The dream I now dispose myself to record was dreamed in the city of Udaipur. The dream's effect on my conscience, which at the time was already weakened by personal circumstances, was so potent and strange, that a genuine and intense fear lasted for days after it came to me. Fear of what, I do not know: But fear I felt—A fear of something I could not elude nor escape from—A fear of a fiend which seemed to exist within myself. But before proceeding to record it, and to expose its very content, I deem appropriate to describe the peculiar state of mind under which I dreamed it. The dream is so dependent on that state, so reflexive of the sorrows and worries of that time, and of the events that preceded it, that narrating it without providing this additional information would surely fail to convey its intensity, and make it seem simply curious or trivial.
Three times I have visited India, each visit lasting something around thirty days. A single passage to this land is sufficient to effect a permanent revolution on the organization of the constituent aspects of our personality, and to draw an indelible scar, that of a wound taken with joy, in the deepest region of our conscience. Why this is so, I will not attempt to tell: I have kept a policy of not discussing my trips to India in any way with anyone, for people hold so superficial prejudices about what that nation is—if one could even say it, as a whole, is something at all—and its impact is so dependent on elements of atmospheric and indescribable nature, that any effort at explaining this extraordinary place is in principle vain. Whatever the case, if one such trip is sufficient to disclose facets of human experience before secret to us, and (above all) to excite one's curiosity and affection for humankind to the utmost degree, one can only imagine what three of these trips may accomplish; especially when, so I attest, the beauty of the nation is not lessened by repetition, but remains fresh at every instance, like a fruit that never rots and hides a never tiring flavor!
At the beginning of my first trip to India, nonetheless, I was drowning in deep sorrow. The days that preceded the trip where the scenario for a series of unfortunate, or with respect to some, even terrible events. The dark apotheosis of this series was, I advance, a state fury, an anger so deep that I can only describe it as a possession; for I did not recognize who it was that took the place of me, but me it could not be—so violent and cruel, so desperate for vengeance, so stupid and detestable: Me it could not be. But oh it was...! And in order for the reader to grasp the source and nature of this torrential ire which sequestered me, and under whose influence I decided in manners which I was to repent for years to come, I must provide a bit of context, so that we may see the beast, whenever possible, with at least a tinge of pity and compassion, and take matters fully for what they were.
Around that time, two of my dearest friends were T..... and A..... . The three of us were friends, but T..... and I, having grown up together, shared a particularly special affection for each other. About six months prior to my first trip to India, an acquaintance made known to me that A..... had sexually abused a girl whom I knew. The rumor, for this is all it was at this point, left me perplex, and I must say at the time I was unsure about what to do—I was still quite young, and perhaps it is worth noting that this happened some time before the Me too movement and Ni una menos, by which I mean to say that the matter was quite taboo still, and had not reached the masses yet, and especially not me, a young boy. I decided that the best course of action would be to confront A..... and ask him about the situation. And though I will not disclose what was said in the many conversations we had on the matter, I can attest that, eventually, after I insisted on a set of inconsistencies that were evident in his account of the facts, he gave an answer that amounted, for all practical purposes, to a confession. With great pain indeed, for I held him in the greatest esteem, and was truly shocked to find that he had actually perpetrated an act of such perverse nature, I decided I would not be his friend anymore. But this decision, I thought, was one I should communicate to him face to face, so as to leave matters as clear as possible; and since he lived in my home town, and I was living in a different province, I waited for the next occasion that would take me there, and suspended my communications until that moment arrived.
As the aforementioned events were taking place, I communicated often with T....., to whom I disclosed everything as it happened, and who was sad and shocked as well. He, however, did not wish to take a stance on the matter, and wanted to wait till I arrived, so that I could brief him in more detail on my conversations with A....., and we could speak to him as well, before making a decision. This I thought revealed some softness of character, insofar as the deed perpetrated by A..... left no place for indulgence—And although I am not fooled by the idea that outright cancellation, as it is now termed, solves any problem at all, I still considered that taking distance from A....., in view of what was revealed, was the ethical thing to do.
