Dream journaling as mayoral satire

From last October, on Vanity Fair: “The de Blasio Diaries, Chapter 1: Bill’s Gracie Blues.” Meh.

Dude-a-palooza

“Your roll, New York,” says Lebowski Fest. Maude Lebowski (Julianne Moore), daughter of the Big Lebowski, not the Dude Lebowski.

This weekend Lebowski Fest was scheduled to bring fans of the Dude (Jeff Bridges in the The Big Lebowski [1998]) to Lucky Strike Lanes on far-west 42nd Street and Gramercy Theater on East 23rd Street. Although I have no reason to think the festival didn’t take place, I can’t say with certainty that it did, because I’m not a big enough Lebowski fan to have taken part. My lack of fandom for what’s been called a stoner masterpiece is of no consequence; easily enough without it, “The Dude abides.”

I had to do a Google search to be reminded whether there were any dream scenes. I have a poor enough memory for plot details, and this is a Coen Brothers movie about which, according to Wikipedia quoting an Indie Wire article, “Joel Coen stated: ‘We wanted to do a [Raymond] Chandler kind of story – how it moves episodically, and deals with the characters trying to unravel a mystery, as well as having a hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant.'” As Roger Ebert described it, “‘The Big Lebowski’ is about an attitude, not a story….Only a steady hand in the midst of madness allows them [the Coen Brothers] to hold it all together–that, and the delirious richness of their visual approach.” All of which explains this film’s cult-fest worthiness. (Ebert’s review provides interesting backstory about the Coens’ inspiration for the main character.)

It turns out there are at least two major dream scenes, beloved of fans. One is a flying dream. The other is a Busby Berkeley* type of dance number to  Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) by Kenny Rogers & the First Edition (1968).

1855 print: “A Dream of Twelfth Night”

New York City is a wonderful place in the summer (except maybe for the heat and humidity). There are scads of free events, especially outdoors: movies, drumming, opera, symphony performances, bike rides, gardening, art shows, and theater, Shakespeare in particular.

I’ve been on a Shakespeare kick the last few years as a result, but I’m still a beginner. So, always on the lookout for blog material, I Google a play’s title in combination with the word “dream.”

Twelfth Night is one of the plays being offered this year, at the municipal parking lot at Ludlow and Broome streets on the Lower East Side. (Shakespeare in the Parking Lot is, in its own right, one of the great things about summer in NYC.) Correct me if I missed something, but apparently dreams don’t figure in Twelfth Night (unlike, say, Macbeth, also being offered this summer — Macbeth in a New York Minute, by Classical Theatre of Harlem and Dimona Theater/Cultural Lab [based in Israel]).

A Dream of Twelfth Night is a different story. It’s not being offered in NYC, per se, but online (Amazon and eBay, also to be found on Google Books): it’s a drawing by George Thomas that appeared in The Illustrated London News of January 13, 1855.

“A Dream of Twelfth Night,” by George Thomas

Jews and Dreams

Having been absent from this blog for quite a while, I’m grateful to Ira Barouch for this guest post. My getting online at the end of Passover with a post inspired by a Chanukah workshop may seem out wildly out of sync, and I do apologize to Ira for my slowness (I’m still distracted by preparing for my upcoming move).

On the other hand, the timing has continuity: Around Chanukah, as Ira notes, the Jewish cycle of reading the Torah in small sections lands on the story of Joseph interpreting the dreams of Pharoah—a biblical event that facilitates the survival of Abraham’s descendents during widespread famine by bringing them to Egypt. Passover celebrates the Jews’ subsequent exodus from Egypt, the beginning of 40 years of miraculous survival in the desert on the way to the Promised Land.

by Ira Barouch

For thousands of years the Jewish people have been fascinated by the notion of extracting valuable messages from dreams. Jewish culture has been in the forefront of the study and practice of dream interpretation, beginning with the ancient biblical prophesies of Jacob and his son Joseph in Genesis, to the “mysticism” of the medieval era’s berekhat (tractates, or sections of the Talmud), to the sexually charged instinctual wishes of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory that boldly ushered in the 20th century, and continuing all the way up to the trendy contemporary “Kabbalah” practices popularized by Madonna and other celebrities.

On a Saturday in early December my wife, Helen, and I attended a Chanukah retreat in White Plains, sponsored by Westchester Jewish Community Services. In addition to workshops that practiced mindful meditation, chanting, and yoga, the program included two fascinating presentations that illuminated the long Jewish tradition of dream interpretation. As a psychoanalyst, I was intrigued.

“Pharoah’s Dream,” digital pop art giclee print by Israeli artist Mike Darnell

 

Rabbi Molly Karp, religious school principal at Temple B’nai Chaim in Georgetown, CT, led a workshop entitled “Spirit Dreams: The Joseph Cycle,” referring to the section of the Torah traditionally studied around Chanukah. Our group, which included a few other local rabbis, sat around a large table and took turns reading and discussing portions of this ancient text. The narrative follows the spiritual development of Joseph through his uncannily insightful interpretations of his own and others’ dreams. The cycle features the two universally recognized dreams that so troubled the Egyptian Pharaoh, in which he envisioned “seven fat calves followed by seven lean calves.” Joseph had gained a reputation as a keen interpreter of dreams while falsely imprisoned in an Egyptian dungeon, and when he was summoned to interpret the Pharoah’s two dreams, he immediately understood them as a divine prophecy from God and warned that seven abundant years would be followed by seven extremely lean years.

