Tuesday, 5 May 2009

Dreams from Dreams

Imaginative art forfeits interpretation and calls instead for a comparable act of imagination.

Your dream evokes a dream in me, mine in you - not literally as such, not mutual sharing and confession (which loses the image in personal subjectivism) - but dream as reveries, fantasy, imaginative response, a piece of soul-making whose aim is not hermeneutic, not a gesture of understanding.

Along the mirrored border one does not hear the language of meaning; understanding each other is not the aim and so translation falls away. There is instead a miming dance back and forth of the border guards, the greetings of images, exchange of gifts, ceremonies.

[James Hillman]
Healing Fiction, p.30

Related posts:-
Fiction from Fiction
Active Imagination
Separations and Bridges
Posted by Forever Becoming at 20:44

1 comments:

  1. In a theatre, the audience is informed by the curtain and the framing of the stage that the action on stage is "only" a play [...] in dream, unless the sleeper be partly conscious of the fact of sleep, there is no curtain and no framing of the action. The partial negative - "This is only metaphor" - is absent.

    I suggest that this absence of metacommunicative frames and the persistence in dream of pattern recognition are archaic characteristics in an evolutionary sense. If this be correct, then an understanding of dream should throw light both on how iconic communication operates among animals and on the mysterious evolutionary step from the iconic to the verbal.

    Under the limitation imposed by the lack of a metacommunicative frame, it is clearly impossible for dream to make an indicative statement, either positive or negative.

    As there can be no frame which labels the content as "metaphoric," so there can be no frame to label the content as "literal."

    These characteristics of dream may be archaic, but it is important to remember that they are not obsolete: that, as kinesic and paralinguistic communication has been elaborated into dance, music, and poetry, so also the logic of the dream has been elaborated into theatre and art.

    [Gregory Bateson]
    Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('Redundancy and Coding'), p.427-8
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