An Abyss of Dreams

<p>Meta-memoir 'after' memoir. Aristotle's Meta-physics comes 'after' his Physics. 'An Abyss of Dreams' is a 'meta' book an 'after' book. A dream itself has no 'before' but only a 'present' which in consciousness is already an 'after.' This is the author's 'dream book': he recounts vividly his real nighttime dreams of the night before and of years and decades before. His two cats tell their tales chasing their tails 'after' their lives and their deaths. His protagonists: Pound Artaud Conrad; Hegel his logic philosophy of spirit and 'anthropology'; Aristotle; and Freud. And Plato (affectionately) accused of being the father of contemporary totalitarianism. This Abyss originates in Hegel's lines on the 'night of the world' the 'terrible' the nocturnal abyss of conscious life pure self 'the interior of nature' where 'suddenly a bloody head darts out and just as suddenly vanishes.' Meanwhile for Freud 'old eel' dreams are wish fulfillment<em>. </em>What! asks the author in 'Why Dream?'  the first of the two novellas in this volume. Wish fulfillment? Then why do I only have nightmares? I only dream what I do not wish for! Why Siggy why? Why dream? Aristotle is next with his schoolmate at Plato's Academy Eudemus known to us only for his (relatively) famous dream and for Aristotle's lost dialogue dedicated to him 'On the Soul.' Eudemus our real hero. Who unlike Aristotle was to be famous only for his dream celebrated and fatally distorted by Platonists forever. But we dream not by Aristotle forever tormented by the dream itself and especially by its totalitarian distortion. This is the premise of the second novella 'I Dream of Eudemus': Eudemus 'psyche iatros' dreamed as the first 'soul doctor' in history. The first and already a rebel: no drugs no! 'Abyss therapy.' Dreams have long afterlives: 'An Abyss of Dreams' is 'meta'-memoir. With its cats and its dreams we travel through the entire history of psychiatry from ancient Greece to present-day Venice. Where dressed in a moon suit Eudemus visits the author's great friend and psychiatrist in Intensive Care in the Venice hospital. Chasing their tails author and Eudemus together see for themselves reaching out from the eyes of their friend the beginning and the end of the soul: the night of the world.</p><p><br></p>