Hinges

Commissioned by the artist Jonah Sack to accompany the artist’s book project Dream Book (2025)

I dream often about a type of large insect native to Johannesburg called a parktown prawn. I dream of ex-boyfriends and of being sent back to school. I dream of my grandfather walking down the long passage I flooded in my childhood home. These are the ones that leave their residues in my waking life. Perhaps much happens that may not be worth remembering at all.

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In October 1924, four days before André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto, the French polymath artist Antonin Artaud inaugurated the Bureau for Surrealist Research (Bureau des recherches surréalistes). This was the name he gave to an independent and somewhat arcane archival project that adopted the vestments of an institution. Its purpose was to document and keep records of dreams and other murmurings of the unconscious, and it occupied an actual office in Paris, staffed by at least two people at a time. There was a notebook for recording miscellaneous ideas and suggestions and a room upstairs with a table and chairs for group discussions. The office put out publicity for the movement on a daily basis, a profoundly analogue undertaking that managed to match the pace of digital broadcasting.

What happened to all the dreams they ostensibly archived I don’t know. They may have gone the way of many second-hand dream narratives, which is nowhere. For people who don’t take a professional interest in dreams, there is not, I don’t think, much incentive to listen to the dreams of others. There is a mismatch of desire between the person who wants to share their dream and their listener, for whom the absurdity and the explosive vividness of the dream experience are never comparable. We are often compelled to share our dreams anyway, and to do so we resort to abbreviations: “In a dream you have to escape through the attic”.

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Those are the words of the artist Jonah Sack, who has been recording his dreams for some years. He has preserved a collection of 56 of them as woodcut prints, bound in a book, the Dream Book.  

I say “preserved”, but in reality, of necessity, we convey our dreams fleetingly and they are never preserved faithfully. In the telling we lose much of their original richness. Yet, in that loss is the seed of another kind of plenitude, that of the reader or listener’s understanding. The dreamer dies a sort of death, together with Barthes’ author, and the dream is inherited by someone else. Jonah’s economy of form is there to reopen the strangeness of the dream world, to give it an afterlife with the living. 

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Perhaps it’s because dreams are vaporous that we want to siphon them from sleep and transform them into something tangible – a journal, an archive, or, for Jonah, a woodcut print.

But this is a trick. Analogue printing confounds the direct relation between form and content, or rather highlights that there may never have been any direct relation to begin with. After Jonah’s dreams are engraved into the grain of the wood, made hard and permanent on one surface, they are turned once more into an impression, a second-hand imaging, that accrues on another surface, paper.

A relief print takes its leave from a topography in miniature. It reads a land of sorts, and can create a map, but it is never the land itself. Dreams are like that, too. They are the shadow of waking life, days seen as if through a veil or a shroud, a map of one’s interiority.

*

What did I do last night as I slept? Who did I see, and where did I go? Some parts I recall in exhausting detail and others are lost, as if they didn’t happen at all, as if a veil is pulled over my eyes when they open rather than when they close.

This forgetting must be the way the conscious mind scrubs itself of the ugliest eruptions from the unconscious. Perhaps those thoughts that are too painful and unsightly to tolerate stay buried. But what, then, of nightmares? Could it be that what doesn’t come out is even worse? Or is it not bad enough?

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Freud proposed that dreams are a subconscious exercise in wish-fulfilment. In particular, dreams and even nightmares are ways of servicing repressed desires (rather than known ones). The answers to the worst desires, the most terrifying ones, come packaged differently. They are softened so as not to destroy our rest. They are censored, in effect, by one part of the brain in order to regulate the activity of another. Freud, the interpreter, then used his patients’ dreams in their narrated forms to act on the mind once more, in ways that were supposedly therapeutic but may not have been.

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My daughter began to have night terrors, a type of parasomnia, when she was about three years old. She would become restless in sleep, whimpering, and after not long she would be crying and screaming. “I don’t want to! I don’t want to!”, she would yell, thrashing around. My horror as I heard her dream was worse than any nightmare of my own invention. What does she not want to do?

