Since we've discussed Susan Sontag and her stance on interpretation, I've been curious about how she felt about dreams. Dreams not only lend themselves to interpretation, they beg for it. Apparently, her first public work as an intellectual, the publication of her novel The Benefactor, takes on just that subject. Here is an excerpt:
"I devoted the entire morning to puzzling over the details of the dream, and urged myself to apply some ingenuity to their interpretation. But my mind refused to cavort about the dream. By mid afternoon, I suspected that the dream had, so to speak, interpreted itself...
I paused over the man in the bathing suit and his flute, and his antagonism to me. I savored my attraction to the woman in the white dress, and her refusal of me. 'I have had a sexual dream,' I said. And I could make little more of it than that, before the evening."
The dream she talks about is incredibly surreal and odd dialogue moving it forward. I have not read the book, merely a few pages, but based on my brief reading, and her quote, "I was not looking for dreams to interpret my life, but rather my life to interpret my dreams," I can assume that she stands firmly against interpretation of dreams, much as she does art.
Parts of her book can be found on GoogleBooks.
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