Sound sampling and Sao

Googling something tonight that was related only in the sense it involved the arts, I happened upon a link to The Knights’ Found Sound Project – WQXR (WQXR being the main classical radio station in NYC).

The Knights, WQXR’s ensemble-in-residence, want your help for an upcoming performance of John Adams’s composition, Christian Zeal and Activity.

In this hymn-like piece for string orchestra, Adams encourages performers to place “sonic found objects” into the composition. The composer’s original recording from 1973 included a recorded sample of a preacher speaking. But over the years, performers have incorporated all sorts of recorded sounds from their lives. We want you to approach using all your powers of imagination.

The Knights don’t actually want our help anymore, because the deadline for sound submissions was March 16 and the performance was on April 4. But being always on the lookout now for how New York and dreams interact, I thought (before I noticed that deadline) about who among the dreamers I know works with found sound.

That took only moment, because the late Shawn Allen O’Neal (also known as Sao) has been on my mind, and the subject of quite a few of my emails, recently.

Shawn Allen O'Neal (Sao)

Montague Ullman’s influence lingers at publication parties

On what’s probably the last day of vaguely winter weather of 2011–2012’s vaguely winter season, I’m getting back to work here by writing about a holiday party I attended at the other end of the season, in December.  More to the point, about the books I received from the party host, Cosimo.

Cosimo, a specialty publisher in New York City (whose owner is a Dutch expat),  does “publishing on demand” in several categories. In 2006, Cosimo republished Appreciating Dreams,

in connection with a seminal 2005 talk by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Montague Ullman (1916–2008). The Ullman Method of group dreamwork has widely influenced how people work together to understand their dreams. Appreciating Dreams is the “manual” for the Ullman Method.

Montague Ullman, on his site maintained by Markku Siivola's

Cosimo gave out gift bags at the party, and some of the bags included a just-published book by Finnish psychologist Markku Siivola, a friend and student of Monte Ullman’s. That book is a restatement and introduction of the Ullman Method, titled Understanding Dreams: The Gateway to Dreams Without Dream Interpretation. Markku and I met at one of the weekend-long dream group dream leadership trainings that Monte used to conduct in his home in Ardsley, New York. That weekend afforded a convincing demonstration of the Ullman Method’s ability to be just as insight-inducing and satisfying for group members as for the person whose dream they’re working on: at some point in using the Ullman Method on a dream I’d brought, both Markku and I were deeply affected, each for our own reasons. So I’m particularly looking forward to reading his take on the method.

Getting into a Nieuw Amsterdam state of mind

GezichtOpNieuwAmsterdam (Memory of The Netherlands), by Johannes Vingboons (1664); from Wikipedia Commons

The obsessive reading-up I’ve been doing about the New York area’s Dutch roots has me in high anticipation of Robbie Bosnak’s January 30 talk on “New Amsterdam and the Dream of the Golden Age: An Alchemical Perspective.” (Download a printable PDF of the flyer for the talk.) I’ll be getting a lot more out of his talk from this preparation—and from out of the 2011 annual conferece of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) in June in Kerkrade, the Netherlands, if I get to go to it.

Whether you’re planning to attend either of those or not, you may find a browse through this post and its links helpful in understanding the mindset of this area’s first European settlers and the lasting Dutch influence on New York’s character. (See the St. Mark’s Church item in the Self-Guided Tours section for a particularly convenient adjunct to the Bosnak talk.)

You can also easily get to all this blog’s Dutch-related posts, past and future, by going to the navigation panel at the right side of the blog. In the Topics drop-down list, choose “Dutch.”

The Dutch Golden Age

__  Wikipedia has a succinct but enlightening description.

__  The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, by Simon Schama

I bought this book soon after it was published in 1987; I started reading it last week! Already it’s given me a lot of insight, and I’m only in the introduction…but it’s 720 pages, and I was glad for an assist from a New York Times book review.

Scavenging treasures

Trying to anticipate the structure of this, my first blog, has turned out sounding all serious on the About and How To pages. In reality, I’ve been having a blast going on this dream treasure hunt for a few weeks now.

The idea’s been germinating in my mind for a few years—originally as a scavenger hunt. In events calendars a couple of times, I’ve seen a listing for a scavenger hunt at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It sounded like a fun time, and I kept trying to think of a way to hold a dream-related scavenger hunt. But it’s challenging enough to get people together for a single-place, stationary event in New York City (long commutes, tons of other events to compete with), and the answer just wasn’t coming to me. I got more intrigued, though, on a trip to Chicago last year, when I discovered that the Chicago cultural center has handouts leading visitors through self-guided scavenger hunts as a way to discover Chicago neighborhoods.