Sleepwalking E-Book

Gudrun Rogge-Wiest

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 117

Beschreibung

Sleepwalking is a collection of dream narratives based on dreams the author really had at night over a period of more than a year. They capture the evasive and uncanny nature of our nightly dreams, their leanings to the fantastic and the absurd. Thus they intimate the fascinating workings of consciousness, which selects elements from our daily lives and associates chains of images. With their sometimes nightmarish sometimes humorous turn the resulting tales make for an entertaining reading experience.

Leseprobe

Für meine family

and

for my friend Gudrun

Table of Contents

Prologue

Mai to August 2021

Evaluation

Socialising

Hedge Hopper

Swimming

Inaugural Meeting

A Workshop

September to December 2021

A lakeside walk

Force of gravity

The drink

Climbing a cliff

On skis

The bassoon

Meeting a friend

Preparations for a war

Chaos

Dark clouds

A staff outing

A chemistry lesson

At the pool

The hotel room

Balcony scene

Purgatory

The missing piece

Before court

The inheritance

Disaster

Confused

The demonstration

January to April 2022

Delayed

Spring

Falling apart

Lost and Found

Cross-country skiing

In a mountain hut

In India

Port manoeuvre

A walk in the mountains

Trying to communicate

Before the return journey

A room with a view

At the doctor´s

A family party

Doubts

Two presents

The solution

Giving birth

A safe space

A sense of foreboding

A lesson with a consultant

The white horse

Just a dream

An investigation

Shopping for clothes

A church service

At a café

An encounter

Injury

Brushing one´s teeth

Poor Sasha

At a town festival

On a train journey

Speeding

A visit in Norwich

After the rehearsal

An incident in the foyer

Not the right moment

An incriminating photo

Hungry

A spectacle

In Spain

The permit

Feeling guilty

House cleaning

An ending

Sunday

A sleepless night

A mysterious car

An English lesson

Not the right outfit

Sudden death

A phone call

A snack

An acquaintance

Sailing

Campaigning

At the baker´s

Lagging behind

Nuns

Holiday plans

Who is in charge?

A steep climb

The right medication

Before the race

Final math exam

The end of summer

Sister and brother

In the toy department

Open day

A memorial service

The outhouse

Not one of them

Breakfast at the youth club

Closed

A letter

May to August 2022

A ride on the bus

Exam day

In the library

A new beginning

Inspection

Torn

History

Birthday

Listening to music

Family life

During a summer night in a forest

Power cut

Late

Satisfaction

A red currant cake

After skiing

Anniversary

Blood

The blue and white book

The foundling

The question

Change

No detour

The model railway

The plant

Danger

Left behind

The tick

Cashing up

An accident

Crocodiles

The book shelf

On a farm

Epilogue

Prologue

For more than a year, from Mai 2021 to August 2022 I have put into words as much as I could remember of my dreams. Right after waking up in the morning I sat myself down either in bed or in front of my desk writing with a pen on paper. Time and again I struggled with the apparently high resolution of the images dissolving while I was working on transcribing them. In the process some episodes or images took centre stage, others blurred or vanished completely. Although a dream catcher has been hanging over my bed since mother´s day of 2022, a present of my older daughter, the challenge has remained. What appeared to be prolific dream material at first, could be transcribed only incompletely.

Dreams are sometimes more eventful than real life, and they can draw attention to latent states of mind and correlations. As to method, I strove for a high degree of accuracy in the representation of scenes and experiences in order to enable my readers to relive them in their minds. In the process ‘I’, the subject of the dream world, becomes a first-person narrator distinct from the author. As reason does not interfere with the dreaming mind, dreams contain fault lines, occasionally take an absurd turn or enter the realms of the fantastic and supernatural. A character might initially seem to represent a certain person, but on closer inspection turns out to be someone else.

In its density, according to Sigmund Freud the result of concentration and displacement, the manifest dream content is comparable to the figurative language of literary texts.1 Thus, transcribing my dreams, a collection of short prose texts with an anecdotal character has come into being.

It might be confusing that the first-person narrator can be a middle-aged woman in one dream and a youth in another. I considered arranging the dreams according to the age of the narrator. However, this would have meant giving up the randomness of theme which the chronological sequence reflects.

With the pioneer of psychoanalysis I share the fear of embarrassing oneself by giving the public an insight into the workings of my soul, and I find solace in the way he deals with this situation. In his own words in my translation:

It is understandable that one flinches from giving away material of such intimacy from one´s emotional life. Doing so leaves one unable to protect oneself against misinterpretation by strangers. But one has to override these doubts.2

In contrast to Freud, it is not my aim to analyse the dreams and to reconstruct the latent dream content.

Of course, the dream content is based on my experiences. Sometimes the material has been dug up from the remoter past, from youth or young adulthood. Many areas of life are covered and occasionally there are allusions to current issues.

My reservations with regard to publishing these dream narratives are not so much due to their content, as there is no one-to-one correspondence with real happenings. They are more like a fictional representation in that they refer indirectly to experiences I have had and often deal with them in fantasy plots and with character constellations rearranged.

However, I have been thinking long and hard about the characters´ names. After all, they represent real people I am close to: family members, friends and colleagues. So I cannot just use the usual disclaimer All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.3 However, most people are unrecognizable as they do not appear as round characters in the dreams. They are often just by-standers or feature a very limited number of traits or behaviours. Still, some dreams do characterize actually existing relationships from the point of view of my dreaming self.

