Beschreibung
"How the hell did I wind up here?" he exclaimed. It was a moderately large hall, lit by bright florescent light, and he was walking along close to the walls. But the instant those words left his mouth, he was rocked by an even greater epiphany: He realized he was dreaming, and knew that he knew this. In the blink of an eye, his awareness shot up in an exponential transcendence of levels, like facing mirrors, causing him to swoon inwardly. All he knew clearly was that he had suddenly been empowered, and that he had been placed, in a lucid state, within precisely this dream in order to use this new-found power to work something out, some cosmic purpose upon which everything-i.e., the cosmos-depended. So he immediately dismissed the temptation to use his power to escape the dream entirely by waking up, which he certainly could have chosen to do, that being one of the perquisites of lucid dreaming, as he well knew. No, he was to remain right within the dream and solve the problem it was presenting him, which was that he was trapped inside this plain, ordinary room with no obvious way out. How to get out? He resumed his preliminary survey of the room, noting that it was entirely bare except for the tubes of florescent light on the ceiling, which, though sharply illuminating the space, had in consequence of their intense whiteness a tiring effect on his eyes, and by extension, all of him. Except for his own body, there were no objects in the room to break up the light's tedious uniformity. It seemed, then, that he would have to carry on with a slight headache. He noted four doors, one in the middle of each of the walls. Three of them opened onto a dark, entombing rockface no more than a hand's breadth away. No way out there, for sure. Only one door was not an obvious dead-end, leading as it did to an adjoining room rich in the colors of royalty, red and gold, and decorated with several ceiling-high mirrors and a large glass chandelier. He felt in his gut the importance of solving the problem but could not account for it logically. Why should so much depend on his finding a way out of this room using his own wits when he could just decide to wake up and be done with it? Use the easy deus ex machina solution, the old Get Out of Jail Free card. Because then you would have learned nothing, in fact, you would have missed learning the one thing in all existence it is necessary for man to know, some inner voice whispered. Oh, yeah, that, he grumbled, gritting his teeth and turning back momentarily to external concerns. Looking carefully around the room, he searched for something, anything, that gave even the barest promise of being useful. The florescent lights were of no value, he determined; they're part of what's "given" here, part of the problem itself. Their bland sameness, an irritating white without warmth, without nuance, probably concealed more than they revealed. Besides, they gave him headache, for which he resented them, needing, as he now felt, a clear head for the task at hand. Wait a minute! he stopped short, getting his first inspiration. Maybe that's just it! Maybe the lights are bland and tedious for a very good reason. After all, everything in a dream is significant, isn't it, even an embroidered felt copy of "Dogs Playing Poker" hanging on the wall. So too tedium, so too headache. Why does this light give headache? That's the question. Pay attention to the tedious, headachy quality of the light. What is that telling me? This led by association to the richly suggestive dream theories of Freud and Jung, which were part of his allgemeine Bildung, as the Germans would say. As a sort of side bar or corollary, he also realized in that moment that, since he was dreaming lucidly, he had all his acquired knowledge, including dream theory, available to him to use or not as he saw fit. Then it struck him that a lucid dream such as this, over which the dreamer has great control, was precisely the venue for the application of e
Eine Modernisierung des alten und berühmten Kunstmärchens des deutschen Schauererzählers E.T.A. Hoffmann. Die Komödie für Jung und Alt erzählt die Geschichte des Studenten Anselm MacGregor, der die Gefahren seiner spirituellen Reise meistert und von Unwissenheit zur Erleuchtung gelangt. Sie spielt im Betondschungel des heutigen Großraums New Jersey/New York (Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken, Lower Manhattan), einem höchst unwahrscheinlichen, Ort aber faszinierenden Schauplatz für märchenhafte Taten. Der junge Anselm, ein mittelloser Doktorand in englischer Literatur an der Empyrean U., lebt von Erdnussbuttersandwiches und nimmt dankbar einen Teilzeitjob an, um für den Archivar John Lindhurst, den Leiter der Sondersammlungen am Stoneham Institut für Technologie in Hoboken auf dem Hudson, alte Manuskripte in geheimnisvollen Sprachen auf den Computer zu übertragen. Dies wird zu seiner psychospirituellen Ausbildung, die ihn in viele tückische Prüfungen verwickelt, einschließlich der Gefangenschaft in einer Glasflasche und der Verlockungen zweier schöner Frauen, die - manchmal auf nekromantische Weise - um seine Liebe buhlen.
Autorenporträt
Dennis McCort hat sich als langjähriger Professor für Deutsch an der Syracuse University auf die deutsche Romantik, die deutsche Belletristik des 19. Jahrhunderts, Religion und Literatur sowie Franz Kafka spezialisiert. Viele seiner Forschungsarbeiten konzentrieren sich auf die Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen diesen Bereichen: z.B., sein Buch "Going beyond the Pairs", eine Studie über Romantik, Zen-Buddhismus und Dekonstruktion, ist nicht nur eine Studie über Ost-West-Vergleiche von Literatur und Religion, sondern befasst sich auch mit dem Werk von Franz Kafka. Seine Artikel befassen sich unter anderem mit dem Einfluss von Rilke und Zen auf J. D. Salinger, dem Zen-Stil und -Geist in Kafkas Parabeln und der Darstellung des Wahnsinns in den Erzählungen von E.T.A. Hoffmann. 2017 veröffentlichte er "A Kafkaesque Memoir" bei PalmArtPress, eine persönliche Erzählung, in der er den prägenden Einfluss des Geistes und der Persönlichkeit von Franz Kafka auf eine neunjährige jungianische Analyse nachzeichnet, der er sich unterzogen hatte.
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