When I finally traveled to my home town, we arranged a meeting with T..... and A...... In that meeting I said my peace: I told A..... that, in view of his (practical) confession, and of the inconsistencies in his account of the events, I considered his wrongdoing too serious to continue calling myself his friend. I gather that he took me for a lost cause, as he immediately disregarded my very presence and turned to T....., who was more hesitant, in search of someone to support him. The words he spoke to T....., who was at the time rather immature, but most importantly, who has the purest heart imaginable, and is always predisposed to conciliation and forgiveness—the words he spoke to him, I say, seemed to me manipulative and ruinous. He made no case for himself at all—not in regards to his innocence, that is—but rather proceded to enumerate before our hesitant friend the great number of calamities that would follow from the public knowledge of his actions. His fears were reasonable and not exaggerated, and the calamities he foresaw were indeed plausible: That he should have to move to another city, that he would have to abandon his studies, that he would lose all of his friends, that he would not be able to walk the streets without despise in the look of those he met. The reader should know that the city he lived at, the place I was born, is rather small—or rather, that middle-class circles are of no great extent. (Furthermore, even when the victim, a young and lovely girl who happened to be my friend in primary school, explicitly declared that she did not want any actions to be taken against A....., nor for the abuse to be made public, two women I know, and who I can with confidence attest are bitter and malicious and lack any moral standard, took it upon themselves to make the matter public in social media, and denounced A.... practically before the whole town, without any regard for the victim's wishes.) And even though the content of A.....'s words were true, and the fear in his heart, so I believe, was sincere and, in fact, moving to anyone prone to compassion, a category in which I include myself, the tone of his pleas was manipulative, and the look on his eyes was mischievous. As it is often the case, the manipulator was not speaking falsely, but rather recurring to slightly unnatural emphases. Whatever the case, the meeting eventually concluded with a last valediction between A..... and myself, which he was not well disposed to give, and with T..... unable to make a decision and stating that he had to think about the matter further. But even so, perhaps ten or twenty minutes after A..... had left, us who remained present at the meeting place discussed, and common agreement was met, that it was the right decision, in view of the events, that everyone should have their peace with A..... and farewell his friendship from then on.
A day went by, a single day, and as the afternoon came, I reached out to T..... and asked whether we should go out somewhere. He said he would be busy the afternoon and would not be able to make any plans. I called some other friends and we got together and were having fun the usual way, until one of them mentioned that we should call T....., that he was in a nearby park playing the guitar with A..... and others, and had been for many hours already. Upon finding this out, and realizing that T..... had lied to me, and was in a reunion with A....., whom I thought he had decided not to see any longer, I felt betrayed. The principal motive was not the lie, which angered me in any case, but the repetition of a pattern in T.....'s behavior which I had come to have serious problems with; namely, a tendency not to take any matter whatsoever seriously, and a child-like incapacity to make any hard decision or true commitment with respect to anything. The objects upon which this flaw exerted its influence were, up to that point, relatively minor, which rendered his behavior somewhat venial—although a few times the consequences of his attitude had already proven severe to me. As an example, I can provide the following anecdote, which I am saddened remembering.
