Free The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

not seemed important to me; I can’t remember them, and have been making little effort; the riddle of the dream is simply beyond me, I can’t begin to get even a vague poetic truth from that aspect of my personality…though a year or so ago, around New Year’s of 1972, several vivid dream-experiences made their mark upon me…which I remember quite well, but it all seems to have happened to another person. What overwhelming dreams! I wrote them all down elsewhere, but to read them now is an effort, I can barely force myself to read of them, it all seems so distant, so uncanny, so other. Obviously we go through various phases in our lives: now attuned to the exterior world, now attuned to the inner world; now given energy by way of deliberate consciousness, now given energy by way of the evocation of the unconscious. For quite a while now I have been in consciousness —rather social, lively, ironic, curious about the world (though not very curious about the silly maya of the “news”), writing lots of letters, even answering my telephone at the University (though God only knows who might be calling!—it’s a risk, not knowing if a typically disturbed person from Waco, Texas, will be at the other end, or a courteous and friendly-seeming chairman of an English Department—Northwestern, it was most recently—offering me a teaching position)—and in this phase of personality I frankly find it difficult to sympathize with, to remember, the otherphase. My earlier journal, written in longhand * —typically!—could be by another person, it’s so thoughtful, solemn, even a little pious, and extraordinarily idealistic—yet very sincere, I suppose. That other self of mine!—and yet I know very well that I will become that “self” again, when the unconscious so wills…for consciousness has very little control over itself, very little. A single lucid or numinous dream can totally unsettle one’s conceptions of the world and self: I must remember that, must not be surprised if it happens again, or when it happens.
     
    Jung: the psyche is a self-regulating function. If this is true, and probably it is true since homeostasis is the survival function of any organic being, then one has powerful and suggestive dreams only when he requires them, and the rest of the time the dream-life is irrelevant. Hence my difficult times—A.K. threatening my life or pretending to threaten it (which is worse?)—and writing Wonderland —and of course enduring those two deaths which were the kernel of Wonderland , its emotional genesis—the dream-world came to my rescue, it seems. And in London, in our Mayfair flat, overlooking eternally busy Park Lane—exciting at first, and then depressing, that eternal impersonal flux of taxicabs and double-decker buses—tourists, sightseers, spectators, people with money, parodies of ourselves—what a damnation, tourism!—and gradually our becoming aware of the vagrants, the old men and women, alcoholics, dying creatures wrapped in rags, carrying shapeless bundles, half-human, muttering to themselves or snarling in the underground subway—partly collapsed on the park benches, oblivious to the wealthy people trudging past on their way to the Inn on the Park, or the Hilton, or L’Epée d’Or, where we had so many dinners—these old, sick, dying human beings gradually becoming the foreground, and the rest of us the background—these people the permanent residents of the park and the subways—the others mere tourists, hurrying past, inconsequential.
     
    More than mere images or metaphors: real people!…And yet not very “real” to themselves. We began to notice them all the time, could see through the huge Sunday morning crowds over at Speakers’ Corner, there they were, a fairly recognizable group of six or eight old men (orwere they really old? old-seeming)…drinking from bottles hidden in paper bags…occasionally singing and even dancing a few steps…but most of the time on the park