Sleepwalking through the Cemetery of Splendor*
This week let's swim in the bright warm waters of the dream universe as we consider the cunning currents of collective subconscious and that sick feeling cleaved in the pits of our hearts </3
(*Massive spoilers to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendor)
(i) We all dream. We can’t stop them.
Dreaming is a strange thing. When I am in a state where control is a little slippery and I am feeling anxious, my dreams seem to be long stretches of menial tasks. In one dream, I had rented out a shop space downstairs. In the waking world, it used to be a bakery. In my dream, I was peeling a mountain of potatoes to make curry puffs for my shop. This dream went on forever and when I woke up my hands were aching. In another, I was made to look for a type of screw in a warehouse that has forty stories and a thousand rooms. In the rooms were small compartments containing all kinds of screws. Most times I wake up feeling annoyed with myself.
These banal dream states stop and shift into bright coloured body horror dreams when I am under some (mostly work related) high pressure situation. These are my favourite kind of dreams. On a Whatsapp message to a friend dated 8th September 2020: “Been having Cronenberg dreams recently but this was really strange. I had feathered skin that bristled according to the sun direction. And it got uncomfortable when it was too hot and I decided to remove them but realised they were eggs. Sitting at the bottom of each feather was an egg and then I found myself just sitting feeling every single egg sac dancing”.
As someone with dysmorphia, this body horror dreams are deeply pleasurable and I find myself forcing continuations in the moments I begin to stir. My baseline dream state however is what I would describe as dreams of alternate verses. This particular sort of dreams are a liquid mess, slipping from being a crew on a ship fighting djinns, who strangely resemble Najib Razak and his wife, into some mage in the forest concocting some elixir with the help of were-tigers. These dreams are harder to track, vapour worlds that are either too illogical or epic in their shifting. That’s probably you traversing your past selves, a friend has said. It’s pretty common.
Sometimes my dream keeps me wide awake even though I am sleeping. It is hard to explain it any other way. A good sleep would be a dreamless one but most of my sleep is tethered to these messy dream worlds bouncing against each other in my psychosphere. My partner however mostly sleep dreamlessly and when he does fall into dreams, he’d sometimes howl or scream with his eyes still shut. There are moments where his dreaming bleed into mine and I’d wake up to goosebumps running all over his arms and hands. A kind of preemptive waking and in less than a few seconds a muffled groan would have escaped. I’d shake him gently and he’d fall back to sleep. In the morning, he remembers nothing of it.
I can’t help but wonder if people are able to share the same dreams. My friend Sally cultivates a dream world with her long distance partner in which they’d sync their consciousness and reunite in sleep. I do not doubt the possibilities of that since dreaming is a refracted mirror of our waking realities.
***
In Apichatpong’s Cemetery of Splendour, sleeping soldiers are treated in a temporary hospital in an old elementary school in Khong Kaen, Thailand. The story centres around Jen, a middle aged woman who comes to care for one of the soldiers, Itt since he has no living relatives. The sleeping soldiers would sometimes wake up temporarily, long enough for haircuts and a meal before flopping back into sleep state with no warning.
We learn that Jen used to go to school in the hospital as a girl. When we first meet her, she describes her classroom in detail to a nurse on duty. The treatments for these soldiers fall slightly into the absurd. The sleeping soldiers are said to be having bad dreams though we see none of that in the film. To lessen the bad dreams, a curving LED tube dispenses different colour light over their sleeping bodies as a kind of light therapy. The doctor assured the rest of the effectiveness of the lights as they had been used on soldiers in America who have fought in the Afghanistan war. Someone quipped, oh they have nightmares too? Yes this will give them good dreams. As they switched on the light and close the windows to darken the room, a nurse said, these look like funeral lights. I thought so too, someone else added.
In another scene, a group meditation is being conducted as another form of treatment. It is conducted by a man who is probably a meditation guru of sorts:
The problem is we think too much, all day and all night. At night we call it dreaming. We all dream. We can’t stop them. Thoughts are the same. Since we can’t stop them, we must become more aware. Aware of our thoughts and of our dreams.
We see Jen flipping through Itt’s diary entries though the surtitles only picked selected parts from them interspersing the lines with the guided meditation. Even though Itt is fast asleep, his thoughts are awake through Jenn.
[The sea can be violent or still with no pattern]
[My family is very ordinary]
Heaven and hell, merit and sin are all suppositions. Don’t put too much faith in them. Meditation trains your mind.The visions we see are caused by chemical reactions in our brains.