During my whole adolescence, I lived in the outsides of the city, twenty kilometers from its center, in a beautiful house fronted by a lagoon, and amidst the purest beauty of nature. I lived there only with my father, as I had decided when I was twelve, a few years after he had divorced my mother; whereas my siblings continued to live with her. At the time of the event which I am narrating now, perhaps five years prior to the dream I pretend to record, the relationship with my siblings and my mother was rough and difficult, and I was not entirely welcomed in the old familiar home. In all fairness, the unwelcoming predisposition came from my siblings and not from my mother, whom despite our many differences loved me dearly. One day, T..... invited me to his place, where I was to meet him at night. Meeting with him was difficult, because he never took the trouble of taking a bus to where I lived, and so it was always me who had to make the twenty kilometer trip to see him. But when I arrived that night, to my surprise, he was nowhere to be found. I waited for some time at his place, lest it may be that he was somewhere near and soon to return, but no sign of him appeared. At this point it was already very late; I had no money nor a bus card to get back home, and my father was not returning my calls, for he always went to bed quite early. It was a cold winter night that I will never forget: For, as a last recourse, I went to my mother's place, which was at a walking distance, where I soon had quite the argument with her and from where, to put it elegantly, I was rapidly invited to leave. It was the first, and in fact the only time, that my mother was the one to kick me out—a deed more often carried out, imperiously and even happily, by my eldest brother. (My sister contented herself to bitter remarks; for example, I recall one occasion when I was having lunch them, and I dropped some soda on the table while pouring my glass, inspiring my sister to say: This is not even your house and look what you do!) But although it was the only time my mother did this, it was also the one that had the most serious consequence. My friend did not return to his home at any point, which angered me deeply—his invitation was what brought me to town—and, having no other place to sleep at, and no money to return home, and also being quite inexperienced and young—for today I believe I would be capable of fixing for myself a better faith than the one which befell to me then—I saw no other alternative than to sleep at a park bench. How windy that night was, and how cold, I still recall, and the particular temperature of it, the exact degree of humidity in its air, the velocity at which the air traversed the solitary park, even the whistling it conjured as it electrified the winding leaves: All is so new and living in my memory, that I can invoke it by mere volition of the mind, and almost feel again at will the wind assailing me. Such was the impression that the cold, and above all the anguish, had on me that sleepless night. Years later I would recall this night while reading De Quincey's Confessions, where he writes:
A more killing curse there does not exist for man or woman than that bitter combat between the weariness that prompts sleep and the keen, searching cold that forces you from the first access of sleep to start up horror-stricken, and to seek warmth vainly in renewed exercise, though long since fainting in fatigue.
The whole night had to pass for my father to wake up and see my calls and come pick me up.
One may say little of this was T.....'s fault, and that would certainly be true. He did not invent the conditions which made his absence, which I later came to find was caused by mere forgetfulness (he had gone to another friend's place forgetting his invitation to me), so sadly consequential. But the anecdote is perfectly representative of the flaws which I so much came to resent in him: He lived as if nothing had a consequence, he committed to very little, and his word could not be counted on. And this, and many other things, was relived by me when I found he was having the most joyful of times with A....., when very little doubt remained, at least in my opinion, of his guilt. T..... knew how terrible the deed was which weighted on A.....'s shoulders; but he experienced such knowledge with the same seriousness with which one feels the character of a movie is guilty of anything—or less so, I should say. And the fact that he could be joyfully singing at the park with a person he knew (so was my interpretation of the facts) to be so reprehensible, angered me beyond what I can describe, and such fury took possession of me as I have experienced on extremely limited occasions, perhaps only two or three times in the quarter of a century which so far I have lived. This was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back; it was not conformed only by T.....'s lie, nor only by the immaturity which, at least to my eyes, he was showing at that particular time, but it had been accumulating for years in my adolescent heart, and finally unleashed under this situation.
I will not describe in detail what happened after, for it would be indeed too long and is somewhat inessential. Suffices to say that not only I called him and insulted him in manners unworthy of any decent person, but, being in knowledge of his whereabouts, I decidedly went in look of him, abandoning the meeting I was at, which was taking place in my very home, and all this with the most violent of intentions. I scarcely even accounted for the fact that I was leaving many guests alone at my own place, nor communicated to any of them where I was going nor when I would be back: My anger was so great indeed that I immediately stormed through the front door before their startled eyes, without me knowing who I was, nor them guessing what I had in mind. But because they overheard my insults to T....., and thus were witnesses of the obscure passion which sequestered me, they called T..... themselves after I left and told him to be mindful and go home. To this very day I thank them for that, and I take for a blessing that I did not find T....., who hid when made aware of my martial march. There is, however, a darkly humorous anecdote that arouse from the manhunt I undertook that night. I left my place in such a violent rush that I forgot my glasses, without which my sight fails to capture any detail of distant objects. Upon arriving to the park I was told T..... was at, which was very dark and poorly illuminated, I saw, at a distance, a group of people sitting on the grass, one of whom had a guitar in hand. These were surely them, and T..... was the guitarist surely, for he played the instrument well, and that was a common setting for the gatherings he attended to, and so I rushed to them with the darkest of demeanors. My steps were loud, my breathing agitated, and yet my eyes—of this I am sure—had the calmness and fixation that is so distinctive of a predator's watch over his prey. But when I was perhaps five or six steps away from that reunion, seeing that both girls and boys alike rushed to their feet with a scream, I noticed not only that I knew none of them, but that the guitarist was a young (and most importantly entirely random) lady! She became so frightened by this stranger that approached them so intrepidly in the middle of the night, and in such solitary place, that she jumped to her feet with such velocity as I would not have guessed was possible, and as I stopped and realized that she was not who I was looking for, she stepped away from me and asked with a trembling voice what was my business. I fell shocked and even disgusted at myself for scaring her so, and her friends also, but this feeling lasted very little, perhaps only an instant; for I immediately refocused on my furious intent, gave a hasty apologize, and disappeared into the darkness once again.