To protect people´s privacy, I have decided to use letters instead of inventing names. Thus, I hope to be able to cover the tracks sufficiently without deleting the correspondences completely.

1 e.g. https://literaturkritik.de/id/15167. The essay is a short version of Joachim Pfeiffer´s contribution ‘Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)‘ in: Matias Martinez / Michael Scheffel (Hg.): Klassiker der modernen Literaturtheorie. Von Sigmund Freud bis Judith Butler. Verlag C. H. Beck, München 2010. S. 1132.

2 Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (1900), Sigmund Freud Studienausgabe Band II, Frankfurt am Main, 1972, 125.

3 e.g. in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_persons_fictitious_disclaimer

List of main characters

A

older brother

C

younger daughter

F

a boy-friend when I was a student

H

husband

J

older daughter

W

younger brother

May to August 2021

Evaluation

May 14

During the final minutes the participants of a workshop, me among them, are assigned to write a comment on an A4 sheet of paper. It is pinned to the wall in one corner of the big room, a school hall perhaps. Now, standing in front of it, I wonder what to write doubting if I have the right to judge. Besides, there are some things I don´t want the other participants to know. So what could I write? The queue of people waiting behind me becomes longer and longer. Their perceived impatience weighs on me. Although I am usually slow under pressure, I am rescued by a brainwave. Why don´t I just write down a question?

When I manage to carry out my task without blundering or being disturbed, I am immensely relieved and feel so self-confident that I spend some more time wondering if I should sign my work. And though evaluations are usually handed in anonymously, I decide to just add my initials: Rw. Everyone will recognize them. Once more I read through what I have written, and yes, it´ll do.

Socialising

May 15

I am in the company of a colleague, a woman of approximately the same age. We are part of a mixed group of people on our way back from a trip and heading for a small train station somewhere in the country. It is the dead end of a single track with the train ready to board. The carriages are from an earlier age. They are earth-coloured and angular with an overhanging convex sheet metal roof.

Although we have twenty minutes to kill my companion urges us to get on it right away, because it has only two carriages. We sit down on seats in the corridor, but it is so narrow that leaning a little forward my forehead immediately touches the acrylic glass of the compartment opposite. It will be impossible for people to walk past us.

Now I am sitting in a large compartment around a table with a few elderly people. My place is at its head. On the table are two cakes both with chocolate icing. As one of them has already been cut into, I can see the thick layers of chocolate butter cream surrounded by crumbly black pastry. In anticipation I sense a spoonful of it melting on my tongue, smooth and cool with the bitter-sweet chocolaty taste of cocoa spreading across my taste buds. But it is not time to indulge in this, yet.

Meanwhile, I have taken a seat on one side of the table. To my right is an elderly man whom I have quite recently started seeing. He tells me about his late first wife, and I picture her as a very beautiful young woman. So I shrink back in dismay, when he shows me a photo of her with a wrinkled face and silver-grey hair so thin that the skin shines through. She looks ill and unhappy.

He quickly produces another photo on which her face is younger. Her hair is white and so bushy and curly that I wonder if it was reddish in her youth. He wants to remember his wife as she was as a young woman, he says. He must have noticed my reaction and tries to put me at ease again. But the affection I felt for him earlier is gone, and I wonder why I took to him and consented to seeing him.

Back at the head of the table, I notice that the chocolate cream cake has disappeared. There are only crumbs left. The second cake has been cut into, too. However, it does not have any cream inside, and plain sponge cake doesn´t tempt me much. So I find it easy to abstain. Besides, we are going to arrive at our destination, presently.

Hedge hopper

August 20

I stand at one of the windows of my parents´ house. It was built by my grandfather in 1938. My gaze wanders over the familiar features of the Brigach valley, which is bordered by a dark forest on the surrounding hills. It is summer. The sky, a cloudless, blue canopy, stretches to the horizon. Suddenly, the ear-splitting bang of an explosion makes the walls and the floor vibrate. The shock wave is passing through my body when the giant airplane, which has flown over our house, appears right in front of the window sinking before my very eyes. I can see every detail of its enormous wings and fuselage. It´s bound to crash into the next row of houses. A ball of fire and wreckage is going to tear and burn down everything in its vicinity. It´s all over.

But the plane just gains enough height to rise above the roof tops. It goes on flying at low altitude, so that for a short while I expect it to make an emergency landing in the Brigach valley, but it withdraws fast, the noise subsiding until all is silent. My house, my neighbourhood, my world, have remained unscathed this time.

Swimming

I am swimming in a quarry pond heading for the other shore which seems to be in convenient reach. The water is pleasantly balmy. I sense it lapping against my naked body and tugging gently in the opposite direction. I feel good, light and happy.

Inaugural meeting

August 25

After a break of some years I have been elected town councillor again. It is the night of the inaugural meeting, and the big hall is crowded. But instead of the ceremony I expected, we have to vote on some issue right away without being briefed any further. I turn to some of my colleagues in a final effort to get the necessary information, but in vain. As I have resolved to prepare myself thoroughly, this makes me feel deeply embarrassed. Thus left in limbo I am unable to raise my hand, not even with those who abstain, all the time hoping that my confusion won´t be noticed.

A workshop

August 28