Queen Mab

Coincidentally the leitmotif today is dreams. At mass it was Joseph's and the three Magis various dreams that accompany Christmas in Matthew's biblical accounts and therefore I'm telling of two special dreams I had.

The first dream occured when I was about to deliver a speech at a seminar.  I dreamt that we were having the seminar in the dean's room and while I was talking there was a little brown bat flying above our heads, almost touching them, but oddly I and my professor were the only ones able to perceive it, though I kept pointing it out to my fellow students. The morning I was to deliver my speech  I went to the academy's library and rememberring the dream, which had been extraordinary "real", I looked up bats and their meaning.My heart went down when I read that according to Gipsy mythology this represented the ability to perceive beyond the superficial, this made me fear for my speech. And it was proven absolutely right because from all the people present only me and my professor had a slight idea what I was talking about. Still my professor kept certain things in mind, because a few weeks later when he delivered a speech on exactly the same subject - he had in fact written his dissertation on it - at a symposium at the Kunstsammlung in Düsseldorf , perceiving me in the auditorium he came to me and thanked me(?!) for giving him the courage to talk about his subject in the manner he had just done because of my utterances at his seminar.

The other dream was even stranger and it took a long time for me to find out what it actually meant. First the dream: I was in Barnett Newman's studio and apart from the two of us there were no human beings present. There were though other creatures and one of them was cutting the buttons off Newman's shirt and Newman was serenely letting this happen, whereas I began screaming that he was dying. Yet Newman was smiling implying that I should calm down. The strange thing is that within the reality of the dream I perfectly knew the ritual of cutting the buttons and its implications of somebody dying or having recently died, but in real life it took me years before I stumbled across a passage in one of Jacques Derrida's books where he tells of the Jewish ritual that at the father's death the first born son cuts off or is getting cut off the buttons of his waistcoat.