Many other things came to happen that night, none of which (I thank) had any consequence to T.....—but this certainly not for a lack of try on my end. I must say, however, that I was so possessed by anger, and my vision was so cloudy and lost (nothing existed in its blurred periphery), and my mind so alienated and mad, that I recollect almost nothing of that night aside from feelings. I walked for hours looking for T....., this I know, but nothing I gather of my walk but the tumultuous ocean of feelings which sequestered me. The streets I walked are gone, the direction I took is forgotten, the exact duration of my quest remains unknown to me—but the interior of my soul during that night, although chaotic and confusing, I have never forgotten.
That night I understood the origin of some mythological depictions of anger. This, I now grasped, was the spell which made Athamas turn a blade against his children. I have never experienced anger like that since, and I believe I won't again, being more mature than I was then. But that one time was enough to destroy my friendship with T....., who did not wish to speak to me since that night, and with great reason. It took three years for us to become friends again; but during those years there was not a single day I did not think of that great friend, whom I loved so profoundly, with ineffable sadness; and I could not speak of him without shedding tears. I was in fact so heartbroken by the end of our friendship, and so ashamed of my behavior, and also so profoundly surprised at my own rage—for I was always a calm person, not at all prone to violence—that I succumbed to a deep dejection. My flight to India departed two days after the events I have described. And it was in such sadness, and after so horrendous events, that I left for the East.
I will now present the dream that was the original object of this entry. I did not expect to digress so much, but the reader—You, Reader, who are a fiction of myself, an instrument of my self-reflection, an artifice of this diary, a mirroring ghost!—must know that, when dealing with personal diary entries, and not literary creations, I write as writing comes to me, as if I were a window through which flow the airs of my own mind, as in the verses:
Soy una abierta ventana que escucha
por donde ver tenebrosa la vida.
The color tone of the dream was cold, and very much resembled, as reference, the color temperature of the drama series Ozark. It was dreadful, profoundly dreadful, but not because of an imminent threat or a lurking danger, but because of an oppressive and ominous atmosphere. I will record it in first person, as I experienced it in Udaipur.
