Words by Ainsley Louie-Suntjens // photo from Mulholland Drive
Starting when I was about ten, I have attempted to keep dream journals. As implied by the word “attempted,” I have yet to succeed. First, it was just a series of intermittent, unfinished notebooks. Then, I tried to incorporate my dreams into Morning Pages. Then, I scrapped Morning Pages altogether. Now and again, they find their way into my journaling. Sometimes I’ll have a particularly stressful dream when I have a deadline, or show, or big date coming up. Occasionally, if I am in an especially weird place, I’ll have a dream that is best described as a prolonged intrusive thought—weird, disgusting, off-putting. That happened the other night, but I couldn’t tell you why. That may be the problem.
As you can probably tell, I am not the biggest analyzer of dreams. Funnily enough, I engage a great deal with psychoanalysis, and dreams tend to factor very heavily into my storytelling, but they seem to drop off the radar when it comes to my personal life. Dreams have always seemed too slippery, too niche, too abstract for me to ever get a meaningful handle on. As stupid and obvious as it sounds, dreams have never felt “real” to me—I can’t touch or taste a dream in my waking hours. Nevertheless, they are useful storytelling tools. In that sense, I can make them real: I can boil them down into a coherent narrative stream that I can actually look at, one that feels real to me.
That is why my interest was piqued by author and astrologer Emmalea Russo’s Dream School, an ongoing series of virtual classes that explore dreams through film, literature, and psychoanalysis. The subject of dreams is one I have engaged with so little, despite the fact that we are surrounded by its influence. The first thing I noticed as I reviewed the Dream School syllabus is that dreams are incredibly ubiquitous artistically. They show up all the time, suggesting I am not the only person who finds them to be a useful storytelling tool. From David Lynch to The Sopranos, Grease to my favourite dance film The Red Shoes, dreams and dreaming are all over the place. Maybe that’s why I never noticed until now: A fish doesn’t realize it’s submerged in water if the water is everywhere. Even the word itself is used so often and variously: “My dream is to become a figure skater,” “I dreamed of zombies last night,” “Wouldn’t that be a dream!”
Emmalea Russo’s Dream School is styled like a college literature course. Each month, students focus on a particular piece of literature, analyzing and discussing it over the course of a 2-hour seminar. The first class focused on “Kubla Khan, Or a Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The course also offers “Dream Work” sessions, where students take what they’ve learned from the literary discussions and apply it to their own lives in various assignments and projects.
Appropriately, the Dream School sign-up page cites famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud: “The task of dream interpretation is to unravel what the dream-work has woven.” This is precisely what I set out to do with “Kubla Khan,” a poem I have struggled with for years. This time, I told myself I would finally get to the bottom of it: I would unravel it, interpret it, and find out what my English survey course professor saw in it when he assigned it. So I sat down with my notebook and pen, the Dream School meeting link open on my laptop, and set out to do It.
In hindsight, I don’t know if I did It. That is the frustrating part about dream literature and Dream Work. Did I do it? I’m not sure. I definitely took more notes this time around. I wasn’t being lectured to about why I need to love the Romantics as much as my 45 year-old white male English professor, either. Emmalea and her students spoke more about elements of the poem that I find genuinely intriguing: addiction, Orientalism, the process of creating art (or losing it, in this case). But as I write this, I now notice that doing It might not be the right way of approaching this. Doing It is accomplishing. It is arriving at the top of the mountain, and then getting to yell, “I climbed to the top of the mountain!” I read “Kubla Khan,” and felt I got It, but I don’t think Emmalea’s course is meant to work that way. Dreaming doesn’t work that way. It is continual: You get to the top of the mountain, only to find that there is a second mountain on top of that, and then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, forever. Dreaming never ends—It is a prism that life continues to filter through, over and over, until you die.
Emmalea offered this quote at the beginning of the class from psychotherapist Carl Jung: “A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal. A dream never says: ‘You ought,’ or: ‘This is the truth.’ It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and we must draw our own conclusions.” I realized that I was searching for the truth in a dream, which has no truth. I wanted to complete “Kubla Khan,” but “Kubla Khan” will never be complete, literarily or literally. It keeps spanning discussions, from poppy flowers to Orientalism to dream theory. Dreams, and art, never end. Every night you lie down, and something new presents itself to you. It isn’t complete, and it won’t explain itself: That’s on you. I think this sentiment was my largest takeaway, and the most valuable part of Dream School—not necessarily the literary discussion (although it’s excellent), but the understanding that this work, this dream of a creative life, will always be a work in progress.