Some months prior to that we had taken her for swimming lessons with a particularly ruthless instructor, an old woman who would threaten her so meanly during her classes that Orla would inevitably start to sink. I thought that’s just how you learn to swim, so to my shame I never intervened.

I hoped that when she screamed so loudly at night that the neighbours could hear her that it was because she hated swimming lessons, and not because of something more sinister. I never did find out, though, because these episodes would be sandwiched between profoundly deep sleep. After sometimes more than 10 minutes of screaming, my child would fall silent in my arms and resume her heavy baby sighs.

The night terrors continued for about five years, diminishing in frequency. As Orla became more articulate, I would ask her on the mornings following her episodes if she had had a nightmare.

She would say, “No, why do you ask?”

*

When you are inside a dream, as when you are in the jaws of a book, everything is immanent: flesh is flesh, feelings are true. The emotional reality of our dream lives cannot be overstated, and yet in the day we carry on as if that secret life, those occult movements, are the fiction, and our diurnal selves the real. The separation of fiction and reality, arbitrated by the threshold of sleep, is itself a fiction.

This is why dreams belong in a book. Jonah makes books to house twinkling constellations. Page-by-page and frame-by-frame, stories appear and disappear, and appear again. You see one, and then you turn the page and it’s gone.

Each page is a passing cloud. Each page is a veil. Each page turns on a hinge. Each page buries pages before and after.

*

The giant bowl of the staghorn fern in Candice Ježek’s garden is silted up with leaf dust and dried bits of the grapevine that seems to hold the entire pergola in place. Translucent hands waving, wet wings unfurling, snake skins shedding, its leaves layer greenly into a vessel – for what? Time? Any body is a vessel for time. Even as we sleep, the fern edges closer towards creatureliness.

I’d never looked into a staghorn fern until the day I went to see Jonah’s book, or at least its component parts, printed pages waiting to be bound. I think of how many hands it takes to make a book, of how lightly they must handle the pages, touching each one to make a tally. Books are vegetal: They rustle as we leaf through them and then disappear, as if into a forest.

*

One of the pages says: “In a dream, in a movie, in a novel by Flaubert, the next generation is flaccid and watery.”  Is the novel in the movie? Is the movie in the dream? We take in the world in these kinds of layered parentheses all day, and they are complicated. Leaves folded into leaves. But Jonah has a lightness of touch in everything he does, and it is in this sentence, too. His economical sensibility is never anxious or withholding.

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Quinn Latimer writes, “A book is a kind of daytime dream. Held in the hands, head bent low, the book is an exterior symbol of interiority, an objective correlative of the mindful, imaginative activity going on inside”.

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Wrapped around the cover of Jonah’s book, there is a green trail of text that you can read if you discover a simple rule. It’s both easier and harder than you might think.

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In a dream I was speaking another language. The word I woke up with in my mouth was “toetuspunkt”. It meant “fulcrum” or “hinge”. I have carried this word with me for years, turning it around in my mind like a pebble in the hand. A dream is a hinge: between what and what? The seen and the unseen, memory and forgetting, the acceptable and the repressed, adventure and fear, desire and shame.

*

The dog comes in only to go out again. She bumps the door open. I close it. What place is there in our records for boring dreams?

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In the story “Savoir”, Hélène Cixous writes about an eye surgery that relieves the protagonist of her decades-long myopia. She wakes up after the night following her surgery and suddenly can see the patterns in the weave of her bedroom carpet. Pattern after pattern, the world comes miraculously, nakedly into focus: “It moved on so fast she could see herself see”. And yet Cixous’ protagonist feels an acute sense of loss: of her unseeing self, of all that is seen when we don’t see, of her very way of being in the world. The unveiling of her ‘new’ eyes, the revelation of the world in its crispness, is, in another sense, its veiling.