Morpheus, not Apollo.

I have been known to say that I have incredibly boring dreams. 

I don't need to resurrect Sigmund Freud to get to the meanings of my dreams; although I would like to get his opinion on Salley Vickers' Where Three Roads Meet in which Freud, on his deathbed in Hampstead in 1939, hallucinates Tiresias, and they discuss Oedipus' myth. When life is good, I have dreams where I discover that I magical powers - like telekinesis and flying and potion-making - which clearly comes from my love of Harry Potter and Charmed. Or I dream that I get to meet my heroes, favourite academics, authors, characters, or lost loved ones, and they sing my praises. I once had a dream that I got a job at NYU. It's all very straightforward. 

My nightmares are equally straightforward. 

When my social anxiety is bad, I have nightmares where I'm rushing to meet my friends, getting more and more stressed as time goes on and I'm getting no closer to the event - it's basic FOMO. When my depression is bad, I have nightmares where someone I loves dies, or I die and have to see everyone else deal with it. When something bad happens in my waking life, I relive it again and again in my sleep.

(Disclaimer: I have other recurrent dreams & nightmares too, but I'm not about to share them all with the bloggersphere)

Anyway, I'm not sleeping much right now because of one such straightforward nightmare. If you follow me on Twitter, you may remember that in August I finished my FIRST DRAFT of my FIRST CHAPTER. It was a really big deal for me, and I was so happy with myself just for having done it. I got sidetracked after that with some other PhD-adjacent projects, but I was planning on moving swiftly on to my second chapter. But when I got my supervisors' feedback (which, to be honest, was a mixed bag - some big positives, but also some really significant negatives) and I looked over it again, I was really quite unhappy with the chapter. My supervisors said the beginning of the chapter was uncertain and indirect, but you could see me getting more confident as the chapter went on. I think the act of actually writing it made me realise the justification and direction for the chapter. To me, this meant one thing: I needed to review / revise / rewrite my chapter 'Women in the Texts' before moving on to 'Men in the Texts'. 

I spoke to one of my supervisors about it and she gave me the green light, but suggested that I give myself quite a strict deadline for when the work would be done, so that I could continue with my schedule and get a draft of my second chapter done before Christmas. 

But the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Or, the best laid plans of myths and me often go awry. Or, events in my academic and non-academic life all seemed to converge at the end of October. Or, put simply, it's now November, and the redraft is not done. 

In my defence, it's nearly done; most of it is done; the hardest bits are done. And I know that I'm not the kind of person who can move on if it means leaving a task unfinished and imperfect. So I've given myself a week's extension, and I aim to have it done by the end of this week. I know that in the grand scheme of the PhD, a week isn't really a big deal, and that this is a very minor setback, and that this is quite a good problem to have, because I have the words written and the ideas on a page, and now I'm just making it better rather than having to produce it from scratch or start all over again. 

... But no one has informed my subconscious of this, and now we're getting to the dreams. 

I keep having this nightmare where I meet up with my friends, and I tell them that I'm going to do a bit of reading for fun, which is the height of luxury for English Literature PhDs. They're very shocked by this and ask me why I'm not more stressed (this is perhaps the most unrealistic part of my dream, because my friends spend a lot of effort trying to get me to chill the fuck out). When I ask them why I need to be so stressed, they tell me that the deadline for our 2nd year Annual Progress Review is tomorrow, and we have to submit 20,000 words. But it's November, I protest, and the deadline isn't until April! They assure me that no, it's tomorrow, and my supervisors also confirm it. I ask them if I can get an extension, and they tell me that they're not even convinced I deserve a place on the PhD programme, and if I don't submit 20,000 quality words by tomorrow then I'm out. So I run to the library, sit down in front of a blank page, and prepare to write 20,000 words since, in this dream-world, I apparently don't have any version of my first chapter. 

Like I've said, I have very straightforward dreams. I'm stressed because my first chapter edits are behind schedule, so I have a nightmare about a life-or-death deadline and having nothing prepared for it.

Upon reflection, further procrastinating by writing this blog post is probably not advisable, but I think that my last blog post marked a trend towards more reflexive blogging. So, enjoy.

Despite that, if there's one thing I can promise you on this blog, it's me talking about myths, so here we have it:

Morpheus, not Apollo. 

Jean-Bernard Restout's Morpheus

No, I do not mean Laurence Fishburne's character in The Matrix, I mean the Greek god of dreams. Morpheus is one of Somnus' one thousand children(!!!). 'Somnus' means Sleep, and he is the personification of sleep itself, while his son Morpheus is the 'Fashioner' of dreams. As well as fashioning the dreams themselves, he appears in them in human form. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, he says that Morpheus is 'the master mimic,' because he is 'the quickest of all to capture / a person's walk, his facial expression and tone of voice; / he'll also adopt his original's clothing and typical language' (Ov. 11.635-7), but he distinguishes that Morpheus can only imitate humans, not truly metamorphose. Imagine that Gregor donned a cockroach suit and just sort of scuttled around, rather than actually waking up as a bug because going to work every day is so fucking awful.

Anyway... Morpheus fashions the fictions that we dream. It's him to blame for this horrible recurring nightmare that I keep having about my APR that is AGES AWAY thank you very much.

mythsntits' golden banana bi boy
aka Apollo

The god I do not have to blame is Apollo, who also works in the realm of dreams. As the god of prophecy (along with the sun, the golden bow & arrow, the Olympic Games, the laurel tree, music, especially the lyre, civilisation, plague, etc. etc.), he often works in the realm of dreams. In his role as Pythian Apollo, he is the prophetic patron of the Oracle at Delphi, which was the most famous site for foreknowledge in Ancient Greece. More than that, though, if anyone had a dream that prophesied the future, it was believed that it was sent from Apollo.

So, here's my mantra for dealing with this horrible recurring dream:
Morpheus, not Apollo. Morpheus, not Apollo. Morpheus, not Apollo.

The dream is shaped by Morpheus, it is NOT a forewarning from Apollo.

It's not really going to happen. I hope.

***

This has been a bit of a panicky post, so I will leave you with this: