Astonishing. This is quite beyond my experience - I am always me in my dreams and I consider my imagination to be quite rich. Of course this is classic intertextuality; I think the word 'Kafka' popped into my head after about a quarter of a second after reading 'spider'. My question would be, do your dreams link up in any way? Do they talk to each other? Have any of the elements recurred in other dreams? Have you been watching Jeff Goldblum in 'The Fly'? As David Cronenberg said, 'Stories of magical transformations have always been part of humanity’s narrative canon'. * Your friend said something that also popped out, the one who is a 'believer in the supercalifragilistic pre-Freudian notion of the dream as prophecy and of prophecy as prediction'. I wouldn't be the first to suggest that Gregor Samsa is a foretelling of the dehumanisation of Jews in Nazi Germany.
It is 30 years since I read Metamorphosis and it is just a hazy memory in a dusty corner of my brain, so I shall not dwell on that.
I am glad I don't get this kind of dream. I find it traumatic enough losing my car in them and never having sex.
It seems to me to be in part about things not being as they seem. And, as others have said, Kafka came immediately to mind (particularly with the feeling of disgust of learning you were a spider). Did you have any feeling of what being a spider was like? Personally I wouldn’t mind dreaming what it was like to have eight legs, and to be able to rappel down with web!
I remember feeling disgusted at having a spider's body, or being such a lowly creature. In the dream tho I was human and never saw my real arachnid appearance.
Astonishing. This is quite beyond my experience - I am always me in my dreams and I consider my imagination to be quite rich. Of course this is classic intertextuality; I think the word 'Kafka' popped into my head after about a quarter of a second after reading 'spider'. My question would be, do your dreams link up in any way? Do they talk to each other? Have any of the elements recurred in other dreams? Have you been watching Jeff Goldblum in 'The Fly'? As David Cronenberg said, 'Stories of magical transformations have always been part of humanity’s narrative canon'. * Your friend said something that also popped out, the one who is a 'believer in the supercalifragilistic pre-Freudian notion of the dream as prophecy and of prophecy as prediction'. I wouldn't be the first to suggest that Gregor Samsa is a foretelling of the dehumanisation of Jews in Nazi Germany.
It is 30 years since I read Metamorphosis and it is just a hazy memory in a dusty corner of my brain, so I shall not dwell on that.
I am glad I don't get this kind of dream. I find it traumatic enough losing my car in them and never having sex.
* The Cronenberg piece is an introduction to a translation of Metamorphosis, to be found here.https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/01/17/the-beetle-and-the-fly/
James, I thought almost immediately you were channeling Gregor Samsa.
I'm glad nobody squashed you. Cheers, my friend!
It seems to me to be in part about things not being as they seem. And, as others have said, Kafka came immediately to mind (particularly with the feeling of disgust of learning you were a spider). Did you have any feeling of what being a spider was like? Personally I wouldn’t mind dreaming what it was like to have eight legs, and to be able to rappel down with web!
I remember feeling disgusted at having a spider's body, or being such a lowly creature. In the dream tho I was human and never saw my real arachnid appearance.