he and another guy… whose name I can’t remember… anyway, they were ordered to send a message to another camp. And, off they went. As they were skiing into the night a grenade fell next to them. Miraculously his friend didn’t get hurt. But my grandfather, a splinter was lodged in his knee. There were lots and lots of snow, so, instead of trying to drag him alone to safety, the guy went to get some help, and, it must have taken them awhile to get back because when they did, my grandpa was in pretty bad shape. So, then he was transported to this empty bunker, where he fell into a kind of coma. I think that it took days before he was moved to a hospital. When he finally woke up, with an amputated leg, the only clear memory he had was one of a dream.
It was a winter night and he was on his way home. At the porch he discovered that he didn’t have his keys. He started knocking on the door. Nobody answered. It was cold and his knocking turned louder as the feeling of panic gradually grew inside of him. In the end he was banging the door. Finally, he heard footsteps from inside, as his sister Elsa came to open the door. With one leg missing he wasn’t of much use at the front, so he was sent home. Once back he told Elsa about this dream he had. And she said that, one night she was woken up by a loud banging on the door and when she went to open it, there was no one there.
(Lady in dream): I’m not sure, but when I looked into the mirror after recollecting the dream of my grandfather, it was as if I was brought back to Elsa’s remembrance of the banging of the door, because I myself physically was not there or I had become a division of two, a dreamer dreaming. What does the knock bring us back to? And why did the mirror mark such a dissolution?
The dissolution makes you a part of the story.
(Lady in dream): But isn’t that a sort of destruction?
No, because if it were destruction if would be life with out dreaming. In fact, I read recently that Milorad Pavic once said that life without dreaming meant the destruction of life.
(Lady in dream): Oh yes…! That dreaming means to live. Through dreaming man can get in touch again with his first kindness. Through his dreams, he can experience again the kindness he once lost. This to me is as if I looked into a mirror for the first time. Self-recognition. A mirror stage. In your mirror I recognize myself, though I dissolve. In this form of disintegration, I am a dream dreaming of itself. Is this a Méconnaissance?
Oh well, it is a kind of misrecognition for sure. If Lacan’s mirror stage is about understanding that one is apart from the mother, here we have a situation where the physical presence is taken apart from the actual surrounding space, the room. Away from the laws that bind us together, or, that we at least believe to be binding. But that’s exactly why this cannot be anything else but another dream.
(Lady in dream): And the nobody? Knock Knock. How does recollection manifest?
The nobody is in a sense, all of us. Memory is the purveyor of reason.
(Lady in dream): And here the original sense of reason stems from a room?
Perhaps it is the room and the individual’s voice. The voice takes its presence in the room, then slowly dissolves into its surroundings, as an operative pervasive entity.
Jennifer Teets
in collaboration with Hans Rosenström