Abstract
Wet sheet that gets cold. The smell of sweat. A disrupted, unpleasant night again where my dreaming had me; a felt vulnerability from which it was impossible to hide. Sometimes, at bedtime, I already know that it will be a tough night. At the same time, the night offers experiences that radically differ from my everyday life. I want to learn from the way in which these experiences unfold and what I am capable of doing at night; what can my dreaming body teach me that can be generative for my writing? Through a reading of Hélène Cixous’s work on the writing body and inquiring into my night dreaming, I elaborate on possibilities for writing that differ from my usual daylight writing. Written in the form of seven invitations, I note that these possibilities are not about finding ways to overcome vulnerability in writing, but rather writing through vulnerability as a gift from the dreaming-writing-body.
I know that everything that occurs in dreams can also occur in reality. Because we can only dream true.
Encountering Vulnerability in Writing
I long for those moments in writing when I can, all of a sudden, embrace something new: those rare moments when things come together as for the first time. The beauty of this writing is that, when it happens, I do not judge what I write. I am not thinking through first what to write and then write. Nor is it about scrutinizing and evaluating every word. I am in the flow where the writing has me and takes me to places, thoughts, and ideas previously unthought. During these occasions, I do not even think about whether my textual attempts are scholarly enough, interesting enough, or strong enough, if they are convincing, clean and clear. It is writing first, “deep in my body, further down, behind thought” (Cixous, 1993, p. 118).
What I know for sure is that these moments do not come easily and they happen rarely. In my everyday writing attempts, I tend to stumble around conscious of what the words look like on paper and the writing never really takes off. I am stuck, mostly because “[t]hought comes in front of it and it closes like a door” (Cixous, 1993, p. 118). I feel vulnerable and it makes me hesitate, it stops me from just going on. At the same time, knowing that these rare moments of flow can unexpectedly visit me, and with that the special feeling of intuition and crystallization, I keep trying, I keep writing.
Being inspired by Cixous’s work, where she argues for the need to open up a space for the feminine body in writing, and in particular, her texts on dreaming and writing, I wonder: How can dreaming be explored to learn more about these occasional moments of writing in flow? In addressing this question, the purpose is to join others who critically interrupt the writing practices that limit what we as scholars write about as well as how we do it, and offer writing invitations for how the body and text may be married in new ways (e.g., Höpfl, 2000; Page, 2017; Pullen & Rhodes, 2015; Vachhani, 2015). In the grand vision of Cixous, we need to move toward other ways of writing because that will “liberate society by proposing alternatives to inherited (masculine) logic, language, and cultural forms” (Lindsay, 1986, p. 52).
I want to learn from my dreaming because during a dream I undertake actions that my insecurity and anxiety prevent me from doing during the day. At night it is as if my dreaming body “takes over” which enables (forces?) me to do things I would never think of as possible, or think of at all, during the day. It is as if my dreaming body does not care—the dream does not come by special invitation—it takes over and moves on without asking for permission: We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it’s very healthy, because it’s the only place where we never lie. At night we don’t lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying—they are strange buildings—we should try and write as our dreams teach us; shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside every human being—sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals; we kill, and we kill with a lot of enjoyment. But we are also the happiest people on earth; we make love as we never make love in life. (Cixous, 1990, p. 22)
Beyond the Daylight Rationality
Since I was little, I have always had an active dream life. One of my first memories is of standing in my nightgown in the hallway on my way to my parents’ bedroom. It was early morning and I woke up because of a nightmare. I have no clue what the nightmare was about, but I remember the feeling it brought with it; a feeling of how my body had me in such a way that I was out of control of what was happening.
I still dream a lot, mostly nightmares. For my whole life, I never really paid attention during the day to my night dreams because it felt too painful. Moreover, what happened during the night appeared to be so different from my experiences during the day that I thought it was better to keep the dreaming body and the daylight body separate. To maintain this separation, I have developed morning tricks that successfully lock in the dreaming to not let it leak out and disturb my day life. One such habit is to immediately after waking take a shower and let the flow of hot water rinse the dream out of my body. Yet another is to turn to the morning news, to what is happening in the real world, pulling myself out of the dreaming domain as quickly as possible.
