Steve, Dreamwork
Since he sometimes finds it hard to stay awake late at night he often spends time in his dreams answering the emails that pursue him through space and time , attending meetings and carrying out other working duties. As you would expect the email replies, initiatives he puts together includes courteous ones, (thanks for doing this, thankyou for confirming your stupidity etc.) passionate ones (it is really annoying that the behaviour these days is terrible) and general bureaucratic ones usually sent to encourage people to act. The meetings he attends when he sleeps are usually the team management meetings in which he is told at great length the way in which things can no longer be. What is never discussed is how things might be better.
Anyway with eyes closed, body in a state of exhausted sleep, he deals with the outstanding issues of the previous days. Usually in his dreams he manages to do so with exotic flourishes, accurate cutting statements that get to the heart of things without fear or favour and which are universally admired and agreed with.
When he wakes up he is lost. Unable to remember everything that he'd worked at overnight and exhausted from the effort. When after many torrid adventures he gets to work and starts clearing up his email the horrible truth emerges. He writes better in his dreams than in reality. In addition the reality of his existing in a large transnational - the personal is political – coming home to roost (his painful inability to write) And here it should be obvious that he does not believe that he can write at all when he is awake, cliches and management speak are his favourite phrases including his current "baseline…"
At a certain point he sometimes believes that they have adopted a strategy of Zofie's who circulates the centre, a strange many headed beast. The latent meaning of the dream , or is it the manifest meaning of the dream ? But he always awakes before the Zofie's encircle him and all he has left is the scent of her pheromones and the whiff of the Yohji Yamamoto perfume she wears when out on the prowl. But on this basis he imagines she is chasing him along the lines that constitute his life.
The act of being prey can last through the many dreams but one cannot find the desire behind the dreamscape, the desire for capture, for rest for someone, for anyone. He doesn't understand the reason, the motive underlying the dream is it discernible or is it rather that it is to reveal the woman at the end? In all probability it is to let the woman encircle him. An endless discontinuous spiral and to leave him with the false memory of a clearing in the woods, a squatting form, the smell. The inefficacy of his memory is punishment enough and a feeling that will haunt him for most of the next day. Perhaps it will one day tear the woman to shreds, rising up a roaring beast that will attack the woman with the crazy machines of his Aunt who caressed him as she bathed him back in his childhood during early 1950s.
Steve, the uncertainties of music (11)
Introduction to the Hypertext Novel
Steve de Vos - London 12/02/98