DREAM SELVES/REAL SELVES

In dreams I'm often QUITE cut off from others. I wander in city scapes. Occasionally I talk with someone but they aren't interested, and I don't have the strength to pursue it. Last night for instance I was in an apartment complex in New York City. I was sent to the apartment of an important recording artist to gain a signature on some form. While getting the signature I felt connected, but then the artist simply DISAPPEARED in plain view, and I was left in what looked like an amazingly meager studio apartment painted purple. I went through the bookshelves and saw just a few cartoon books. Dilbert cartoons. They were not dog-eared. They had never been read, but appeared to be there just to fill up the shelves. But for every book there were lots of knick-knacks quite sparingly and artfully arranged. It was as if no one really lived there.

I then walked to the metro through the snow on a dark street and came to a station in which upwards of twenty bohemian artist types were sitting together in evident comraderie (shoulders all touching in a single horizontal row and I was envious of this but would never be able to meld into such a group even though I felt in some way that they wanted me to). I didn't see a way to get up the steps past them without saying, Excuse me. I didn't want to use my voice because I wasn't sure it would work. Sometimes it does but mostly it doesn't. Then I realized these weren't artists, but actual bums. They were looking for handouts. At first I thought they might attack me. Then I realized they had taken a strong convivial interest in me but I had no idea who they were or why I would accept them. I was flattered, but also annoyed and amused. They had quite unusual outfits. Gloves so the fingers could poke through. Navy blue peacoats. Some had lacy bohemian collars. Touches of finery and strange rings. The women and young men were uniformly attractive as if they could have been models from about the 1969 period. Then they were bums, and everything looked stretched and they looked prematurely old and tired and as if their clothes had not been washed for years.

Then I was walking through the metro talking to a famous writer from forty years ago -- a lazy Beatnik writer -- who is somehow still alive but almost completely forgotten, although he does still get coverage in the NYT when he releases a book. However, no one reads his books or has ever read his books. (Ed Sanders.) We talked for a bit, and then I lost track of him, and was in an old folks' home. I saw the sister of a very cute student that I used to fantasize about years and years ago. The sister was nowhere near as cute as her student sister, and in fact was lying on one side like a sea lion bellowing for help. Someone was administering a dropper of serum to help her with her pain. At that point a foot poked out of the wall and tickled my leg. It was the foot of the cute student! I was entertained and laughed, but wherever I went the foot kept following me and trying to tickle me. I tried to find a body but all I saw was the foot up to about the knee. I didn't really think the student's face or body were cute, but I admired her legs. I recognized this leg following me around and laughed as I tried to escape! she had such beautiful legs, and she always tried to pull my leg with some lie or two about why her work wasn't done!

In life I try hard to pretend I am making sense, and am on the ball, and competent. But in dreams I guess I am what I am: just totally disconnected but often quite amused. I have no real right to be amused, because unlike Alice, the world of my dreams doesn't even make allegorical sense. It just exists and is senseless although filled with sensory details. I am so lost! I am going to specific places but I have no home. The homes in which I do live in my dreams belong to someone else. I sometimes think it might be my home, but all kinds of other people float through as if they own it. They don't even recognize me as they walk past and yet I'm sure I have the deed to these houses somewhere if only I could find it. It's as if I'm at a party to which I haven't been invited and nobody knows who I am even though it's in my house!.

I'm pretty sure I'm an INFJ. I think the INFJ has so little sense of himself because there are so few of us. I like coming here to find the other lost souls. In terms of an enneagram number I feel very fourish, but with a strong five wing, or very fivish but with a strong four wing. I'm often looking for recognition so I guess it's social in terms of a subtype. That is, my dream self seems to be that way. But in my real life I pretend to be strong. I am a professor and I make hard clear decisions and try to hit salient points so the kids can study for the test. I give fair grades. I write clear and imposing articles and books. But inside I don't really have any idea what I am doing or why I am doing this except to line my pockets with enough wherewithal to put milk on the table for my kids. When I think about myself awake, I think of myself as a five with a four wing. The five part of me is competent and functions pretty well and has some sense of what it's doing so I have to use it to get anything done. But in dreams I rarely have any idea of where I am and am lost and there is a Kerouac feeling of being lost but deeply moved by things and loving the contours of faces and legs, and the beauty of clothing and the way clouds come out of industrial landscape smokestacks and shadows flit through alleyways. Then I'm usually far more fourish, and not hiding the fact as I used to have to do from my threeish family (my brother is the president of a huge bank, and my father was the dean of faculty at a big university, and I have another brother who runs a string of Target stores, and my mother is a one-ish ISTJ fussbudget who is constantly fussing with things in a neurotic way while trying to force you to take more pie, or tie your shoes, or comb your hair). I am just lost, just completely lost, but I go along. In this dream I did at least get a signature from someone and am bringing it back to the music company where I work, to place in a file. It's a property deed. But everyone has already died long ago, even though somehow we're still living. In real life I love to have a place and keep everyone out of it. I can't stand it when people come in my office and when they do I want them to leave right away. I love to ban people from my house, and say, they can never come in here again. They stayed too long last time, or did something I didn't like, or are just too nervy for my taste.

The funny thing is that someone said (Thoreau?) that we live lives of quiet desperation. I guess. I do feel desperate. But there is so much amusement, too. I feel like someone has to be pulling my leg to set up this world and to have me live in it as I do. And then to give me these dreams. These endlessly weird dreams. Who am I?