In the tendency to think and act in dualisms, the two forms of bodily existence “waking” and “sleeping” are habitually separated in our work too. Living through dualisms, we are skillful in carrying out our work as if the night had no influence on us at all. This separation is done (at least officially) not only in relation to how we do research about others, but also in the organization of our own work. As a result, the ways in which we come to understand and practice embodied knowledge “have been dominated by the norm of wakefulness and by dualistic language” (Valtonen, Meriläinen, Laine, & Salmela-Leppänen, 2017, p. 520). What I am interested in here is what it would mean if we allowed our lived body to exist on precategorial ground where dreaming is released from its secondary status in relation to waking. I do not do this to make dream interpretations but to learn from what the body can do, if allowed to. Thus, instead of closing the dreaming body down I have decided to do the opposite, to let it out to the best of my ability: I go to bed in order to dream. Carefully. And with hope and curiosity. While I sleep, the shooting (the sleeping, the scenarios) takes place. In the morning I harvest. (Cixous & Jeannet, 2013, p. 123, emphasis in original)
Seven Writing Invitations
Equipped with a notebook and pen next to my bed, I have started to inquire into my dreaming. As soon as I wake up, I grab the pen and paper and scribble down what I remember: what happened, how it felt, what that did to me, and others. Sometimes I do not write things down immediately, I just lie in bed and feel what I felt. I try to remember. I pay attention to my full body when it is in the mysterious phase of not sleeping or being awake. Rather than wrapping my night body, I ponder over what I would like to bring with me into the day. In an attempt to articulate some sort of “dream writing as a mode of inquiry,” 1 below is what I have found so far. These invitations are mostly in the form of questions rather than elaborate practices. However, isn’t that what the night offers?
The Dreaming Has Me
While dreaming I am not in control, the dream has me: “Dreams await us in a country we cannot get tickets to” (Cixous, 1993, p. 58). I have to wait for the dream to come to me. As it arrives, it takes me to places, characters, and forces that I did not know my body could accommodate. But they come from me, don’t they?
Cixous teaches us that the dreaming forces can be used literally for writing. She explains that the forces offer her special qualities: when I’m in the middle of the trip of writing, and I dream, very often the dreams are like a kind of engine or . . . horses, it gives me energy, power, they push me very strongly along my way, immediately from the night to the day’s work. (Sellers, 2004, p. 119)
How can I as a beginner locate this power? How can I enable the “sensory release” needed to give myself over to writing in such a way that it is the writing that leads me, not the other way around (Valtonen et al., 2017, p. 521)?
When Dreaming There Are No Transitions
Have you ever noticed when a dream begins? When the dream arrives it does not knock on the door or prepare me for its entrance. Apparently, there is no such thing as a slow start in dreaming. I am immediately right there and the dream moves me quickly between places, spaces, and people. I travel across time at the speed of light. And then, as suddenly as the dream arrived, it just drops me. Has it ended?
What a wonderful premise. I cannot wait to start writing journal articles without boring introductions covering elaborate gap analyses; I do these introductions because I have been trained to, but, in fact, they only serve as a transition to the beginning. And it ends when it ends, without repetitive clarifications and conclusions. In Martinez’s (2014) critique of the institutionalized need for closure, she notes what it does to us in our writing: And what is ironic of it all is that as students fight their way for this “complete” and “final” product to be seen and revered for their hardwork, actually leaves the student in-complete, partial of an education, torn away from their own words. (p. 7)
What she brings to the fore resonates with the call for “dirty writing,” allowing for texts that are “open-ended, incomplete and uncertain” (Pullen & Rhodes, 2008, p. 243). Yet, how difficult it is to do in practice. How do my dreams end? What can I learn from that?