[Everyone has his own Karma]
[I pleaded to the God for my next life]
[Life is like a candlelight]
When you sleep your mind is still active
[When he sees his nephew, he always asks why is he so thin]
[Don’t you buy him milk?]
[They held hands]
Anyone can achieve awareness if they train their mind
[HELLO]
Let’s do a simple exercise. Don’t think too much about it. Sit up straight and close your eyes, focus on your upper body and your brain, pull your thoughts down into your body. All the way down to your feet.Focus on your face now. What does it look like? Look at yourself. Your eyebrows, Your eyes Try to imagine them. What are your ears like. Focus on your mouth and now your chin. Slowly focus your way up, now to the tip of your nose. Let it spread out. Away from your body until it fills the entire room.
In this scene, everyone’s eyes are closed, even the caregivers and the nurses by the sleeping soldiers. Everyone seems to be asleep or dreaming or both.
Move this ball of energy to the field outside. Once it’s outside let it expand. Let it float into the sky until it reaches to the moon. From the moon, Let it spread to the stars. It’s spread to all the stars now. Now pull that energy back. Slowly pull it back to yourself. If your stomach hurts, let the energy flow to your stomach, let it heal you. If you have cancer, hypertension, diabetes of AIDs, let this energy come in and heal you. Until you feel better. Once you feel better, gather the energy to the back of your neck. Let it collect there…Once its gathered…
The guided meditation fades out and mundane scenes outside of the hospital and the areas around it follows in silence.
A similar scene outside my house in the same week before I’ve watched the film for the first time.
**
There’s no denying that dreams are a refraction of the exterior worlds we inhabit that informs our interior subconscious and back again like a feedback loop. Maybe dreams are conduits to allow for energies to flow in and out on, so relentless that we can’t stop them, even if we remember them or not. Maybe dreams are a primal source of healing, extensions to the vast and cellular universe. In the following scene, Itt wakes up and tell Jen that she knows who she is. I can hear you in my sleep he says as though they have been sharing each other’s dreams unknowingly.
(ii) Oneiric Guides from FuturePast
I feel there is an innate desire to correlate back our dreams to our waking states, to make meaning of them and find some hidden message. At least for me when the world turns to shit, so does the dreams. I recall during the pandemic how saturated my dreams have become. With undertones of catastrophes and nightmarish qualities, one apparent change I experienced was dream- synching to my electronic devices as there was a stark increase in my reliance to them to remain connected. In my dreams, I’d communicate on the same platforms I use to communicate to friends and family. Sometimes it feels so close to real life that I could not tell the difference.
In a New York Times Magazine article titled “Did Covid Change How We Dream?” the changes we experience to our dream qualities, frequencies and recall is a collective phenomenon. “As the novel coronavirus spread and much of the world moved toward isolation, dream researchers began rushing to design studies and set up surveys that might allow them to access some of the most isolated places of all, the dreamscapes unfolding inside individual brains. The first thing almost everyone noticed was that for many people, their dream worlds seemed suddenly larger and more intense….Even social media sites, researchers found, were full of people surprised at how much more active and vivid their dream lives had become. “Is it just me?” many of them asked. It was not”. In addition to this, studies have also shown that pandemic dreams share similar motifs as though it was some shared trauma vernacular that exists entirely in the psychosphere.
Are these motifs some kind of oneiric beacon guiding us out of some unknowable thing? For as long as I can remember, guiding dreams feel a little bit different. There is clarity to the dream recall and a solid quality to the dream itself. I had these guiding dreams in different moments in my life but they are rare occurrences. When I was around seventeen, I had a dream that my top right molar popped out with such force that I woke up with my finger in my mouth checking if it was still there. After recounting it to my mother, she told me that someone in our family who is younger will pass away. True enough about three months later, my maternal cousin who suffers from a genetic heart condition died at the age of thirteen suddenly during his school assembly.
Dreams of snakes and dogs, of pooping in front of people, of cutting hair and teeth falling out are all bad omens in my family. These dream motifs circulate among our extended family members as though we have shared this vernacular for as long as time itself. In the same article, there was a mention of dream dictionaries and the earliest known dictionary was written 3,100 years ago, in ancient China. Its author, was a member of the Zhou dynasty; its contents, which are organized around thematic elements in dreams (dreams about the sun, moon and stars come before those about shoes, socks and clothes), would be recognizable to anyone who bought a modern dream guide in which dream motifs stand in for a supposed deeper meaning. If wind blows your clothes in a dream, the book advises, it means a disease is coming for you.
