Chickens
Dream
29-03-2003
There are different elements in the dream. Something with supermarket shopping trolleys. Then something very important which I loose when I think about the chickens. As if it is impossible to keep in mind two (important) parts of the dream simultaneously.
There is an apparatus, sort of arrangement, in which chicks can be gathered by the chicken, in the middle of a big tray. There is a transparent-brown plastic square, arranged just above the heads of the chicks, and the four sides of this box are made of somewhat stiff feathers. The chicken can push the chicks in the box with its paw, but the chicks can't leave any more. The box works like a rectifier, one-way traffic.
Free Association
29-03-2003
Difficult to depict a dreamed image.
Take away the white plate above the chicks, replace it with a brown transparent plastic, like in sunglasses, and surround the animals with fairly large feathers, to keep them in.
The chicken has to push the chicks in a 'cote', with its paw, for safety perhaps, or for warmth. Under mother's wings. My mother for a long time had lightly brown tinted glasses. Not sunglasses in fact, but yet with a touch of brown. The light was to strong, or her eyes to week, or it was for her headache - migraine?
In fact in the dream it was different: exactly one chick was present, although the box was fit for more.
It feels as if I am pushed in a cote, captured, to look at the world through the glasses of my mother. Imagine to look at Australia through brown glasses.
The clouds, the water, the land, everything gets distorted in comparison with the rest of the world. Yes, I know our eyes adapt to the general background color, and color deformation is partly compensated in our brains (white balance), if you keep the glasses on at least. The long and the short of what I feel in the dream is that I see myself as more restricted, distorted than the others, in a straitjacket or corset. Let me use the brown glasses as a symbol for 'looking at the world through the glasses of...'.
I once visited a chicken raising farm where all chickens wore a sort of plastic 'glasses'. It were so called free-range chickens, but they gathered so many of them on a small area, that the birds tended to peck each other. The glasses prevented them from seeing the others, not very well, and then they were decent. Horses are treated the same way, and even people tend to wear blinder-glasses.
In Flemish (apparently not in official Dutch) looking through 'horse-glasses' means: blinding off the panorama of reality, looking just at a restricted area, seeing only what you wish or others want you to see. Something like rose-colored spectacles, but negative.
Bridle with blinders (7), bit (6) and reins (14)
Not that so many horses walk or walked around, that they would bite each other, but apparently the beast becomes skittish by the movement on the roads, or something like that. The animal is more easily manipulated, certainly with an extra bit in its mouth with reins for guiding. The world changes color, but the number of observations decreases, the field of vision gets narrower, 'one' can better concentrate on the driver's signals, it boosts communication between the members of the team.
Where we find chickens with chicks, probably there will be a cock also. Father should not be absent. My mother often called me a big chicken, because I pretended being a birdbrain, which she liked. In the past I was washed in a tub, galvanized steel, and once my father was watching.
It was the tub to wash the dishes. Between my 3 and 4 years of age, at home, the wash bowl stands on the living table, where a brown stove is burning. There is a brown cupboard too, and an armchair with my father in, and two lamps of the five turned on in the chandelier, to save electricity. Besides a couple of chairs, there is nothing further. Perhaps my father's bicycle. I am standing in the bowl with the warm water, and my mother washes me.
She rubs with a face cloth and plenty of soap, my Willy, and it makes a little flopping noise. Everybody laughs, and I repeat the movement with my hand. Laughing again. Then I do 'it' an other time, but the laughing is over. Mother orders me to stop it and looks at father, and he says it is quite enough now. No more laughing. End of memory. I had to put my serious glasses on again. People like to put glasses on babies and beasts.
Once I made a peep-box: a long square tube with a little hole at one side and a red or a green square on the other side. I could look at the houses of our neighbors over there and imagine, see, how it was in red or green, in detail as if I had a telescope. Nobody liked it. Not the neighbors, because they did not see me looking, not my little friend, because I was alone then. My parents saw it, I think, my mother indeed, but she did not find it worth the bother. Then an other time I made a sort of zither.
A strumming instrument with some 12 strings, on a small board with screws, and strings made of steel-wire out of an old tape recorder (which was in fact a wire recorder to begin with, and I got the wire from brother music, in the second class of secondary school - the wire was knotted and unusable). This time my mother was surprised. Length and tension of the wires was neatly adjusted to produce the correct sequence of notes, and she did not understand it.