I am in the middle of an unpaved street, in what I know is a villa miseria, at night. The place is poor, filled with tumbledown buildings, and sewer water rests in the ditch that follows the street by its side. There are only two flickering street lamps: one at one of the corners, another at the sidewalk opposed to me. I am standing in front of a gate that marks the entrance to a residential compound, more precisely what in Argentina is termed a monoblock. I know that in the compound there is something that everybody fears, and that I fear as well, but that I must for some reason seek. I open the gate and cross to the other side, closing the gate before me, entering the compound through a long hallway, which leads to an open space where the residential buildings are. I take a few steps across the hallway and I hear a voice calling for me from the street. It is a police officer: He is Indian and has the uniform of the Indian police. He tells me that I should not enter the residential complex, that it is dangerous, that I know it is dangerous and should return. Knowing that he, like everybody else, fears what is in it so much that he would never dare to enter, I reply with contumacious tone: Then come and make me leave. He stands there doing nothing, with fear and worry on his face. I turn my back to him and continue to enter the complex. I arrive to the open space where buildings are. Everything is dark, the buildings are shattered, with broken windows everywhere: Everything in this place is dilapidated, in ruins. To my left I see that one of the buildings, the one closest to me, is illuminated on the inside. The main door is a big white hospital door. I feel trepidation and doubt. I nevertheless approach the building and enter. I find myself in a derelict room, whose floor and walls are made of white tiles, most of which are broken; I think it looks like an abandoned hospital. The room is illuminated by a glimmering light bar. At this point I see a thing which terrifies me, and breeds anguish and anxiety within me: An anthropomorphic, though not entirely human shadow is traversing the walls—There is no body which projects it, nor has any source outside itself, but is an independent entity living the bi-dimensional existence of an outline, a silhouette, a contour, an umbra. It is dark, like all shadows, but its darkness stands out in a manner unknown to mundane shadows, and which I cannot describe. It moves across the wall into another room, a room which is purely black. I insist, this room is not dark: It is Blackness. Fear grows even stronger within me, and I want to leave, but simultaneously I know I must pursue this being. So I enter the dark room, but I see nothing, until I turn to my side and decry on the wall that there is the silhouette again, but it is now pure light: It gleams with such a shine, of a yellow but almost white tone, that I can only describe as divine or heavenly. It is the only visible thing, this quasi-human outline, radiating light like a sun amidst the total obscurity of that place. I fall to my knees, probably in despair, thought perhaps in adoration, and then I am awake.
Such was the dream of Udaipur, or the dream of the Shadow, as I always called it when, speaking to myself in solitude, I pondered upon it. An insensible reader may find it too brief to amount for the significance I attribute to it, but I should not suppose my reader to be insensible. Dreams can have, and in fact do have, at least on counted occasions in a man's life, a paramount effect on his psyche. In my case, I have found suggestive dreams to be concomitant with a development of personality, or at a minimum to serve such development by coinciding with it. With respect to dream interpretation, the appropriate stance, so I believe, is a pragmatist one. The matter, to my eyes, can be summed as follows: Dreams either have or don't have an interpretable meaning. If we suppose the latter case to be true—something that does not seem to agree with our current, albeit extremely limited, understanding of sleep as a biological phenomenon—then their interpretation is justified. If dreams do not have a meaning, then I would risk asserting that attempting interpretations of them as if they had one is still heuristically valuable. Dreams take the form of a rather noisy fiction; projecting ourselves onto such fiction, under the (if you want only heuristic assumption) that it is somewhat representative of our own selves, can do nothing but serve as a medium, and in fact an excuse as well, to confront and learn about ourselves in a more or less playful manner. Most people live their lives entirely unaware of the fact that they are but a mystery to themselves, and would surely benefit from any excuse or reason to make themselves the object of an inquiry. It is true that, under this purely heuristic light, nothing entails that what can be learned through the interpretation of a dream could not be learned simply via, say, honest self-examination—or in other words, if dreams have no meaning on their own, then whatever we can learn in interpreting them as if they did, should not be unique nor peculiar to our dream life. Dreams would not be, as psychoanalysis wanted, an oyster with a hidden a pearl. This much I concede; but yet it seems to me that, because dreams are often so loaded with emotional tension, and so imbued with affect, and have the power to induce the shedding of half-conscious tears, or the most furious closing of our fists, their examination compels us with an intensity rarely reached in simple self-reflection. Tranquile self-examination is often only an intellectual affair—dream interpretation may impel our very soul.
Whatever the case, I woke from this dream under so great distress, and with such melancholic anguish, as words could not express. The image had bewitched me. I gathered the strength to pursue the day, and moved to and fro the bridges that arch over Lake Pichola, and conversed with people of so varied walks of life, as I so often intended in the streets of India, that I managed to, if not forget, at least veil the sinister impression which that shadow had carved in my mind. But as nightfall came and I perceived that all around me darkened, and in the sky I saw the first of stars, I thought: Your shine is surely unfailing, so where were you before? And in that lane I walked, to which I had arrived as one arrives to any street in India—viz. stochastically—I knew that, just as daylight only veils the stellar sparks, without ever removing the stars from their own place, so the cloak of diurnal passion only seemed to conceal the sadness of my heart—and wherever I turned, I feared to see the Shadow.