Being a Muslim I know that the reading of dreams and its meaning is forbidden. But it comes naturally. Sometimes friends would text me their dream and I’d read them, ask them questions to facilitate some kind of potentials that can provides them with some clarity or resolution, and push them towards the direction that is intended in that moment. I’d usually ask, rather than tell. There’s a lot more to dream reading than symbolic interpretations. Maybe the dream itself is not as important as the creation of the dream in our subconscious, and how it unfolds as we feel all these feelings. Dreaming is processing and to dream is to process.
**
In several scenes of Cemetery of Splendor, reality and the dream state seems to exist simultaneously that it is hard to discern what is a dream and what is reality. In one scene we see Jen in a temple near a lake praying to the Laotian sister goddesses. She offers them animal effigies that is imbued with her wishes. One of her three wishes was for Itt to recover from his narcolepsy. In a later scene while eating what looks to be longan, Jenn is approached by a beautiful woman with long hair. Shortly after they are joined by another beautiful woman who also has long hair. The two women turn to Jenn thanking her for the effigies. Jenn, with eyes wide open asked if they were crazy yet was convinced when she stared hard at their faces.
They told Jenn that Itt and the other soldiers cannot be cured because when they are asleep, they are fighting the royal grounds for the kingdom that is at war.
Goddesses:
Yes, there used to be a palace there. A war broke out between the kingdoms thousands of years ago. Bodies of dead villagers and soldiers laid everywhere. But most importantly, the cemetery of the kings was located beneath your elementary school. Let me explain. The spirits of the dead kings are drawing on the soldiers' energy to fight their battles. They are still fighting as we speak
In the following scene, Jenn is retelling her encounter to a nurse and a young woman Keng, who uses her psychic powers to help family members and caregivers communicate with the sleeping soldiers. What made this scene even more absurd was that neither Keng nor the nurse doubted Jenn or asked if it was all a dream. The scene itself ends with one of the soldier having an erection in his sleep and Keng pokes at it several times. Again I could not tell if this too was a dream.
For a film with a lot of sleeping and dream logic, the act of dreaming is kept at a strange distance. I can’t help wonder who are the guides here. The Laotian sisters goddesses in human form or Jenn processing the encounter to Keng and the nurse, the film itself? Maybe there is that desire to make meaning from something that may or may not mean anything simply because we can never be truly sure of it as we can never be truly sure of our subconscious realms and yet it always makes encompassing sense somewhat.
(iii) The Dream Space is Sacred. The Dream Space is Sick.
I woke up to find myself stuck in a fetal position. The sun was scorching and I cannot really see my surroundings. My head pressed hard into my hands. I noticed marks all over my body. Pools of blank ink swirling, but my skin is dry. I realised this marks were words but somehow I have forgotten to read. Each time I try to move, I become more frozen. Yet there is an inexplicable sense of relief as the swirls slowly settle and my skin absorb these marks, as though satisfying some thirst inside me.
This dream eventually became the guide for a video work months later.
In BEKAS (2019), ila inscribes text on her bare body and exposes herself to the hot air, sand and sea on reclaimed lands in Singapore. The text narrated ancestral lineages from ‘Malay Singaporeans’, a colonial racial category that muddles the diverse Batak, Boyanese, Buginese, Minangkabau, and Javanese cultures that exist within it. As the body sweats in response to the humidity of the tropics, these texts similarly dissolve into illegible traces. Performed on reclaimed lands, the site-specific performance likewise reminds us of the numerous communities lost due to land expansion.
Being allowed to tap freely (and playfully) into the dream space is truly a gift. Sometimes the dream appears out of nowhere guiding me into various pathways of the universe, calling me to pull it out of the subconscious realms into the real world. Sometimes, it’s part of a dream feed, usually from the accumulation of information I have consumed as part of making a work. These dreams are either recurring, but always in different permutations, or occur only once but bright enough to have a lasting impact.
In a twitter thread that came up recently, Drew Daniel who is from the acclaimed electronic duo Matmos shared a dream he had:
I had a dream I was at a rave talking to a girl and she told me about a genre called “hit em” that is in 5/4 time at 212 bpm with super crunched out sounds thank you dream girl.
His post caught wind of the interweb fiends and different interpretations of this dream up genre begin to materialised. So beautiful ain’t it?
