The Abundance of the Infinite Read Online Free PDF Page B

to the bottom of that at my party. I’m Karen, incidentally. I live directly above you. The party is at my apartment this Friday, if you’re interested.”
    â€œI guess I won’t be able to sleep then,” I say, attempting to smile again, “so I’ll have no choice in the matter.”

6

    I have often marveled at the richness of dreams and the poverty of life. In my dreams, lavish adornments of the mind can perceive conversations with those both living and deceased, and grant the capability to move through time to see either the initiation or the termination of the world. Those manifestations are unsullied except to be subjected to the unfortunate whims and illogic of your own subconscious mind, and are inescapably tainted by the mundane and sometimes tragic realities of human existence. While we are wonderfully able to recall Freud’s childhood “amnesia” in this dream world, to see the spinning of a cognitive web of our adult experiences and current knowledge suffused with these repressed childhood memories, we are invariably brought back into the cold light of practicality with each morning sun and with a few wretched pronouncements, such as the one made by my mother over the phone declaring that my father—with whom she would not let me live for a time as a child, saying that he cared for neither one of us—had died.
    As a clinical psychologist utilizing techniques of dream analysis, the concept of dreams as an escape from such realities, and eventually contending with these truths through dream interpretation, has always interested me. I have studied, in detail, Freud’s Austrian lectures—his relationship between manifest dreams (what is remembered) and latent (what is derived from the manifest dream after ‘free association’ analysis—what does this mean to you, quickly now, tell me, Freud might have said, using his understanding of substitution, allusion, imagery and symbolism to produce a dream meaning, the early Freud often interpreting a sexual one). I have learned the complicated theories of Jung, who was also interested in what the dream symbols mean to the dreamer in waking life. I understand Faraday’s three levels of dream analysis—looking outward for direct meaning, looking at the dreamer’s relation to symbols and settings, and looking inward by letting the symbols and settings speak for themselves. I also continuously study more contemporary viewpoints on the nature of dreams, but my attention always falls back to these three originators of dream analysis. And now, any attempt at escape from my reality through dreams is futile as I, along with the Señora, Inés and Yolanda, carry my father, who is wrapped in a shroud, and set him into the freshly-dug ground. We are all dressed in black, myself sweating in a black suede shirt and cotton pants, the Señora and her daughters in thin dresses that the Señora says she made herself. A few others, who are strangers to me, are lingering about.
    Looking down as flowers, then his bagpipes, and then dirt are cast over top of him, I find myself wanting to dig with my hands in the dirt to unravel the shroud so I can see his face for one final time, as if to confirm that it was indeed he who had died and that this event was not some heartless ruse initiated by my mother and perpetuated by the Señora and her daughters to keep me from thinking and talking about my father, who is, in fact, still alive and living in a different part of Ecuador—Salinas or Quito or Guayaquil—while another gringo with the same slim build and musculature and skin tone, barely visible through the shroud, is buried in his place. I regret my earlier foolishness in leaving him covered from head to toe as we all ate rice with chicken and ceviche around him.
    Despite the heartless and hypocritical ruse my father had perpetuated on me—promoting himself as a loving, caring father for the few