One thing that I have learnt is that dreams tend to return. They are only temporarily closed off. There is the promise of another night to come, another dreaming possibility. I have a number of dreams that keep returning; however, in different shapes and settings. There is certainly no progress. Rather, the dream stays with me for a while before it drops me again. It reminds me about the writing contradiction: “Complete papers are never written, only re-written” (Colyar, 2009, p. 422, in original).
Dreaming Questions Taken-for-Granted Plots
What is the dreaming plot? I cannot clearly see any. The dreaming is pure experience; there is no one spelling out where I am, who I am with, what you and others look like, nor what has happened before or where I am going. There is no need to declare the state of things because the dream takes place from within me and my immediate experience is in the now; the dreaming body. Many times it is hard work, but as it comes from within my body there is no way out. I have to live it.
But how can I write that? To write with a beginning, middle, and end and to search for coherent themes and narratives, these are plots that I am used to. To redirect our writing away from chronological accounts and other taken-for-granted modes of writing, Steyaert (2015, p. 164) draws attention to queer time, written in the format of a triptych, which requires a back-and-forth movement in reading, enabling a “non-linear, cyclical reading that engages with the sensation of movement, intensity and rhythm (rather than representation).” The idea of the triptych is similar to the dreaming experience where I can be at several places at the same time. Besides, that is how dreaming draws attention to the “moment rather than plot” (Steyaert, 2015, p. 169). Through dreaming, we can expand on the capacity to write the instant, the only time we know in dreaming where history and future do not exist.
Another suggestion, offered by Cixous from her dream writing, is to write about that which is most unknown and foreign. In this dream world, so different from daylight rationality and the known plots we live by, “the feeling of foreignness is absolutely pure, and this is the best thing for writing. Foreignness becomes a fantastic nationality” (Cixous, 1993, p. 80).
Dreaming Enables Oppositions
When dreaming there is no clear beginning and end, inside and outside, here and there; you can be both. You can be a child and in the next moment ageless. That is how dreams seem to offer unique experiences that are truly mine. And these experiences are unknown, yet so familiar. What kinds of experiences are they?
Dreaming seems to offer overlooked unique experiences that can extend my existence and enable me to reach toward other writing potentials. Thanks to the imagination, the fearless forces, and the poetic images in dreaming, I can see and feel what are otherwise impossible to reach. One common opposition that becomes blurred during the night is that between the real and the imaginative. How can I write that? How do I know what is real if I no longer know what the imaginative is?
Dreaming Reminds Me to Not Overexplain
Dreaming is pure experience: movements, actions, dialogues. I am never told why. I often understand very little when I dream. Gradually things become clearer, but I never get there; there where I know and fully understand. With the nonrationalized comes the magic. Dreams remain magical because not everything is perfectly explained and laid out; “It is the feeling of secret we become acquainted with when we dream, that is what makes us both enjoy and at the same time fear dreaming” (Cixous, 1993, p. 85, emphasis in original). How can I enable magic in my writing? Will this take away the stress of not being able to, at this very moment, articulate the implications of what I am writing?
Dreaming Facilitates Other Body Rhythms
In her elaboration on “Writing Slow Ontology,” where writing is explored as a site of creative intervention, Ulmer (2017) discussed the need to be aware of our writing rhythm. In suggesting that slowness can be one way toward writing practices that are more life sustaining than running, she calls for writing rhythms other than the clock. To awake my dreaming body adds new layers to my writing rhythm. Thinking carefully about these rhythms, as noted by Valtonen et al. (2017), in their research on sleep, contributes to “within-corporality” experiences. Cixous works with, and through, these rhythms: When I’ve depleted all my energy I sometimes go to bed to “think” imagine with another rhythm than the desk’s high-pressure one, a floating rhythm, aswim, unhurried, when I let images, phrases come or come back, a state of alert passivity, this lasts for half an hour. I “float,” and, indeed, the current bears me along and nourishes me. (Cixous & Jeannet, 2013, pp. 123-124)
It seems that unexplored writing sensibilities can be released when I write from within the different rhythms that sleep and wakefulness of the body offer. Such “within-corporality” has largely been overlooked while we were more sensitive toward intercorporality (Valtonen et al., 2017). It reminds me to not only think of the social interplay in-between people, but also within people.
