dreaming from the chin up

the ones in Russian began with a vengeance as soon as i got back from winter break. i attribute their delay (based on comparison with other intervals between starting the study of a language and its infiltration of my nights' activities) to my general lack of exerted effort during autumn quarter and, i must admit, a certain resistance to the whole Russian enterprise. apparently, this latter also worked its way into the dreaming enterprise. let me give you a little taste of the joy.

early in January, i was beset by these nightly dramas in which my speaking of Russian was almost secondary. what was obviously paramount was the fact that i was consistently doing so both badly and, i might add (if we accept the hypothesis of dreams as will-fulfillment), willfully badly. as i functioned in the RSL dream-world, i persisted in pronouncing things "correctly," which is to say: according to the written vowels, instead of the 5344402 caveats governing them, such as "a=b iff x ≥ 2a —-√b, where x is a syllabic function and a and b are vowels." in linking strings of verbs, i continually used a brilliant bit of That Language construction ("da"), albeit with the spoken actions in their Russian variety. needless to say, in each of these cases (and others i shall leave for your imaginary salivation), some villainous manifestation of my super-ego never failed to show up just in time to correct me, repeatedly and adamantly.

we dream both our hopes and our capacity; none demonstrate this synthesis better than language dreams. once upon a time, i wrote an essay in Czech about how Freud was wrong for the very reason that he couldn't adequately account for such ones. my teacher was not confused by the grammar, shall we say.... while i don't exactly remember what i wrote, i know that it is this central mystery that has remained focal through the years since then: that if we could fulfill our wishes in dreams, we would, simply, speak perfectly in other languages therein. that we cannot do so, that our faults and lacks we carry with us (along with—along with—our ardent desire to communicate, to phrase in parallel, in quadruplicate), indicates that we cannot even represent some of our deepest wishes. then again, perhaps we can: perhaps our wish is not to speak like the finest of broken crystals in the shrouds before dawn, but to speak at all—and for this speech to be contiguous and contingent upon a recogniseable open-eyed reality.

as time has slipped by, as i have begun to actually study for exams and quizzes, my guards have begun to slip. this is not to say that i like Russian any better, or even that i'm making the great linguistic strides i have (often within very constrained spans of time) in the past. but perhaps i have subconsciously accepted the same facilitative argument i use in waking life—except that, instead of involving making headway towards and then staying afloat in a Slavic department, by night, the rationale is far more speculatively a matter of life and death.

this from last night, in Russian:
"thought of changing your name?" he asked me; i thought about it whenever i talked with Raskolnikov's mother and sister.