Anyhoos, the reason I am writing this tremendously long post is that my dreams of late have been really dark. No, not dark as in a twisted nightmarish way but dark as in the beacon light is dim and its surroundings dank. Sludgy dreams that are hanging heavily above me as I lay in bed. Don’t get me wrong, I am deep in sleep but also deeply awake. Maybe it’s the side effects of my mood stabiliser, Risperidone or just the way the world is right now. It feels as though the doors are locked and I can only peer through a small dirty window. I wonder what kinds of dreams have you all been having and whether we are all going through the same shifts in how we are dreaming.
One obvious reason for this is the state of the world right now. With all the violence going on in real time in different parts of the world, with no way of putting a stop to these atrocities, the world outside is really sick. The collective energy seems to be gathering all its strength to heal leaving the dream space in fragments. I cannot help but feel I am disassociating in the dream space in the same ways I find myself disassociating from the real world; unwillingly and pushing hard to get back in. On most days it is hard to tell the difference between the two.
**
In the final scenes of Cemetery of Splendor, a sleeping Itt enters Keng’s body to show Jenn what he is seeing when he is sleeping, to show Jenn the royal grounds of the kingdom at war. This is the most beautiful part of the film and as the both of them traverse the grounds, sharing what they see; the Prince’s quarters in Itt’s timeline located near a tree marked with the line from a flood that took place in Jenn’s timeline or the royal bathroom with pink stone in a pile of leaves, we too see what they see even if it’s not there. This practice of intimacy is so moving as they suspend their belief momentarily to enter into each other’s ways of seeing the world.
At one part Jenn tells Itt that she feels as though she is dreaming and she wishes to wake up. Itt, in Keng’s body, tells and shows Jenn to open her eyes really wide. Feeling satisfied, Itt directs Jenn to look out at the horizon. Itt describes that here there are no ornamentations, no gold or other stones, no mirrored rooms belonging to royal princes. Yet, …”Of all the places, we have been, this is by far the most opulent”.
Itt/Keng: From here you can see the most fertile lands. Fields full of rice and rivers full of fish.
Jenn: It looks lonely. I see everything clearly now, Itt.
Itt/Keng: Yes?
Jenn: At the heart of the kingdom, other than rice fields, there is nothing.
This is of course a strong critique against the military and monarchy in Thailand, the Americans having a hand in its militarisation, the effects of the war on Jenn and Itt, on Laos and Thailand, on the land around them. This mirrors the state of the world before and the state of the world right now. Yet somehow through their dreaming, they have found ways to heal themselves from it all. The healing continues as the pain continues, as the real world and the dream space continues across all time and space continuums.
In a scene preceding this, a woman sings a song:
...The breath of love that never fades. Not lonesome am I, my dear. Though the many years that pass by. My heart is still full of love….
I miss you... you who were here... The breath of love that never fades.
</3
Another scene towards the end, there is a shot of an open sky and sparse clouds. An amoeba glides across the sky. The vast and cellular, small is all and we are all fractals influencing each other, both in dreams and the waking world.
I end this with a post I found that resonated deeply with me:
I know it is hard right now but let’s keep going and move in healing ways, in our dream and waking worlds, as “witness, the withness, the lovingness, the weirdness, the truthness, the messiness, the holding”. I hope to see your dreams as you see mine, always. Till next time my love, hydrate, ressociate and stay in love.
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This is a campaign for relief on the ground in Gaza that I truly believe in supporting. If you have the means please donate. If you don’t do share this campaign on your platforms. Nidal provides food for children and their families every day. Here is his instagram account and gofundme link :
I am suffering from Nidal Abu Samra, a resident of the city of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip. I am 31 years old.
We led a quiet and comfortable life before October 7, and since that day we have been under bombardment, destruction, and killing. The occupation destroyed everything and we lost our homes. We became in need of food for my family and everyone in Gaza became in need of providing food.. I decided to create a donation account so that financial support would come to me in order to help the youngest people provide food for children and their families every day. Every day began as a voluntary basis because the children died of hunger in Gaza. Our lives have become turbulent, living under bombardment and killing every day. It has become a big part of the lives of the children who participated every day in providing food.. Therefore, they ask the good people of the world to provide us with assistance for the sake of these children who lost the honor of their medicine in the war.
We will need more donations even after the war ends because people have no homes to return to and have lost everything they had
May this war end soon and our lives may shine again
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