Dreaming the square root of negative one: Jacques Lacan and space-time relativity
Uploaded by duprie37 on Sep 26, 2001
(c) 1998 by Daniel du PrieThe 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 meaning 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 much because there were no recognisable signifiers, symbols or objects: the cat in my dream I know as a cat, that tram I understand 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 meaning seems to elude me. In the syntagmatic disjunctions, dislocations and disordering of the 'normal', everyday and waking flow of signifiers' differences 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 everyday is undermined and turned upside down in my night-life. It is because the cat is eating pizza with knife and fork, because the tram has now become a train (while I was not looking), because shooting the monster had 'nothing' to do with 'anything else' in my dream narrative that meaning escapes my consciousness. These alien patterns of flow alienate me from my dreams' meanings.
I am aware, generally, that this lack of meaning is grounded in the manners by which the wish-fulfilments of my Triebe (drives) tend to function, as Freud has variously written, that is, dreams are "disguised fulfilments of repressed wishes" (see endnote 1) [emph. in original]. However, 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 need to preserve their own particular...