Mike Barney

Mike Barney lives in Detroit, where he practices the profession of parasitism,

transferring wealth from one pocket to another within the same pair of pants.

He also scribbles poems. The following, he suggests, has something to do

with Sigmund Freud via Jacques Derrida. He can be reaced at mikeb@hotmail.

com.

THE EXEGESIS OF THE DREAM

It is the recapitulation of the relating of the experience and not the

experiencing of the experience itself that validates.

The content of the dream, being part of the process of the experience and not

part of the process of the recapitulation of the relating of the experience,

has no worth and is never described in detail.

------------------------------------------------------

The dreamstate is dysphasic

The dreamer speaks of the dream with precision, an engineer sketching a

schematic, every aspect exact and quantifiable, as if dreamscapes possessed

measurable dimension.

The dreamstate is dissilient

The dreamer speaks of the dream with shame, constrained by the need of

confession to address a secret wellspring of disgrace given shape by the act

of dreaming, as if the dreamscape could be more than mere veniality.

The dreamstate is droll

The dreamer speaks of the dream in the flat empty tones of the defeated, as

reportage of a catastrophe lived through but not survived, as if transisting

between the dreamscape and waking had a capacity for injury irreparable in

reality.

The dreamstate is dynamic

The dreamer speaks of the dream drowsily in language leavened with a vast

lassitude as if the dreamscape were the final leg of a sojourn begun in hope,

ending in exhausted indifference.

The dreamstate is delusory

The dreamer speaks of the dream as a tourist, the dreamscape an alternate

country in which the attractions and the prisons both offer only the most

limited possibilities of escape.

The dreamscape is dysphoric

The dreamer speaks of the dream as a state of grace.

Mike Barney