what is an affective dream
Often, my dreams are holistic and dull. I remember aspects but they blend in with my daily life. My sharper dreams are directed and focused. They have a stricter delineation.
My sharper dreams tend to be affective dreams. Details crystallize. I can clearly recount them. When I close my eyes, I can see them for a couple weeks afterwards. In contrast to my dull dreams, my sharp dreams blend into my emotional life.
An affective dream is one that has a consequence to my emotional state. Affective dreams bug me, because that doesn’t make any sense. They make me feel as though something actually happened. Even though nothing happened.
This really bugs me.
vignette
I sometimes dream of someone I knew a long time ago. We’re usually in intimate situations, but in the way I fantasize about intimacy. There’s a warmth, but also a distance.
I reflected on this as I sketched one morning. I wrote
this intimacy never exceeds my boundary […] the person he is in my dream understands me; he in reality never thinks of me.
Later in the day, I began to implement my book page on boxhouse. I got frustrated, and that leaked into my dreams. Days after the above reflection, I dreamed of him once again, but this time, he exceeded my boundary. I woke up, half in love, half enraged. I felt a little bit violated.
It’s been a couple of days, and the dream is still in my head. I can’t help but feel the same split emotion; part of me floats, and the other seethes.
floating emotion
I’m angry at him. I’ve felt this since I woke up from that dream: I am angry.
Is anything as stupid as being angry at someone because of a dream? Though it isn’t really stupid—it’s floating emotion.
I think about memory in computers, when sectors are released but not overwritten. I think about the way buttercream clumps if I don’t prepare it correctly. I think about these pockets of isolated things that have their purpose, yet aren’t serving it directly. Emotion has a similar operation.
When particles of the psyche float, they are prone redirection. Redirection can be a very dangerous thing. I think redirection can really ruin people if they aren’t careful.
Dreams are important as they may have a redirection function.
animus and redirection
The man I describe from my dreams does have a strict line to someone I once knew, but the reality is complicated. It’s my animus. It just puts on a face, and this time it happened to be that man.
I understand dreams as reality freed from the constraints of time and space. Given this freedom, dreams are quantum objects. The animus in me has many faces, and often wears them all at once. I cannot claim with full intellectual integrity that I really dreamed of the person I have in mind. If I think hard enough, he shifts a little.
where jung falls short
I think jung is a lot of fun to play with, as is freud. Though... from my recollection, both fail to address the issue of materiality in dreams from a grounded perspective. I once wrote that a dream is like writing sentences on the same line, because both time and space are irrelevant. As such: any hard-coded concept, like animus, is tenuous at best, or completely misguided at worst.When I am unable to perform to my expectation, I get emotional. I am “emotional” when I have a surplus of emotion that has nowhere to go. I dreamed of the animus, and redirected some of that emotion towards him.
He soaked my frustration. I’m very grateful for that.
the crucible
I have not explained my sense of violation.
A complicated (and hard to articulate) aspect of this whole discussion is that I am my dreams. When I sleep, my head is more like a crucible than a psyche—a melting pot of my sensations that seem foreign.
The animus is me, which is an intensely uncomfortable thing to say. Though I’m not sure if it’s any more uncomfortable than admitting that I am in love myself, and my sensory experiences just serve to furnish an radically isolated world.
Why did I cross my boundary? Did I cross my boundary? What’s even going on in my head.
Reality is nice in that it is sequential, and it is consequential. Cause propagates effect. Real, useful emotion emerges from sequence and associated consequence.
When I have these sorts of responses from my dreams, I lack that sequence. I’m left only with the consequence.
I close my eyes and I can still see the scene. It was the warmth but without the distance I need. I still feel a little bit in love&emdash;a real feeling I can’t shake.
My real feeling comes from something that isn’t real. It has absolutely no link to materiality other than my own psyche.
None of this is real. I hate affective dreams, they really bug me.