I see the world through the spectacles my mother - and father - put me on the nose. I see myself, in the mirror, also through their glasses. Of course you have seeing and seeing. My father had to sleep many times at daytime, because he was a waiter and worked at night, for the sake of them who got stuck in the café. He had a dovecot with winning pigeons, and often tried to rouse my interest for his hobby. I had to start as a novice however, to scrape the dove-shit and so, and I did not feel like that. Building the cote was much more interesting, but I was too young to help, seemingly. So I invented things on my own. I saw much, and I found many things, but nobody looked out for it. My mother was not very interested in things, and often turned her nose up for my personal world. My emotion was lonely, en with my big brains I fantasized in the world. The glasses on my nose are coloring the day with the turned up nose of my mother and the disappointment of my father. I see myself in the mirror having the feelings they strewed round me, or from within the cote they lovingly and tenderly pushed me in, en from where (alone) no escape is possible.
In the Jude-street, where I lived until I was four, there were some dance halls. In the weekends there frequently were lots of Dutchmen making an almighty racket and with screeching tires rode down the narrow street. Then they made it one-way traffic. Not visible on the picture is the big mushroom in the middle of the road-sign blinding off the bulb illuminating the white bar in the middle of all that blood. As if it were a big penis shouting to the rowdies (so called by the inhabitants of the street) to go home. In the evening people came out of their houses to talk to each other, sitting or standing. The kids, we in fact, played outside, in the middle of the street - there almost were no cars, when the rowdies were gone.
4 - 5 Years of age. I have to sleep at my grandparents'. The small bed is gone, but a large one waits for me in the empty bedroom upstairs. There is a lavabo too, a cupboard with a marble top and a mirror at the back. On the marble there is a jug in a bowl but no water. The once filled it for a guest, but I don't know who. Perhaps it was aunt Arsène, who moved to America. When she once came to Belgium, it was as if the whole country ought to be ready for her arrival and her chat. Very well. There was a towel rack too, without towels. Apparently it was Saturday, because the rowdies were very active. On the windowsill there lay a lot of dead flies, with their legs in the air and completely intact. I wondered why they all laid upside down, perhaps died of hunger and thirst face to the window, and then backwards down? From in the bed I could see the street bulb, with a lid on top.
When I still lived there (<4 year), there was still a gas streetlamp somewhere halfway the street, and every night a guy with a long stick came cycling, sometimes a little bit drunken, to lit the light. He had to push a small bar in an other position. I never understood why it burned at once, without a match. The bulb came a little bit later, and now I was looking at it, and listening to the cars and the voices in the street down there. I wondered what they did there, in this dance hall. Of course it were bad guys, they said, but in fact I liked the sensation, all those men and women in a small dark cote. Oh yes, 15 years later I met my wife in one of the tents there. Fortunately I continued to like the sensation for a while.
A little bit further in the street my aunt Miss lived, some distance from the gas-lamp. It was the youngest sister of my mother. Sometimes she took me with her, when she returned from her work. Apparently I got my nose against the windowpane, just in time like a dog, to see her walk about, at 6 o'clock in the evening. I could play with water at the lavabo, a real one then, with a tap. Once I turned it quite far open, and did not find the way to shut it down. Or it got stuck, or I did not find the right turn to stop the spurt. The water continued streaming, and the bowl threatened to flow over (I thought). My aunt was out of sight, and me shouting and screaming. She simply came and turned the tap off, and said it was all right. I had to stand on a footrest to get at it somehow.
The brown step reminds me of chocolate. Aunt Miss sometimes made chocolate mousse for me, when she had not yet a child of her own. She whipped egg white and melted chocolate in a small pan ... I often looked at it, on the step, and I found it very long lasting. I must have a little bit of patience, she said. Later on, when she had a daughter herself, she gave her a whole bar of chocolate, when she asked for some, and so was I, but I said it was bad for my liver and so. At home I only got a small piece of a bar. She proposed I should imagine not having a liver at all, which was much more easy. She looked through an other pair of glassed, then.