This fear was so great and profound that I can only term it infantile. Assuming the absence of exterior circumstances endangering our lives; assuming, this is, that we are speaking of supernatural dread, of trepidation arising from imagination or suggestion: What greater fear there is than that which we feel as children, when we are left alone in darkness, and the archaic instincts that produce the fear of dark become all active? I recollect many an instance of this obscure passion, and their terrible and myth-like imageries, but detailing them would be demanding too much of a single diary entry. In any case, such was the fear I felt: a numen had appeared before me—a sinister theophany corresponding to a most sinister god—a vision which somehow escaped the Boundless, for boundless are the confines of our dreams, and haunted me in my vigil!
In this suggestive state I traversed the streets of Udaipur, a place in itself suggestive. A few nights passed without my restless state receding, and with each night an ominous sensation, which never ceased to assail me, brewed with violent passion. But of these nights I remember very little, and of the days prelusive to them nothing but the same disguising joy of the first day after the dream. Until it came, a feverish night I very well recall: No sound was in the air, and only the most minimal of lights prevailed in the central darkness of that room. And I repeat: it came. Before me was the Shadow: And with it came a feeling that I would have never guessed.
It would bee too pretentious to plainly call this a vision. I have experienced sleep paralysis ever since my late adolescence, and continue to do so frequently, and it is the general case that this phenomenon transpires not without hallucinations of the most various and intriguing nature. As a general rule, it occurs to me when, after briefly waking in the early morning, I attempt to sleep again. But in some occasions it struck me while attempting to sleep at night, or just before waking at dawn. I am forced by reason to think that what I saw that night, as I attempted to sleep, was but an instance of this strange condition, which seizes the soul and leaves it only half-way in a dream. However, I am also obligated to describe matters as they occurred, and hence to observe that many of the typical symptoms which accompany the state of sleep paralysis were not present: I felt no agitation and I could freely move my head. In my drowsy state, however, my head was all that I attempted to move, and I have always since doubted whether any other part of my body was within the reach of my will—or doubted, more precisely, whether I was paralyzed at all. That one besieged by sleep paralysis can move is, on account of my personal experience, true in certain occasions, when the malady appears in the form of a tremendous heaviness more than a complete petrification. But the movement of my head was light and effortless, which in dealing with sleep paralysis would be exceptional—though certainly less exceptional than the manifestation in waking life of a figure from our dreams, a pure hipnophany, if the reader will.
Whatever the case, I saw what I saw, be its nature what it may: It was the shadow of my dreams. Indeed, there it stood, a few meters away from me, at the opposing end of the precarious habitation, at first moving with slow and gentle grace, until accommodating at a fixed position. Two things, however, were not proper to the dream. Firstly, the Shadow had two sparks of light, that looked just the way a star looks on the nightly sky, precisely where its eyes would be, and which never ceased to observe me. Secondly, and most importantly, a most unpredictable fact: As I saw it standing in the room before me, though after a strong but evanescent sense of fear, I felt such bliss and confort that I could not describe. The whole place seemed suddenly radiating with tranquility, and I was made aware, by some unconscious prestidigitation of the mind, that the entity I was so surely observing, and which was so surely observing me, was my most faithful ally and my sincerest friend. What I felt then could be expressed in the relieved pronunciation of the phrase: I've finally found you—a confort altogether inconsistent with the fact that I had feared to find it ever since the dream. And, however unbelievable this may be, drowning in the protective warmth that so generously exuded from the (moments ago dreaded) figure, I proceeded to close my eyes and rest in peace—and such respite was achieved that dreamless night, that the next day I felt renewed, and the intensity of my worries had been washed away—all as if, by virtue of that night's realization, a spiritual quarrel had ended. Only then, freed at least from the most turbulent elements of my emotional distress, I was able to think about the dream, and of the circumstances it drew, and the strange experiences it suggested to my suggested mind, in analytic or self-examining fashion. And every examination lead to the tempestuous ire I had felt before my trip.
