Translucence

(17 April 2001)

I did all of the renovation work without curtains—my budget has been stretched that thin, so the neighbours were able to observe me working.  At night I undressed with the lights off, and during the day I got dressed in the one blind spot the apartment had.  Today it finally occurred to me to tape dish cloths on the windows, not a very aesthetic solution, but a solution.  While taping up the dish cloths, I remembered a vivid dream that I’d had a few months ago.  In the dream I was in a house that recalled Japanese temples, it translucent windowpanes like rice paper, and it had many rooms, with sliding wall partitions, which allow one room to become two rooms or more rooms.  Also, the relation between the interior and exterior wasn’t clearly delineated, as in the temples, where you can sit on the tatami mat floors at the edge of the floor under the eves, and be both indoors and outdoors at once.  I walked around the house until I came across a room in which my psychiatrist was practicing.

The dream of course reminded me of the psychoanalytic process.  It also made me think about how I can have difficulty with boundaries, for example with knowing what should be keep private and what can be public.  It’s telling that after having had that dream, I went on to live here under the neighbours’ watchful eyes, without it occurring to me to find a way to cover the windows.

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