The Imaginary Intern was vehemently opposed to the inclusion of dreams in the autobiography. He was completely, intransigently hard-line about this. We were always talking about the need to renounce counterrevolutionary forms, and the Imaginary Intern maintained, and he was unswerving about this to the very day he disappeared, withdrew, quit, whatever you want to call it…he maintained — he was adamant about this — that expository dreams were counterrevolutionary, that they comprise the same form as anecdotes and vignettes, which we both despised as “literary” and which we were both violently opposed to including in the autobiography. We had discovered during the, uh…during the, the gestation of the autobiography, that it was the segues and the interstices, the oblique and incidental details, all the throwaway, offhand remarks and obiter dicta that invariably ended up being the most meaningful, the most weirdly hyper-cathected stuff — just our favorite stuff — in the whole book. We pledged to abide by the injunction “Tell, don’t show,” and its corollary “Diagnose, don’t tell.” “We are not writers,” he’d say. “We are clinicians.” Dreams are simply a means of smuggling literary modes and motifs into the autobiography. Dreams (i.e., narrative dreams) “wave the red banner to oppose the red banner,” meaning that they have a specious allure, they seem “all trippy and schizzed out,” but they utilize counterrevolutionary expository elements. Literary content, he’d say, is “a nodular accumulation of yellowish, cheesy sebaceous material that can harden into large plaques.”
The Imaginary Intern claimed to only have nonexpository dreams (or “dremes,” as he called them). He said — and again, his diction tended to be very juvenile and somewhat ghetto, so I’m paraphrasing here — he said that his dreams were a sort of kinesthesia of mathematical torsions and arabesques and fractals, and could never be represented in language, that they eluded and exceeded rational transmission, that they were pure quivering, contingent thought in its barest provisionality…an evanescing froth that represented the abolition of meaning in favor of form.
The whole question of whether or how a dreamt-up entity dreams is a fascinating one that I actually pursued with him at great length…and, uh…I was thinking this is something you guys might want to possibly explore further with me in the Q and A later… (The “guys” remain emphatically uninterested.)
MARK
There was definitely, I have to admit, an anti-Semitic strain to some of the Imaginary Intern’s ideas about this, to some of his beliefs. He’d occasionally use the word Jewification. He’d talk about the Jewification of dreams through the importing, the transplantation of literary motifs, etc. This would usually happen when we were both high on oxycodone…although I know that’s no excuse. (MARK glances guiltily at his MOM, then back at the fast-food workers.)
MARK
Did either of you guys happen see that movie Lake Little Lake that was on TV…I think it was Saturday…on Lifetime…pretty sure it was Lifetime…this past Saturday night…Lake Little Lake? Did you guys see that?…No?…
I’ve never seen a movie that makes being chemically castrated seem so appealing.
Neither of you guys saw that…last Saturday…no? (MARK sighs, flagging somewhat, seeming, for the first time, a little discouraged.)
MARK
I’m trying, Mom…I really am. (MARK’S MOM mouths the words I know you are.)
MARK
Sometimes when we were drinking, the Imaginary Intern would mumble ominous things to me…his back turned…a silhouette…But he was crying this one time.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him.
“I’m worried about you,” he said. “You have a powerful death drive — it’s a nostalgia for a lost harmony, a desire to return to a pre-Oedipal fusion with your mother’s breast. Have you been having any fantasies of castration and self-destruction lately…fantasies that you’re finding it harder and harder not to act upon?”
“Why? Would that be bad?”
“It’s completely normal. Relax.”
“A child’s been abandoned on a merry-go-round in the middle of the night in a desolate, crepuscular de Chirico — like landscape. The seats on the merry-go-round are not the usual horses, they’re hagfish, pygmy marmosets, Madagascar sucker-footed bats, that sort of thing. There are no other human beings anywhere, with the exception of a woman (the child’s mother, we’ll soon learn) who recedes in the distance, arm in arm with a disreputable-looking guy in a white wifebeater and greasy blue overalls, a cigarette lodged above one ear. Suddenly two glowing dots…these two tiny punctiform gleams appear in the distant black sky — the rabid eyes of some sort of winged reptile which grow larger and larger as the creature gets closer and closer, and the calliope music grows louder and more dissonant and more demented. I can see now, of course, that this terrified child is me, because he’s tiny, he has wispy blond bangs, and he’s dressed in this ridiculous multicolor brocade Nehru jacket. Suddenly the creature is upon the child, he’s torn him open with one savage slash of his glinting talon, and he’s yanking loops of intestine from the child’s abdomen as he screams in agony for his mother, who, as we hear the Velvet Underground crooning ‘She’s a femme fatale’ in the background, disappears into the horizon with her louche drifter boyfriend.”
“Dude, I love that song.”
He extended a fist that I bumped with mine.
“How does it feel while you’re being eviscerated by this, this creature?” he asked.
“It’s like I’m being unspooled…it sort of conjures up the unraveling of my father’s and mother’s DNA in the zygote at the end of the Gone with the Mind video game.”
We cracked open two more cold Spaten lagers.
“Does it hurt — the disemboweling?”
“It’s a strange sensation…not agonizing at all actually, not even painful really…but not pleasurable…it’s a very, very peculiar feeling…but the whole regime of obligation seems to disintegrate, as if adhesions and knots of scar tissue are coming loose…I feel as if I’m diffusing into the flux, diffusing in and through language, in and through verbs, if that makes any sense…And I feel as if this is the crossroads to which all other paths in my life have been leading. Do you know what I mean?”
“I do, absolutely. First of all, I think the horizon represents the spurious line separating hysteria and politics. And I think being torn apart by a prehistoric winged reptile symbolizes for you an ecstatic capitulation to imperious events beyond your control — in other words, a way out…a way out for your mind. And it’s not hard to see the correlation between disembowelment and the a posteriori disgorging of one’s contents that is autobiography…How does it feel seeing your mother disappear with that lowlife scumbag who’s got his hand down her pants?” (MARK clasps his hands to his heart and gives his MOM the most fervent look of esteem and affection one could possibly imagine.)