Spinster Bursts In
Dreamed 1934/3/27 by Michel Leiris
I am with a woman close to my heart, on board a boat, about to disembark, perhaps for a simple call at port, accompanied by Z... and several other acquaintances who are traveling in our party. Searching for a doll my lady friend has just lost (just as several days ago she had lost her pocketbook at an actual ball we were attending), I comb the stairways and the parlors amid the crush of passengers.
Meet a little girl (barely pubescent and probably related to that girl whose spunk so struck me when I gave that lecture-tour at the Trocadero Museum of Ethnography for a group of teenagers who belonged to the left-wing youth group, "The Red Falcons"). The doll the little girl is holding is the one I'm looking for, so I ask her for it. She gives it to me, proud to have found the lost item. I chat with her, we disembark together, and walk along the pier.
The little girl seems to enjoy my company greatly, and I notice that she is quite developed for her age (she's probably 12 or 13). After a while, it occurs to me that she's probably spent a fair amount of time with me by now: her parents are going to start worrying and wondering what on earth I am doing with her. So I tell her she'll get into trouble with her parents if she doesn't leave right away. She then explains to me that she is studying dance and, growing ever more flirtatious, she overtly sets out to seduce me.
I am now in a room, either in a hotel or a private apartment, to which I have been led by the young ballerina who soon becomes identified with the woman who had lost the doll (a woman whom I see almost on a daily basis without any need to dream and whose young daughter I know). The girl-woman or the woman-girl--subsequently confused with Z... and no longer with her rival--had made preparations for a sort of bacchanalia: two sailors are present, along with two prostitutes, all four of them getting ready to make love at the same time, but without promiscuity.
Things get delayed a bit. One makes sure that all the doors are shut tight. Then I get undressed and start, I believe, not by taking off my jacket (as I do in real life), but by dropping my trousers right away. At which point a door that we had not noticed opens: one of my three sisters-in-law, a spinster, enters, bringing a hot-water bottle or some other item of domestic comfort to my wife. The woman-girl and I are horribly embarrassed at having been surprised in the company of couples about to engage in group sex.
EDITOR'S NOTE
I often critique Freud, but for once Freud's ideas fit--a taboo sex scene is disrupted by a figure of repression and convention. Such frustration dreams do happen, and this can represent the dreamer's own repressed desires in conflict with guilt feelings. My objection's just that I don't think every such dream expresses Freudian issues. Consider...
--Chris Wayan
SOURCE: Nights as Day, Days as Night by Michel Leiris (1961; 1987 translation by Richard Sieburth) p. 9l-2. I added title and sketch.
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