Memories and Dreams . . . song title . . . the melody is haunting me . . . here and not here at the same time

This class is already dredging up much in the realm of memory for me. Frankly, much unpleasantness which I would prefer were not in my experience or memory, but is. As such, I’m contemplating the role of memories in this examination of dreams, myth, and life. For it can be argued that our dreams may rely upon memory, particularly those we might desire not to consider overmuch in our waking life. Our dreams disallow forgetting. It is also the function of memory which allows us to compare and analyze texts and patterns at all, to recognize in one place a translated form of something else, to see the mythological nature of any narrative.

A brief examination of recurring instances in my dreams include much fear, places that can be reached once and never found again although much effort is extended in the search, secret or hidden places that seem familiar or that I feel I knew all along and yet am discovering for the first time. Desperate irreversibility.

My new identity of Ice and Cold, although I know not yet what Hillman has to say about, conjures many personal associations and resonances. Numbness, death, preservation (interesting juxtaposition if I do say so myself), the mercurial nature of time in my dreams wherein it often feels as if the time I am acting in is frozen while the rest of the world rushes along breakneck as my frozenness, my inability to act finally results in apathy, cold waters threatening to wash all away.

Have you ever kissed a corpse? The body cools at a frightening pace once breath and blood still. Then what? Memory, dream, life exterminated. But not myth. Perhaps each experience both feeds myth and feeds on myth in an endless snake-eating-its-tail/tale cycle.

The spirit of Dylan is with us. He would approve.