Siri Hustvedt - The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves

As you can see, it was not that I was carrying out the calculation proper in my dream, but that some of the elements had taken human form, and although they could not be manipulated algebraically, they had retained the “character” they had in the calculation.

Several times I have woken up (in the morning or in the middle of the night) to a clear mathematical conclusion, as if I had done the calculation in detail in my sleep. I could just go to a piece of paper and write it down, all crisp in my head.

R.’s dream of the x twins looks remarkably like S.’s waking world of numbers with swollen feet or temperaments of gloom and cheer. S. lived in an ongoing dream of vivid concrete personifications and images. It’s as if his dream machinery never shut off. After a night’s sleep, R. has sometimes solved mathematical problems, just as I have often woken to find a way out of a writing impasse — the solution appeared to have been given to me during the night. No doubt, R. and I have powerful emotional attachments to our work, which then make their way into our dreamscapes. At the very least, however, I have unearthed two examples of people who have dreams that feature transformations of written texts and mathematical formulations. Arguably, R. and I are still working in our sleep.

But who is the dreamer in the dream, the “I” that walks and talks and rides around in cars at night? Is it the “I” of daylight? Is it another “I”? Does that hallucinating nocturnal being have anything useful to tell me? Dreams are a part of our consciousness but not our waking consciousness. The continual stimuli that bombard us during the day are missing at night, and the mind manufactures its own hallucinatory material, at least in part as compensation for what has disappeared. The transitions in dreams are often violent — I don’t know how I climbed into that car with the monk, for example. The laws of physics do not apply in that parallel world. And dreams are less abstract than wakeful thoughts: the signs of a day’s work, x and x prime, are transformed into belligerent brothers at night. Neck tumors succinctly condense my worries to a single nocturnal image. But could I be wrong? Is there really anything meaningful about dreams? Is my reading of a dream just my left-brain interpreter churning away the morning after, imposing a narrative on what are mere fragments? No, I don’t believe that. It seems to me that dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless. And even if I’ve changed sex or grown fur or am flying through the air, the first-person pronoun belongs to me in the dream, my dreaming “I.”

My intuition that dreams are not nonsense, arrived at through my own experiences during sleep, is not without its scientific advocates. Having studied people with neurological lesions that change their dreaming patterns, Mark Solms disputes that dreams are mere mental junk. He writes, “It appears that specific forebrain mechanisms are involved in the generation of dream imagery and that this imagery is actively constructed through complex cognitive processes .” 135In other words, some higher mental functions are active during dreaming. Intellectual melees continue to be waged over this issue, with strong proponents on both sides. In 2006, Hobson and Solms staged a formal debate in Tuscon, hosted by the Center for Consciousness Studies. The issue was Freud’s dream theory: Solms for, Hobson against. Although Hobson has modified his earlier belief that dreams are without any significance and are symbol-free, he lost the debate to Solms (the audience voted) by a large margin. 136I continue to be fascinated by how controversial Freud remains and how emotional the discussions surrounding his ideas are. My own view is that conceding Freud was right about some aspects of the mind does not mean he wasn’t wrong about others. Is there any reason to insist on embracing or rejecting a theory as a whole?

As far as I can tell, the idea that dreams have both form and meaning has grown among researchers. Whatever the case may be, my own inner life was affected by my dream, with its strange but concise components. And perhaps most of all, the dream left me with the trace of an emotion that genuinely reflects my trouble. If I discovered tomorrow that I had inoperable cancer, I would not just feel sad, I would be terrified, mutinous, devastated. In the dream I was only sad, strangely deliberate, resigned, and capable of calm meditation on my lot. In other words, it was a dream not about my own death but about my relation to another death — one I seem to be carrying around with me every day like a disease. I may be wrong, but I feel I’ve never been as close to the shaking woman as in that dream.

THESE QUESTIONS RETURN US to the problem of subjective experience. Dreams use the language and imagery of waking life, but their meanings are personal. Like most contemporary psychoanalysts, I do not believe in universal dream symbols, that stairs signify one thing and trees or kites another. Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie. Had I not unraveled my dream through the events of my day and the driving emotions of my present life, it surely would have read as nonsense. To exclude complex subjective reality from dream research strikes me as myopic. Close attention to the dreamer’s day life doesn’t make a dream report less disjointed or bizarre; it renders those same qualities significant by placing them in a broader context. Nevertheless, there is no objective reading of a dream. Is this the character of interpretation in general? It is no secret that our personal experiences infect our ideas about how the world works. If Antti Revonsuo were scribbling or calculating regularly in his own dreams, it is doubtful he would have advanced the idea that these activities are missing from everyone’s nighttime hallucinations. It is certainly possible that most people are not typing and doing sums in their sleep. My friend R.’s calculation did not involve manipulating algebra but instead personified its symbols. I often type in my dreams but can rarely remember what I am writing. Nevertheless, we appear as exceptions to Revonsuo’s hypothesis, and exceptions must also find their way into a theoretical account of human dream life. The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world. In art, this is considered an advantage; in science, a contamination.

A dramatic example of an overlap between the personal and the intellectual occurred at a lecture I attended. Among other topics, the presenter spoke about neuroscience and its uses for psychotherapy. She also spent some time talking about empathy and the brain. During the question-and-answer session, a man in the back of the room stood up and announced that he was an engineer who was also immersed in brain studies. He then demonstrated some of his knowledge, the content of which I don’t remember, but it was plain he was no fool. Then he stated loudly and forcefully that empathy does not exist. The very idea was preposterous. He did not believe in it. The room, filled with a couple hundred people, mostly psychotherapists and psychiatrists, was silent. But I had a potent sensation of a current running through the audience like an inaudible murmur, if such a thing is possible. Politely, silently, a mass diagnosis was taking place, one that, I confess, flashed immediately through my own head: Asperger’s.

Surely, it is difficult to believe in an emotional state you never experience. It is not like believing in Antarctica or neurons or quarks. Even if one has no personal knowledge of these entities, has never actually seen them, they may be taken on faith, part of our intersubjective cultural knowledge. In contrast, the world of our feelings is so internal, so inseparable from being itself that every notion we entertain about normality becomes highly subjective. To argue that the man at the back of the room has a “condition,” currently a fashionable diagnosis, that makes him abnormal does not detract from my point: it is often difficult to untangle personality and feeling states from belief systems, ideas, and theories.