It ain’t over ‘til it’s over
Do you remember what it felt like to lie down on grass and smell it’s green freshness underneath your face, and feel the slight dampness of spring soil under your palms? Or Better yet, can you remember the dry feeling of tickly grass on your legs and the firm resistance of sun baked earth?
For some reason this makes me think of Lenny Kravitz’s “it ain’t over til it’s over” and I could probably say the same for this quarantine if I’m honest: it ain’t over til it’s over. It’s day 6. It’s Sunday. Last Sunday I was lying in the grass drinking a Vedett that I feel really guilty about since Macron got all “nous sommes en guerre” about sitting in the park. I understand why I can’t sit in the park tho, and I do feel bad about propagating the spread of the virus by normalising not social distancing. As Kylie Jenner said: “hey guys – corona virus is a real thing”.
I’ve been having a lot of very vivid dreams, and they’re all about the same sort of thing. I’ve been having them for a little while, probably for about a week and a half, but I just read a really great post by my new pen pal a little while ago. She wrote about dreaming of her ex, in the dreams they’re in various scenarios of relationship, but mostly they’re friends. Mostly the dreams are about the bitter sweetness of endings. I wrote a similar thing about an ex and sent it to her and now we’re penpals. Anyway: you can read her beautiful piece here. It is poignant and touching and it made me want to cry.
After I got over my nostalgic response to her post, I got to thinking about the fact that recently I’ve been dreaming about all the boys I’ve ever liked. I’m not kidding, I have been dreaming about every boy I’ve ever liked – AND CRUCIALLY mostly about the boys I like/liked that I have not told I like. This has included, but is not limited to, a boy I fancied in year eight and wrote (still fucking terrible) poetry about on bebo and PUBLISHED for the world to see (awful), a friend I had in year 11, a boy I met on the tube,a boy I met on the bus in 2014 who asked me what book I was reading, boy I met in LA: so many boys. So many dreams to be had.
In these dreams, what happens is, I live a whole life with one of these boys. We meet, we date, we get together, we stay together. Sometimes the dream jumps ahead and we’re making dinner on a June evening in the garden with a Chablis talking about the neighbours we hate (boy in LA), sometimes we’re 65 and the dream is us watching it’s a wonderful life at Christmas with a huge extended family (boy I met on the tube), and other times I have a huge lavish wedding with the person (year 8 poem boy – awful, truly awful. I’m cringing. Dream me loved it)
In those dreams I almost invariably feel really happy, like head over heels happy, like first sunshine of the year, Vedett in the park, sunning myself with my friends and getting a damp arse cos the ground is still damp from the rain the previous day. And then I wake up and remember nous sommes en guerre and I am just like: “oh. Here we are”
The one with the Chablis was the most interesting, because it was just like I was living my life, except dream me had a nagging drive to check her watch. Dream me knew something was up because dream me knew that I am too much of a wimp to fess up to LA boy that I think he’s a dreamboat and I want to drink Chablis in our beautiful garden in high summer and bitch about the neighbours.
What’s a dream? Flo(my new pen pal) wrote about it being brain garbage, a way of processing our thoughts, but she also wrote about dreams maybe being weird little portals to worlds of possibility. Maybe my dreams are time-slips, rips in the fabric of space-time where all the versions of me who weren’t MASSIVE WIMPS managed to actually talk to people they fancied. Except I did admit my feelings about year 8 poem boy in FUCKING POEMS about how the sunlight coming through the tower block window shone on his chestnut hair in the middle of maths, and “what good is long division, when I can’t divide my love for you”. Yes, I know. Fucking cringe. I’m so glad Bebo is dead now.
Anyway back to the Chablis dream. I lived a whole life in that dream, albeit at an accelerated rate inside the 8 hours and 26 minutes of sleep I got from that night (thanks Fitbit). But a whole life: we were like 40 odd in that dream scene. I died at the end.
In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason He puts time as not a thing acting externally from us, like a Newtonian would; or as being entirely based on relation to a system without a physical existence, and only really existing conceptually like the Liebnizians (that’s a mouthful, jesus- the be-Liebniz-ers might be more catchy – tho a bit of a rip off); but as being something in between. For Kant Space and Time aren’t really things in and of themselves (conceptual or physical or otherwise) but rather they form a part of our own sensibility. Space and Time exist as they are experienced by the individual. So time, then, exists as we are experiencing it. Does that mean then, that on some other plane somewhere I have lived a full and joyous life with LA boy in which we wind up drinking our Chablis in June 2039? Does June 2039 already exist in dream-land?
Even though it felt like 30 years in dream-land, I’m not going to lie to u, Kant would not say that means it was real. In Critique of Pure reason Kant spends a long time saying that the experiential nature of space and time do not apply to imaginative play based upon experience. Transcendental idealism, whilst implying that time and space are subjective, doesn’t negate the reality of objects, and therefore kind of negates the reality of the unreal: dreams.
Kant would tel me to wake the fuck up and stop mooning about over a boy (or boys, keep up Immanuel, I fall in love multiple times a day! Shout out to the boy I saw on Rue Montorgeuil whose beautiful blonde hair will stay with me forever – wish I’d said something 2 u before the quarantine – alas now u r gone forever)
I’ve stil got “baby it ain’t over til it’s over” in my head. It sounds like summer in the distance. Lenny, what you doing to me? The dream is that over but is my dream happy life over? the answer is like most definitely yes, but the question still remains why am I dreaming about it?
in an essay called “What is the creative Act?”, Deleuze writes that a dream is a dangerous thing, both to be the dreamer, and the dreamed. It’s a really cool essay that you can read for urself here. “The dream of those who are dreaming concerns those who are not dreaming” – which is interesting,m: it seems Kant would tell me the dream is all in my head, and Deleuze would (using Minnelli – not Liza ) tell me that it’s not about me at all, but about them. (this is both very Deleuze, but also really validating, so thanks Gilles) “beware of the dreams of others” he says, “ because if you’re caught in their dream you’re done for” – Hi boys 👋
This particular essay is really good, and it will be revisited in other posts soon, but these lines have been revolving in my head since reading Flo’s post so I’m knitting Deleuze into my banal dreams of Chablis drinking mediocrity with a boy I met in LA, talk to occasionally, and who almost deffo doesn’t fancy me back.
The dreams make me feel like I’m lying in the sun after a long winter. On slightly damp grass, with a beer in my hand. God that’s pathetic, man. I’m gonna cringe so hard when I read this later- I think this might be worse than my Bebo Poems. RIPme. Maybe I’m dreaming about them bc it is rlly hard to date in the apocalypse? Maybe I’m dreaming about them Cos I’m in love with them. Maybe it’s a rip in space-time.
Tune in for Near Window 7 to find out about what I think about something else exciting like maybe potatoes or Matisse’s use of blue. Or maybe I’ll write about the neighbours. Or maybe rear window… W h O K N o w 5
PS. LA boy, if you’re reading this and you’ve figured out that it’s about u, I am available for a Chablis en terrasse (or another beverage, I don’t mind) as soon as confinement is over if we’re not dead.
Goose FM 