Waking up to D and G

I feel like I’ve been losing track of D&G lately. I think this is because I haven’t had that much time to read. I’d relegated them to a routine – it was the Saturday morning readings but then that started not to work out so well as my Saturday got taken over/overtaken. I can ride my bike again but I don’t have ‘permission’ to do it yet.

I had a nightmare on Sunday morning. It was one of those awful situations where you are awake and asleep simultaneously and the dream is disturbing (this one played to my claustrophobic tendencies) and even though you can think of it as a dream and know that you are awake, you can’t quite wake up. I actually hit myself to wake up and then ran outside. It wasn’t cold enough outside to have the desired effect of jolting me but after I ran around for few minutes, I woke up fully.

I hate when this happens. It’s interesting that it happened this week because I had just heard a radio show about sleep and dream therapy which was very interesting and enticing. It reminded me of D&G and the kind of therapeutic practice their work suggests. I was really interested in some of the techniques talked about on the radio – even thinking I might try writing out my dreams as a way of becoming more proscriptive with them but the waking nightmare experience reminded me that this would be a very risky move for me. A day later, I’m not thinking about experiments in dreaming, I’m turning to D&G.

D&G require a certain commitment that other reading doesn’t necessarily require. For example, the chapters are long. The material gets you into an interesting way of thinking that’s pretty removed from everyday life. It takes time to move in and out of that way of thinking. Very little of my life is actually contemplative or conducive to contemplation. I can’t find space for contemplation. My patterns are too suburban or too urban hick. Where are my contemplative environments? Do they enable reading? Does the reading occur prior to the contemplative act? Do I need two spaces – one for reading and then one for thinking about the reading? Or is it three spaces – reading, thinking about the reading, thinking about the thinking about the reading?

In Chapter 2, D&G warn against being reductive and this is something that I really like about them. I just need the space to think, the floor to lie on, the cool tiles of contemplation.