By Komal Phuyal, PhD
Self never harms itself in a dream. The imaginative functioning of the human mind during the resting state of the body begins to form an esoteric world that symbolically represents the outside reality and posits the unfulfilled fantasy of daily life. The inner drive ever craves for the exploration of the zone of pleasure in that the quotidian life either negates pleasure on a host of excuses or denies the bliss at the prospects of break of moral codes of society. The perfect environment for pleasure gets formed in the state of rest in that the body finds a completely motionless state in a place of safety which the mind continuously keeps on acknowledging even when it appears not to care for the physical form.
The astral reality begins to enjoy a personal world that can never be shared by/with anyone else. The creator and sole experiencer of this world is the single person in that the person’s self romances with the situation that otherwise would remain inexpressible. The great psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud presents that the dream is a zone of the fulfillment of repressed wishes and desires. For him, the sexual content of the human mind gains primacy in such fulfillment, for the moral, cultural, and social world is constructed at the sublimation of the primitive sexual drive called the libido. That is to say, the social-politico-moral domain of human life opposes the pleasure in its ultimate form in social practice. The self that sets itself in the quest of such pleasure encounters a lot of obstacles in regular life.
The self as the astral formation ever aspires to move into the forbidden domain lying beyond the access of the quotidian rationality of the ‘moral’. The breach of such discipline/code in the normal, ordinary situation while awake might bring even the risk of life: the moral, the social, and the political are ever united to oppose and bring the individual back to the normal form. The moral structure governs social life and individual self by enforcing everyone the rule of predictability. For instance, the traffic police want us to behave in a predictable way on the road because the moment one of the drivers goes unpredictable, there’s an accident. The principle of predictability helps us identify our world quite comfortably. The outside world wants us to make public announcements of our mating partner through celebration of the rituals of marriage: in fact, this is also linked to the issue of reproduction and identity of the children reproduced. Absence of predictability leaves us in a strange world, quite similar to a lunatic vision.
The strange world is activated in the state of sleep. The world that transcends the boundaries and limitations of everyday life and morality provides a space for romance of the self. The situations that come across are swiftly modified in favor of the self, whereby avoiding the potential harm, such a possibility arises every time. The author of the strange world can never get entangled into its own creation in fantasy. The situations that are produced in the mind of the dream can never go against the self. Also, the self romances in the prohibited zones of the hidden without a body that has five senses. The self without a body attains the state of freedom where the physically unpleasant feelings and emotions cannot disturb the dreamer. In this sense, the dream doubly benefits the experience of the dreamer: firstly, the physical body as the vehicle of the senses gets detached from the self during its rest; and secondly, the moral structure as the disciplining force loses its de facto rule in the self during the sleep.
The dreamer gets autonomy over herself in three ways: creator, practitioner, and modifier of the world. As the creator of the world, she ever aspires to fill the imaginary with the absent attributes of the real life. Pain and sufferings are profuse in the real: the creator wants to eliminate them from the core! Since she is there in the self-created world, experiencing the bliss which she would otherwise not enjoy, she puts her absolute efforts at the service of the self. Outside this domain of control of the social, the political, and the moral, the self regains the supreme position! The obstacles that might occur in the exercise of its happiness are quickly purged and the situation is swiftly modified as the dream unfolds further.
Obviously, there are frightening dreams as well. Even in such dreams, no harm is imposed even though the self is adequately challenged. For instance, I saw myself with a different face in a mirror in my dream one day. I wore a Mongolian face with small eyes and wide vertical wrinkles that seemed to make various sections on my cheeks. The reflection on a mirror of a dressing table in a kitchen simply amazed me as I saw myself in the form of an elderly man. The autonomous self as modifier reminded me of my childhood perception of self and questioned the status of my current face. Such dreams can show the presence of reality and the expectation of the dreamer in a different limelight; still, the safety of the self is guaranteed in dream.
The understanding of the self in relation to dreams helps in analyzing its positioning in art. The artistic productions in the form of the verbal and the visual require that they understand the nature of self being created, practiced and modified in the daily life. The repressive forces of the society (the moral, the social, and the political) ever aspire to discipline the way one perceives the world and promote the comprehension. Like dreams, art does always celebrate the strange; unlike dreams, it does not guarantee the safety of the self.
Creative process is a medium of bringing the unpredictable into the spotlight, exposing the latent possibility, and promoting the experience of the strange through the verbal and/ or the visual. Transcending beyond the effects of the political and the moral as singularly driving force in formation of the self, art projects the perception of the world in which the effects of the political morality are sublimated into a fine perception of the strange. The vision of the dark and the vision of the light that are formed at such depth of creative process lose their literal significance and thus turn into a symbolic gesture towards outlining the contours of the aesthetic perceptions. The creator, practitioner, and modifier of the situations in fantasy turns into carrier of the beauty in art. The vision of beauty and the being of the self thus get integrated into a single concept through which to view, understand, and rewrite the relationship of the creator and the creation.
The binding principles of this relationship also imply the complexities involved in making of both the self and the art. The perceptions of the world, the transformations of the self, and the social forces imposing the ban on free will of the artist establish a new form of being that attempts to bring about a picture of self, opposing and negating the existing social forces. As a rule, the predictability as the social norm is thoroughly revised and rejected in the making of art because the artist as a genius delves into the unknown, breaking all the possible rules of life. Often, she flouts on the regular expectations of her society, family, and herself! With dried lips facing the sun, she moves out at midday to figure out the size of the celestial body and fathom the depth of the fire. At night, she finds peace to rework on the vision sought after at noon. Searching for the words or colors, shades or gestures, and tunes or rhythms, she waits for the needle of the clock to tick till the break of dawn. The self resides both in the real and the fantasy in art.
The real brings contempt on the self, for the self goes into the incongruent and the shady. The fantasy brings about the strange, revises it, and resizes its image in accordance with the tolerance of the time, and projects the vision of the beauty. The consequences brought to the self vary from the direct threat of life as in the case of Salman Rushdie and Tashlima Nasrin to other various forms of humiliation. This type of understanding of self in relation to art develops new courage to explore the hidden, the unknown, the strange where reside the true tunes of the inspiration. It gives way to the gem of artistic achievement!
As an actor, the self works as a generator of both dream and art. The question of the safety gains primary importance only in the former while the latter prepares the self to take up further risk to identify the mystic domain of the strange. The famous author, Aldous Huxley went to the extent of taking lysergic acid in order to explore the terra incognita in his writing. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a classic case of experiencing a poetic dream, “Kubla Khan” that appeared to him while intoxicated with opium. Dream and art differ from each other in many respects: the question of self suggests that its safety is never guaranteed in art.
[Dr. Phuyal is a faculty at the Central Department of English, Tribhuvan University. A scholar of South Asian literature, history, and culture, he teaches courses on Cultural Studies, Modernity Studies, and Area Studies. He has researched and written extensively on Nepali literature. Also a creative writer, Dr. Phuyal writes poems, essays and stories.]