only in dreams.

a mí, one of the most interesting, wonderful, frightening, perplexing and certainly important features of the human brain is the unconscious. it's so intriguing b.c it catalyzes so many of our actions, but always surreptitiously. it doesnt seek recognition; it allows our conscious mind the illusion of feeling that it's pulling the strings. it's kind of like we all have a little dick cheney homunculus in our domes.

or, a more elegant metaphor from an old david brooks column, itself a paraphrase from a book:

Imagine...a boy riding an elephant. The boy is the conscious mind, the prefrontal cortex and such. The boy can plan ahead. The elephant is the unconscious part of the brain, the amygdala and other regions. It produces emotions and visceral reactions. It processes information and forms intuitions.

obv, the boy can steer the elephant a bit, but ultimately, dumbo is gonna go where he wants to go. yet many of us are rarely at all cognizant of this.

i was reminded of all this by a dream i had last night. in it, i was walking the streets of barcelona, where i lived sep 99 - june 00, at night. i was walking on the gran via de les corts, towards placa catalunya. this is a busy part of town, but it was late at night, and i was the only one in the streets; it was reminiscent of the tom cruise-times sq scene in vanilla sky. i made many such walks when i lived there. my friends and i all lived with separate families, peppered about the city; at the end of a night, we all had different routes home. (to be fair, i also have a proclivity for fantasizing about being the only person in a huge metropolis.)

anyway, the dream made quite an impression on me b.c although i havent been to barcelona for over eight years (dios mio, man), i tot knew my way around.
and dont get me wrong; my mind's eye was not fabricating buildings and signs and sites. the landmarks i saw during my night walk are certainly there, even though i couldnt have described them for you while awake.

it's like seeing a scene in a movie or reading a passage in a book that you could not have recalled on command, but that instantly resonated when it was presented to you. like forgetting someone's name, asking them for the first letter, then discovering you had in fact not forgotten the name. only the conscious part of you had.

(this is all part and parcel of athletes and performers being called unconscious as they reach the heights of their crafts.)

to me, the dream is a good, straightforward piece of tangible proof of the capacity of the unconscious mind for those who doubt its power.

yet names and places and performances are only so many small potatoes. the area where the unconscious really gets you is the emotional realm. if it can tuck away city maps and movie lines behind your back, imagine the love, fear, angst, hope and frustration it keeps in storage. only to let these apparitions seep into your conscious mind, where they have a field day monkeying with the machinery therein.

bridging this divide btwn conscious and unconscious minds, tapping that potential boon, literally and metaphorically, is the tacit all-time quest of man.

yes, ive been into joseph campbell lately.

yes, this post is a bit high schoolish.