I admit, dear reader, that I am a literary man—which often means a fabulist. But I am also a man of science. I did not attempt here to convey truths or facts of any form but psychological and biographical. I have resisted for years the adolescent temptation of condescending to think that anything like a shadow ‘ truly’ appeared before me—if by truly we mean via a material and objective realization. But the almost certain fact that there was no shadow that night, observing me with glittering eyes, is to me just as important as the fact that I saw that there was a shadow—and even more, that not only such vision was imbued with positive (and even tender) affect, but it seemed to have contributed to, or at least marked, the conclusion of a psychological process.
Now I must present not only the interpretation of the dream, but how it came about. This will hopefully account for the very long preamble that preceded the narration of the dream itself. If at any point I claim to have interpreted that the dream, or some of its elements, had this or that other plausible meaning, I shall be making always such interpretation with a heuristic purpose, as detailed some paragraphs above. At all times I disregard the question of whether the dream had an intrinsic meaning or not.
At this point in life I was seventeen years old. I was a rather passionate but disorderly young man, with too many (and too intense) curiosities but no particular goal nor any path set forth. You could say I lived a privileged life of literary and intellectual devotion. I studied intensely, both formal and informal disciplines—I had already started to delve on formal logic, but not on mathematics—but I undertook these studies with a very independent and even rebellious spirit, obsessively absorbing the areas that interested me the most, while barely addressing those that failed to intrigue me. This was, at least partially, simple immaturity, but I still stand in certain respect of this attitude. In any case, among the readings undertaken during my late adolescent, I had come across the concept of archetype as proposed by C.G. Jung, and was aware of the fact that a shadow archetype had been postulated. I hadn't yet read any work of Jung, but had a summary notion of his general ideas. With my recently acquired tranquility, and upon recalling this psychoanalytic concept, I managed to obtain a copy of what I understood would be the simpler of his books—for traveling in India I would not have the time for profound or serious inquiries—and so that week I read, in trains as well as in precarious hotel beds, Jung's Recuerdos, sueños, pensamientos. My reflections upon the dream were parallel to this reading.
As I said, at every point I was forced to deal with the inferior side which had been revealed the night I was possessed by anger. The more I came to acknowledge the existence of the vile and primitive impulses which sequestered me then, the least I managed to reconcile with my own identity, and yet the freer I felt. It is easy to make a superficial analysis of one's flaws, but a profound integration of our darkest facets is far less trivial, as I should expect anyone who has seriously attempted it to understand. As I continued to travel in India, along the diary entries that pertained to my impressions of this exuberant nation, there appeared notes where I recorded whatever I felt which was primal and foul. I proceeded to exclude nothing, and if so much as a hint of wickedness appeared before me inner eye, I recorded it with haste and crudity. This process continued to the point that I began to scare myself. Now I deem it natural that a person undergoing such process would tend to identify with the new material which appears before their mind, but at that moment this identification distressed me, and new turbulent dreams started to come. One of particular horror, which I dreamed recurrently, was as terrible as it was brief: I walked a street at night stalking a random stranger, and eventually gave myself to a murdering apetite; I killed the victim with a piece of glass, upon which, at the end of the dream, I was faced with my reflection—which showed me as Ted Bundy. At that point I would wake up screaming. It was not, of course, that I thought I was as evil as a serial killer—although entertaining a comparison would be literary amusing, I couldn't really compete with such peerless perversity—rather, it was that I was so much less pure than my adolescent mind would have wanted to guess. It is a mythical commonplace, however, that some part of the nemesis exists within the hero, be it by virtue of a common origin or a common essence; and from this point of view, my discovery was simple and barely initiatory. I often murmured in solitude the exquisite poem To Tirzah, by William Blake, pretending to ask the shadow, but surely speaking to myself:
The death of Jesus set me free:
Then what have I to do with thee?
