Before Bed
Dreamed ca. 1995? by Mary Ruefle
|
I bathe at night. I dress in white. The sheets are clean,
for sleep is an important occasion. And since I cannot bear a tick, the small clock is placed under the bed like a carefully lost invitation. I am going to a coronation. And I'm not just one of the crowd, I am walking down the aisle of a great church and somebody carries my head on a pillow. When we reach the end I pick it up, hold it high, say a few words of farewell. Then I put it on somebody else's head. And though you could say I've never worn it myself, I play an important role, I plan the details that allow the rest of the country to sleep, to dream of the day they'll be the one. But I keep the secrets of how it is done. |
--Mary Ruefle
EDITOR'S NOTE
What amuses me here is how quietly and elegantly Ruefle's unconscious upsets an axiom shared by most dream-theories for a century: that the dream-self is always the ego, the conscious 'waking' I. Doesn't the viewpoint of Ruefle's dream seem more like the unconscious--like dreaming itself? She's given up her head (and what better image for that patronizing, negative label "unconscious"?)--yet she's the quietly competent Jeeves who knows how it all works, though never donning the crown of nominal self-awarensss! The power behind ego's throne.
--Chris Wayan
Source: Cold Pluto, © 1996 by Mary Ruefle, Carnegie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh.
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