Dreaming the square root of damaging 1: Jacques Lacan and space-time relativity

(c) 1998 by Daniel du Prie

The resistance of dreams to the transparency of the egoic consciousness, as opposed to structural meaning per se, lies not in their ‘objective presentation’, that is, in the way in which objects appear phenomenologically in terms of an eidos, under the order of the symbol. It lies, rather, in a noetic resistance, in an opacity on the order of the image, the imaginary: a lacking in the ‘narrative’ flow of which means as it flows forwards in time, the non-conformity of the ordered text. Or so it appears at first glance. Dreams seem to hide from imaginary order, protesting against a psychological model of sense/reference. This due to the trieblich (drive-ish) source of dreams’ contents.

In this frame, it appears that when I wake from this dream, or that one, confused, it is not so a lot simply because there were no recognisable signifiers, symbols or objects: the cat in my dream I know as a cat, that tram I have an understanding of as a tram, the gun looked like a gun which shot bullets and killed the monster. To my understanding, it is in the diachronic flow that which means seems to elude me. In the syntagmatic disjunctions, dislocations and disordering of the ‘normal’, everyday and waking flow of signifiers’ variations and associations. Not these as such, but in the flow thereof.

The diachronic flow of signifiers which appears transparent due to repetitive reification in the meaningful discourse of the daily is undermined and turned upside down in my night-life. It is because the cat is consuming pizza with knife and fork, simply because the tram has now turn into a train (though I was not searching), due to the fact shooting the monster had ‘nothing’ to do with ‘anything else’ in my dream narrative that which means escapes my consciousness. These alien patterns of flow alienate me from my dreams’ meanings.

I am aware, commonly, that this lack of which means is grounded in the manners by which the want-fulfilments of my Triebe (drives) have a tendency to function, as Freud has variously written, that is, dreams are “disguised fulfilments of repressed wishes” (see endnote 1) [emph. in original]. Even so, the signifying chain generated by this or that Trieb (drive) in this or that dream by the unconscious is radically obscured in its translation to the symbolic by the censor: that is, in the Trieb’s translation subject to law and reality, which want to preserve their personal specific…

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