At this point, I knew the shadow represented the set (or the complex, as psychoanalysts would call it) of inferior and undeveloped aspects of my personality; and I presumed, because it became light upon entering the Darkness, that it would blossom and infuse new life into my life, so to speak, as long as I dared to search for it in unknown regions of myself. But the more I gave myself to this exploratory zeal, the more I shook the grounds upon which my identity was laid.
With regards to the Jungian concept of shadow, I can never entirely conclude whether it is a useful and intelligent concept or the over-elaboration of an obvious truism. In what comes to its personal side—this is, to the part of the shadow which would, in theory, correspond to the personal unconscious—I find it not too revealing. As many of Jung's ideas, it only takes force when inserted into his broader theory of archetypes, which concerns the collective unconscious. There are two reasons why this is so. First of all, the postulate of the collective unconscious, even when originally formulated within a now questionable theory, is not entirely incorrect—while that of the personal unconscious is, as they say, not even false, at least as developed in psychoanalysis. It appears that Jung's intuition on the collective unconscious was right, or at least this I concluded from my inquiries on affective neuroscience—particularly the line of work set forth by Panksepp. Jung's formulation was not entirely accurate, but (it seems to me) it was almost as correct as one could have expected from the state of scientific knowledge at the time he was alive. For a very specific publication on this matter, the reader may enjoy the neuroscience paper The affective core of the self, though more comprehensive and valuable works from Panksepp exist. In any case, to avoid further comment on matters no directly related to this entry, suffices to say that reading Jung did not prove too helpful at the time, and the peculiar project of self-excavation that I had started was conducted with very little principle or guidance.
I eventually came to learn that my shadow was quite versatile. When it wanted to strike the weak, it called for the use of force—when faced with a strong opponent, be it a situation or a person, it chose the subtle arts of subterfuge and deceit. I pondered deeply about my sins, and saw that I had many—I came to find I had been quite insensible to suffering, even brutal. Memories came which I detested. I remembered, for example, how all the kids in school, including myself, had made existence impossible for one of our fellow students—displays of cruelty were resurrected in my memory of which perhaps only a child is capable. I had felt for years such actions were beyond me: They were not. In any case, they were beyond what I decided; this is, it's not that I could not be evil, it is that I sometimes chose not to. A trivial realization, I think now, but at the time it struck my adolescent mind like a lightbolt. I was now aware of a new capacity, by the simple principle that whatever was or is the case is possible. The question became: If at a certain occasion I had decided to do wrong, what made me do so? I learned that these new regions of myself, whose integration was slowly developing, not only had a personality on their own—this is, one with a certain degree of independence with respect to what psychoanalysis would have called my ego personality—but that this personality was not alien to myself. Like our two hands are capable of independent action, and yet belong to the same body, myself and this Mr. Hyde had at times functioned independently, as if striving for different objectives, and obeying distinct and sometimes contradictory principles, and yet were members of a unity which, in some way, had to account for both. And slowly my sense of instability receded, and I began to notice that with everything I learned not only my control over myself grew stronger and more conscientious, but such creative energy brewed within me as in years I did not feel. I wrote abundant poetry. I felt vigorous. In fact, or so I think, I became kinder and more serene.
I am unaware of whether the process I have described is somewhat universal or not. I suppose, though I have no way to know, that it is a normal development of late adolescence. The conflict was, however, positively resolved: New threads of life were spanned from and within myself. I felt an inner expansion, as if my personality was a realm that had acquired new and vast territories; and in such a way that not only these new regions were embelleced by the acquisition, but their riches gave activity to the old provinces. I will not trouble myself to go any further than this, for I believe this account is as complete as any sense of modesty allows for. These were the things that came about by virtue of the dream of the shadow, which lies in between a descent to obscurity and violence, on one end, and an ascent to a relative peace with greater knowledge, on the other. That this dream was prelusive to the conquest of such peace, I would not have guessed at the time I dreamed it. But it seems a positive numen may operate through the forces of fear and anguish.