Dreaming Tells What Cannot Otherwise Be Expressed
“. . . the dream says something that is never said, that will never be said by anyone else and which you unknow; you possess the unknown secret” (Cixous, 1993, p. 85). If writing is inquiry, rather than transmission of the already known, would dream-writing be a way of getting closer to and inquiring into “the unrepresentable” (Vachhani, 2015, p. 149)?
In writing, you can of course try to spell out the secret, but it is even more exciting to write with the feeling of wanting to articulate the unknown. To try writing the unthinkable of the secret is just what Henderson and Black (2017) did when they decided to collaboratively write about their experiences of living with family trauma. As they started to write about what they had gone through, it was as if new light came into their life. Where loss and grief had taken all their energy, their joint writing enabled new response-ability. Still, am I prepared to see those things that only dreaming can show? Am I prepared to spell these things out?
Writing Through Vulnerability
I wake up from the “timeless present” of the dream and I am relieved because I was not killed this night either (Steyaert, 2015, p. 171). I am exhausted and remember what it was like. The waking up is accompanied by a feeling of vulnerability that I cannot easily shake off. The wound is there; the opening of my body. During dreaming, my body does not stop from going right into that which is troubling me deeply and it does so without excuses. Thus, the vulnerable body of the night demands that I stay and engage in that which I could otherwise pretend to let go. This is the gift of the dreaming body. When I cannot overcome it, the fragility at least makes me feel something and it is opening up in such a way that I cannot simply pretend it is not there. Can the dreaming body teach me something about having to stay in this fragility? Can the dreaming body enable a writing from within experiences I did not even know I was housing—from within my own “corporal multiplicity” (Valtonen et al., 2017)? In using dream writing as a mode of inquiry, vulnerability becomes a writing resource and not something to overcome.
It is the rupture from the daylight rationality that releases these writing resources. Thus, I do not only have to move into the night, but also try to shake up and overcome my everydayness. By incorporating the rupture that the dreaming offers from my daylight rhythm, it is as if I can release the capacity to act differently. In locating these differences, I hope to become a writer who utilizes the forces that I know that my body has because I am living with these forces at night.
Clearly, the seven writing invitations are not recipes for dream writing or in the format of concrete, particular writing strategies, because that would be at odds with what made me curious about my dreaming life in the first place as well as the subversive play that is at the core of Cixous’s writing practices (Kuhn, 1981). That is why these invitations may rather be seen as reminders of thinking differently in relation to embodied writing. Such reminders are needed because usually “we edit, cleanse, correct and say what other people want us to say” (Pullen, 2017, p. 3). What a hopeless project where we limit ourselves and what we are capable of expressing. As a counterforce, hopefully, the seven invitations can offer writing practices through vulnerability toward a “writing in flow” driven from within the body’s dreaming experiences and capabilities. This would be a writing that does not care so much about conventions of what should be. It seems that it is in dreaming, when I let go or another me is in the driver’s seat, that the embodied experiences of grief, loss, and fear, but also of joy and hopes are let loose. All those experiences that can be pushed away during daytime, but in dreaming there is no escape and I have to live through it all.
Day writing, night writing. Reality imagined and the imagined reality. I am searching for ways to cross between because it forces me to expand what I take for granted about my embodied writing. Yet, after years of traditional academic training, my words do not materialize on paper that easily. They are still in my stomach. Far down. The words do not even come out in full sentences. As if every bit is too large and I have to chew every chunk carefully. I know it will come. My rhythm is slow, still in bed, slowly awakening.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
My warmest heartfelt thanks to Charlotte Wegener and Ninna Meier at Aalborg University who were great collaborators as we inquired into what writing from the bed might offer. Our talks, walks, and long dinners at the writing retreats within the “Writing Differently” community in organization studies also influenced me greatly. Thanks to all for being such a generative force. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer for offering thoughtful and appreciative words on the way toward publication.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
