Thursday 17 April 2003

Pic of the day: In dreams, lifelike realism blends seamlessly with the utterly impossible. (Illustration picture from Morrowind.)

Dream - metaphor - poetry

it is not quite right to say that dream is a language. Perhaps more right would be to say that dream is poetry. Let me explain.

When we dream, a bio-electric storm rages through the brain. It starts in a small center near the limbic system where our fundamental emotions are controlled, our basic needs, and animal instincts. From here, near the center of the brain, the activity flows outward to the cortex, where sense input is interpreted, memory stored and associations made. Before it comes that far, there is hectic activity in the hippocampus, which has the index to our stored long-term memories.

It is now generally accepted that all humans dream, and indeed all placental and marsupial mammals. But the "brain storm" does not always lead to the subjective experience of a dream. When I was young, I felt kind of insulted by my brother's theory that people made up their dreams after they woke up but before they got out of bed. But there is something to it. What remains in the brain after the REM sleep (dreamsleep) is a jumble of emotions, images and perhaps an underlying sense of time flow. But to remember a dream as a dream, most of us have to review it. And in reviewing it, we tend to tell the dream to ourselves. We seem unable to remember that which doesn't have the structure of time, as imposed by the language; in the same way we are unable to remember what happened before birth and usually the next couple years too, despite frantic activity in the brain all that time. It is just of a nature not compatible with our system of memory.

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A rather small area on the left side of the brain has the power of language. Once this area is damaged, we suffer complete or partial aphasia, inability to use language. (The partial thing can be really puzzling, like people who are able to write but not to read or speak.) Some people, almost exclusively women, have a secondary speech center in the right side of the brain. The rest can only use the right brain for exclamations, including simple obscenities.

In some cases of partial aphasia, speech loses its structure but retains the vocabulary. What happens then is that the language takes on a dreamlike, poetic form. Words containing meaning are put on the table together, but the listener is left with the task of figuring out how they relate to each other.

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A metaphor is when one thing is used as a symbol or replacement for another. Usually it is a more concrete thing that symbolizes something more abstract, like a flower symbolizes beauty or a heart symbolizes love. Sometimes a symbol can symbolize a symbol, such as lips for kiss for love. But the connection must be immediate in experience: Diapers don't symbolize sex to most healthy people, even though babies come from sex. Of course, an important point here is that babies have a high value on their own, and the rule of symbolism is to use something of lesser strength to convey something of greater strength. Bones are symbols of death, a dagger is a symbol of murder: Strong but abstract ideas shown through proxy.

Not all metaphors are general. Some are personal, and these you will find in dreams. Therefore it is hard to make a good book to translate dreams into reality, for the symbols are those of the dreamer. But in poetry, we restrict ourselves to symbols acknowledged in our culture.

I learned about Norse poetry in high school, and was surprised to find that it did not rhyme. I was used to poetry that rhymed: The last syllable in one line would sound like the last syllable in another line. But in Norse poetry, the goal is alliteration: To make sure that syllables with stress all started with the same consonant or a different vowel. Was this poetry? It should take until now before I realized why they both were. In the meantime, I saw and dismissed "modern" poetry, which does not use such rules at all. Anyone can write flowery language, right?

The constraint forces the use of metaphors. More generally, it forces the use of substitutions. Often there simply isn't a word that ends in or starts with the right letters; you have to use a substitute or rearrange the orders of words, or both. If done well, these substitutions are metaphors, and you get poetic language. If done poorly, you simply have a thesaurus in your head and find a word that has a roughly similar meaning, so you say less than you started with, not more. This is doggerel, or poor poetry. Most of us who have attended a wedding will know what this means.

You don't have to write poetry to use metaphors. Some of them have crept into your mother tongue (native language). And some people naturally write in a more poetic style. Some, such as I, do it on occasion, depending on how we feel. And as mentioned, some do it because it's all they can do.

One of the things that clued me in to the nature of poetry was translations. Now that I write mostly in another language than I was raised in, I sometimes feel the need to translate poetry from one language to another. Also I see daily Japanese song texts translated by fans into English. Sometimes it makes little sense, other times it retains its poetry despite the loss of structure.

Of course, the structure of poetry is not imposed just to force people to use metaphors. Its most important job is to preserve the poem, so it doesn't change in retelling like all other stories. It is easy for us to replace one word with another, but not if the word fits a very exact requirement. Structured poetry was the writing before writing. The extended use of metaphors was a positive side effect, and this is why modern poetry (which has access to writing) feels free to dispense with the form altogether.

But why not just write down a dream instead, and look for your own symbols? After all, we are all symbol-minded, aren't we?