In virtual reality everybody gets a viewer on with a whole new world to look at. It is as if you get a new head, and they can fool you the way they want it. Of course this is already done in the normal way, without special gadgets, and the greater the nonsense the better it goes in, but yes, ... . In fact we want to talk about education. Everybody has his/her own character, and brings up his/her children in accordance with this nature. My father often said: "Children resembling their father are beautiful". People coming in therapy sometimes don't believe 'education' plays such an important role, and then I give the example of the Chinese. Imagine you are brought, from the first day after your birth, to China and raised over there. The chance is very real you will speak Chinese, and not only speak but also write, think, feel, eat, know, love, ... like that. You would not be like you are now, and your world will be totally different. When you would be dropped here this very moment, well then you would be surprised about your own thoughts now in your head. I often feel everybody is brought up in his/her own planet, and the more that everybody supposes we all come out of the same nest. Even children coming from the same family are never the same. Sometimes I am asked: "Why am I sitting in the shit, just me, while my brothers and sisters don't have those difficulties"?
Everybody wears his/her own virtual viewer programmed with everything out of the environment and adjusted personally for optimal usability. Looking objectively at the world, reality so to say, is a difficult affair. The more difficult it becomes when two people are interacting. I see you with my own glassed on my nose, glasses I neglect, and so I see you like I think you are. I see you wearing your own glasses, but because everybody wears such things, I don't take them into account, and imagine to be seen like I think I am. You are doing the same, have the same experience.
Failures resulting from this system are enormous, misunderstandings cluttered like a fallen knot of steel wire. Not the beginning nor the end are visible, and unraveling takes much time and energy.
Still an other cause of confusion I recognize in TV. When a very young child looks at something, becomes interested in it and tries to catch it, then the movement stops when a opaque screen is placed between the child and the object. It simply 'vanishes'. Older children go for a look behind the screen, and adjust their strategy to get what they want. A television screen is in all respects a strange thing. You never know if what you see is real or not, live or canned. The comparison is possible in this way: you show a (grown up) child an attractive object, and tells it may have it, and can catch it, and then you perform the trick with the opaque screen... , and in the meantime you change the attractive thing for something worthless or nothing at all, then the child is looking TV. I think about publicity on TV, or ordinary programs presenting impossible situations as being normal, or informative talk-shows in which not so long ago was suggested that it is crazy to stay your whole life with one and the same partner, so.
Then of course we arrive at language, as information carrier between people, the symbolic order (Lacan). With TV the whole chain of machinery is apparent: the camera and microphones, possibly recorders, the transmitter and receptor, the home recorder perhaps and the TV set itself. Interactions between people and language don't show such obvious things. In addition we adapt to the reasoning of each other to formulate our thoughts, so things grow more and more complicated: listening and responding to suggestions, accentuating nice aspects and dissimulating the darker side of our personality, manipulating the situation to win, or because I just think about something else, interpret what is said a second ago as if it fits with my imagination.. . It seems to be an interactive feedback system. To be continued.
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Sunglasses :
http://www.geocities.com/nehemia13/zonnebril.gif -
Chicks :
http://zijdehoen.fol.nl/zijder.htm -
Brood hen with chicks :
(http://www.angelfire.com/pa3/lazyhacademy/images/chicks.jpg) -
Spring chicken :
http://www.dierennatuur.nl/index.asp -
Horse blinders :
http://www.aangespannenrijden.nl/tuigen.htm -
Wash tub :
http://newdeal.feri.org/library/s35.htm -
Child in tub :
http://www.merrillphoto.com/images/Sue in washtub.JPG -
Child with sunglasses :
http://hampshire.edu/~lasCCS/family/april2002/
april2002.html -
Child with sunglasses : #
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Child with sunglasses :
http://karen.akamine-moore.com/ -
Mirror :
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/ S4B/sem05.html -
Bowl and jar :
http://www.antiquemystique.com/chinaporcelain.htm -
Water tap :
http://www.diy.com/bq/category/category.jhtml?CATID=297 -
Virtual reality :
http://abilitymagazine.com/boone_virtual.html -
Virtual reality : (http://www.afit.edu/gallery/Gallery3/images/vrbattle.jpg)
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Virtual meeting :
http://homepages.cwi.nl/~robertl/ -
Horse blinders.
http://www.tack-wholesale.com/Catalog_Pages/
English_Bridles.htm -
Chicken blinders. http://pages.ebay.com/
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Horse glasses.
http://microvet.arizona.edu/vetmic/ircvsc.htm
Copyright © 2003 A. Syberg