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Gazing Into Myself

Two dreams by Michel Leiris, mid-1926 & 1940/7/12

Cylinder of Lime
Dreamed mid-1926 Portrait of Michel Leiris by Many Ray, 1930.

I am lying in bed exactly as I would in reality, except that my forehead is pressed against the white powdery wall of a large cylinder made of lime, a cistern of sorts, exactly my height, and which is nothing other than myself, actualized and exteriorized.

I feel this other exterior forehead against my own, and thus I imagine my head is pressing against the very substance of my mind.

The Granary
Dreamed 1940/7/12

Waking up (with a shriek that my wife Z-- muffles) from the following dream: as if to catch a glimpse of something, I insert my head into an opening that resembles an oeil-de-boeuf window overlooking a dark, enclosed area akin to those cylindrical pisé granary lofts that I saw in black Africa between 1931 and 1933 and also reminiscent of those covered alleyways in certain neighborhoods of Oran that I visited when I was a soldier in the South during the "phoney war."

My anxiety derives from the fact that as I lean over this enclosed area and get a glimpse of its inner darkness, I am actually gazing into myself.

Editor's Note

Jung argued that deep dream-themes can recur over months, years, even decades. These two dreams by the Surrealist writer Michel Leiris were 14 years apart! Quite different in imagery, but sharing the same deep theme.

SOURCE: Nights as Day, Days as Night by Michel Leiris (1961; 1987 translation by Richard Sieburth), p. 49 and 111. Original passages untitled. Cylinder of Lime dream is undated, but betwen entries dated April and September 1926. Portrait of Leiris is by Man Ray, 1930.


LISTS AND LINKS:
Cylinder of Lime: beds - stone - alter egos - Love is a toroid rock in Dreamstones - self as pillar of salt, in Thumbsucker! - geometric tourists in Rain of Platonic Ideals
Granary: nightmares - caves & the underworld - darkness and night - doubles & alter egos - mirrors & reflections
General: Surrealism & Surrealists - recurrent dreams - Jungian dreams - souls - more Michel Leiris

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