36
Unnkerannt is a German word that means not comparable to anything, most similar to the English words unrecognised or undiagnosed, but not quite. In a footnote in The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud describes something he calls the dream’s navel. The umbilical cord stretching to the unknown - the Unnkerannten.
"There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown"
The unnerkannten was described to describe a point reached in a dream that’s been titled Irma’s Injection, by the way, his first and arguably most famous dream analysis. Irma, one of his patients at the time, is rolled into a dinner party and laid out for inspection. When she opens her throat, Freud finds a white scab on the turbinal bone, which turns out to be the result of an injection given to her by Freud’s friend with a dirty syringe.
Spoiler alert: The dream is about cocaine.
But the point of this wasn’t about Freud’s analysis of the dream.
Reader Questions:
Do you think with good conscience a therapist can interpret their own dreams?
Do you think with good conscience anyone else except the dreamer can interpret their own dream?
Do you find an “ungraspable unknown” of a dream an odd thing for a man of science (Or speculation on cocaine, if you will) to conclude, almost guiltily, within the footnotes of his book?
Do you think Freud was a religious, spiritual, or mystical man? Do you think Freud was suggesting the presence of the numinous in his idea of the “Dream’s navel?”
37
The writer arrives at the space station, The Halcyon. The writer’s prefrontal cortex is damaged. She’s produced an erratic amount of mirror neurons and they’re interfering with her ability to function around other people without feeling the swallow in their throats or the lilting heaviness of their eyes rolling in the back of their heads. She’s come here to learn how to control her empathy in a more efficient way. They have specialists up here who do a that sort of thing. They sit in metal bathtubs with electrical nodes attached to their heads the readouts are off the charts. The readouts say the specialists are fantastic at their jobs.
The writer’s papers are processed, she’s sent to the showers for sanitation. As she’s stripping out of her spacesuit, the specialists find little insects clinging to her skin. The insects are dangerous. Commonly attached to writers, sensitives, and artistic types, they have the tendency to present themselves as benign, going so far as to buy the host gifts and tell her she’s special. But while the host sleeps they begin to gnaw through her consciousness, telling her that maybe she should cut her hair, maybe she should write a nice romance, why doesn’t she go to therapy? They feed on her diminishing self. The bigger they grow, the more the host shrinks.
The writer, panicking, can’t stop touching her skin. She claws at her face.
“I didn’t think the insects were all that bad,” the writer says.
“Of course you thought that, dear,” one of the specialists says while scrolling through her phone.
“Don’t worry,” another specialist tells her, “The damage is only permanent.”
The specialists lead her to the surgery room and extract the insects from her skin. They work quickly, identifying the insects with their microscopic devices and then freezing them to death so that they will release the writer’s skin and be unable to reproduce. “Time is of the essence,” they say, and although they have soothing smiles and soothing white suits the writer can feel their anxious energy like broiling, frothing static. It punctures their noses and mouths, bleeding through her, through her prefrontal cortex,
She thinks, I came to this space station to learn how to deal with my empathy issues, to stop being so sensitive all the time. And now here I am, haven’t been here for more than an hour, and they’re piercing me with their anxiety. They’re making me deal with the resultant trauma of removing these insects from my skin. I wouldn’t have had to deal with any of this if I never came to this space station. I want my ship back. I want my money back. I want to go back to the earth and rent an acre of land and pull dirt over my head.
This is what the writer thinks every time she moves. She’s constantly running away from the buzzing, like psychotropic bees lodged in her brain and throat. What she hasn’t figured out yet is that location and space will not dislodge them. She’s beginning to learn, however, when they suture the holes left behind by the insects. “If I went back to earth and covered myself with dirt, somehow they’d still find a way to get to me. They’d crawl through the mud after their white horses died, with flowers caked in ash, and scratch their way into my makeshift grave. There really is no escaping the hole in my skull, the bruises in my ribs I create with my fists.”
The writer’s surgery is complete, the bugs annihilated. She’s wheeled off to recover, down to the residency sector of the spaceship. The intern pauses on the bridge, so that the writer can watch a meteor shower move through deep space through the diamond window. The meteors flash and burn in the writer’s eyes, streaked heterochromatic, and she grips the sides of her wheelchair as if they’ll smash through the window and disrupt her gravity, make her slide off through the wall, burn her, beat her, consume her.
“Why do the insects keep coming to me?” she asks the intern, barely able to breathe while those colors ignite in her.
The intern’s back faces the writer as she stares through the window. She’s gripping the back of the wheelchair, checks her watch, starts wheeling the writer down the hallway once more.
“Because,” she said, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the known universe. “You let them in.”
38
She crawls into her bed and whisssssspers.
“You open your arms and you let them in.”
Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed. They're designed to be able to be read in any order.
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