Help! I'm Turning into a Tapeworm (Don't Tell Me Not to Worry)

Teresa Zgoda: Taenia solium (tapeworm) everted scolex

Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition (2017)

 

 

I. 

 

The above image by Teresa Zgoda, revealing the anterior end of a pork tapeworm, is truly the stuff of nightmares. No wonder then that after coming across it, a friend of mine experienced a metamorphic dream in which he had the head and short neck of the creature atop his still human body. 

 

As he described what had happened to him in his dream, it became clear that there was no point my telling him not to worry, as, clearly, he was profoundly disturbed by this - and perhaps rightly so; for if transforming into a macroparasite isn't troubling, then what is?

 

Besides, don't worry is such a crass response; insensitive and inadequate; dismissive and minimising. When people are upset, they want to be able to express their worries and fears and they want, perhaps, to be offered some explanation for why they are feeling as they do. 

 

They certainly don't want to hear the words don't worry, never mind, or calm down. Nor do they want to be told to get over it, as if their emotional distress were something trivial and slightly embarrassing (something they either have to justify or apologise for).          

 

 

II. 

 

Having said that, what do you say to a man who is worried about becoming-tapeworm? Who has seen himself (in his dreams) with that terrifying attachment organ, the scolex, where his head should be and fears his body is becoming whiter and flatter and more ribbon-like by the day?     

 

I'm not a psychiatrist, or dream therapist, and I'm afraid my only experience in these matters is as a reader of fiction ... 

 

One thinks of Gregor Samsa, for example, who famously wakes up one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a large insect (commonly depicted as a cockroach). Initially assuming this to be a temporary change and that he will soon be back to normal, Gregor is, at first, philosophical about what has happened to him. Unfortunately, however, he doesn't recover his human form and things end tragically for him [1]. 

 

One also thinks of Marda West, in Daphne du Maurier's extraordinary short story 'The Blue Lenses' (1959), in which everyone appears to suddenly lose their human features and is seen with the head of the creature that best expresses their inhuman qualities; not so much their true nature, as what might be termed their molecular animality. Again, this might sound amusing at first, but any comic aspects quickly give way to horror [2].      

 

I would advise my friend, therefore, to take his dream seriously. But I would also remind him that our humanity is nothing originary and autonomous; in fact, there are no free-living organisms - we are all parasites living off the lives of others ...

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring, of course, to Franz Kafka's novella, Die Verwandlung (1915). There are many English editions of this text available, but I would recommend the translation by Susan Bernofsky, that comes with an introduction by David Cronenberg; The Metamorphosis (W. W. Norton and Co., 2014).

      For my analysis of the case of Gregor Samsa, see the first of my becoming-insect posts: click here.

 

[2] See Daphne du Maurier, 'The Blue Lenses', in The Breaking Point, (Virago Press, 2009), pp. 44-82. For my reading of this tale, click here. 

 

 

This post is for my friend Síomón Solomon.

 

  

Sleep and Dreams

D. H. Lawrence says some very amusing things about sleep and dreams in his brilliantly crackpot work of 1922, Fantasia of the Unconscious, which - following another sleepless night - I thought it might be interesting to re-examine here.

For Lawrence, sleep is a phenomenon that relates both to his cosmology and his thanatology; the moon being not only the centre of our individuality and the pole that governs nighttime activities, but a meeting place for cold, dead, angry souls. Each time we lie down to sleep, says Lawrence, we constitute within ourselves a body of death and this body of death is laid in line by the activities of the earth's magnetism or gravitation - what he terms the circuit of the earth's centrality: "It is this circuit which is busy in all our tissue removing or arranging the dead body of our past day."

In other words, for Lawrence, there is a kind of cleansing and terrestrial current moving its way through our nerves and our blood as we sleep; "sweeping away the ash of our days' spent consciousness towards one form or other of excretion". This earth-current, however, whilst an active force, is not strictly speaking a vital one; rather it is death busy in the service of life and which, as it sweeps, stimulates in the primary centres of consciousness "vibrations which flash images upon the mind". 

Somewhat surprisingly, these dream-images should not be a matter of any great concern to us. Indeed, Lawrence views them as purely arbitrary; "as disconnected and as unmeaning as the pieces of paper which the street-cleaners sweep into a bin fro the city gutters at night". They are not prophetic of the future, even if pregnant with the past. Dreams are merely "heterogeneous odds and ends of images swept together accidentally by the besom of the night-current, and it is beneath our dignity to attach any real importance to them". Lawrence continues:

"It is always beneath our dignity to go degrading the integrity of the individual soul by cringing and scraping among the rag-tag of accident  and of the inferior, mechanic coincidence and automatic event. Only those events are significant which derive from or apply to the soul in its full integrity. To go kow-towing before the facts of change, as ... fortune-readers and fatalists do, is merely a perverting of the soul's proud integral priority, a rearing up of idiotic idols and fetishes."

Having said that, Lawrence then concedes that there are in fact some dreams that matter. But this is only when something threatens us from the material world of death: "When anything threatens us from the world of death, then a dream becomes so vivid that it arouses the actual soul. And when a dream is so intense that it arouses the soul - then we must attend to it."

The knack is to distinguish these death-dreams that stimulate and haunt the soul, from the purely mechanical images that often result from some temporary material obstruction in the physical body; perhaps because we have eaten cheese before bedtime, or too many pancakes. 

Finally, Lawrence ends his short meditation on sleep and dreams with a warning against staying up late at night and not rising early enough in the mornings; the twin dangers that threaten us today, for we have, we moderns, "made the mistake of turning life inside out: of dragging the day-self into night, and spreading the night-self over into the day." This is a self-destructive form of evil; an impoverishment of the blood. Unless it's an afternoon nap - Lawrence speaks positively about a quick snooze after lunch; for this is just a necessary readjustment in the blood's chemical constitution and vibration.

But the long hours of morning sleep are very harmful and result in inertia and automatism; we get up feeling shattered before we have even done anything. Thus it is that:

"Every man and woman should be forced out of bed soon after the sun has risen: particularly the nervous ones. And forced into physical activity. Soon after dawn the vast majority of people should be hard at work. If not, they will soon be nervously diseased."

This may or may not be true. Either way, it's disappointing to observe how Lawrence ultimately uses his madly imaginative metaphysics to simply justify a conventional work ethic.      

See: D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (CUP, 2004).