28 September 2006

Ghosts in My New House

We are purchasing a house in Kemptown, meaning we’ll stick around the UK for another year or two at least. It was supposedly used to house workers at the mill that was in the area in the 19th century. We take possession next Wednesday.

I'm two Fall songs in one lately ("There's a Ghost in My House" and "My New House"). Three times this month I have dreamed that the house is haunted. The first dream was terrifying and short; I was being chased in the dark. In the second dream, the current elderly owner of the house was desperate to impart some information to me. She did so in the form of a book of newspaper clippings that described the death of a little girl (Rosemary?) and her mum, who then appeared to me as ghosts. There was something to do with facial mutilation maybe. When I woke up M. asked if I'd had a nightmare and I felt sad and insisted on calling it a “scary dream” because "nightmare" seemed insulting to the ghosts somehow. The third dream had to with ghosts haunting us overhead as streaks of light and sound and me having to shout at them that we meant no harm and wanted to live in peace with them and that they better stop.

In response, I've been re-reading Anelia Jaffe's Jungian An Archetypal Approach To Death Dreams and Ghosts. Though simplisitic Jung-talk about the collectivity of supernatural experiences, it nonetheless drew my attention the figure of the gray man that Anna Karenina sees in her dreams, and then again just as she throws herself under the train. Funny to see him described by Jaffe as a "spirit-maniken" with all the automatonic connotations that holds for me. What to make of ghosts in dreams anyway? When two such vectors of the uncanny meet, maybe it kinda becomes banal and overly obvious. A pair of flapping wings back to the time of the US Civil War, as Mark E sang. As expected.

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