Writing with Dreams: Kafka’s Insomniac Method
Had Kafka read The Interpretation of Dreams with “considerable care” (as Marson and Leopold argue) its influence would be most evident in his peculiar writing technique; a method of writing late at night, in an insomniac trance. In this scenario—that is likely but by no means conclusive—Kafka read The Interpretation of Dreams as a how-to-manual, a guidebook for exploring the dream-world and pulling its cryptic material up into the day-lit realm of fiction. Kafka learned from Freud that he could displace his dreams with writing; that he could write with his dreams.
“I believe this sleeplessness stems only from the fact that I write,” Kafka notes in the diaries. He made this literally so by writing when he should have been sleeping. Kafka writes himself into insomnia; he suffers insomnia in order to write; it is as if the insomnia, entranced by the hypnogogic drift, were doing the writing. “It was the power of my dreams which radiate even into the waking state before I fall asleep, that didn’t let me sleep…I feel loosened to the bottom of my being and can draw out of myself whatever I want…it is a matter of mysterious powers…”
Freud was well aware of these radiating dreams and their mysterious powers. Writing of “hypnagogic hallucinations” in The Interpretation of Dreams he says: “These are images, often very vivid and rapidly changing, which are apt to appear—quite habitually in some people—during the period of falling asleep; and they may also persist for a time alter the eyes have been opened” It was in thinking through the vertices of the non-ordinary hypnogogic mental state that Freud begins to approach the freier einfall, the free associative method, by which a free incursion, a free falling, an uninhibited eruption of the unconscious is able to elude the regular censorship of the repressive apparatus of ego. It is as if the wave of primary process (that is normally unconscious) swamps the little boat of the ego, while one is conscious of it.
The fall of this wave takes place in “a psychical state which, in its distribution of psychical energy (that is, of mobile attention), bears some analogy to the state before falling asleep… As we fall asleep, ‘involuntary ideas’ emerge, owing to the relaxation of a certain deliberate (and no doubt also critical) activity which we allow to influence the course of our ideas while we are awake…”
The primary process (the free flow of psychical energy) may be described precisely as unceasing waves of involuntary ideas (If not waves of the involuntary real itself). These involuntary ideas are no different than “the strange ideas” Kafka mentions the morning after he wrote The Judgment. Freud goes on to claim that “poetic creation must demand an exactly similar attitude” and quotes the poet Schiller at length describing his creative method as a “relaxation of the watch upon the gates of Reason” A relaxation that can be brought about by merely not going to sleep, as Kafka would prove with his own weird late-night writing practice, and that is in turn in evidence in the very dreaminess of his fiction.
The phase shift in Kafka’s artistic development, the insomniac moment when Kafka became Kafka was catalyzed by nothing less than the psychoanalytic method as laid out in The Interpretation of Dreams; a method, not of interpretation, but of consciously dreaming: of speaking/writing in the altered-state of the freier einfall—particularly in its hypnogogic aspect—as a means to express otherwise repressed or cryptic material.
Kafka’s mysterious powers are the hypnogogic access to the primary process through the occult powers of the dream itself; access, in short, to the unconscious.
R. Crumb’s Kafka, 1993
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