Notes On Attic Dreams
There remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like above all to still be possessed. In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large.
{Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space}
Thus, where the traditional male hero makes his “night sea journey” to the center of the earth, the bottom of the mere, the belly of the whale, to slay or be slain by the dragons of darkness, the female artist makes her journey into what Adrienne Rich has called “the cratered night of female memory” to revitalize the darkness, to retrieve what has been lost, to regenerate, reconceive, and give birth.
{Gilbert and Gruber, Madwoman in the Attic}
The Pit and the Pendulum: the enclosure of the prison cell presents itself as a series of obstacles — hazards, gravities, wits. This seems distinctively male to me in that only men seem to describe dreams this way; that is to say, with plots. Is this distinction true? If so, what is its origin?
Even I once wrote of the pursuit as a diver, gathering air and plunging down, enveloped in dark, watery form in search of talismans of content, as he wrote of weathering a storm; the implication being that of a ship, a forward trajectory, a shore.
It’s not the room, then, that makes these dreams male. It’s the manner of leaving it.
