Psychogeography and You

As I had mentioned in my brief raving about Beckett the other day, I am fascinated by psychogeography, that peculiar relationship between people and the spaces they inhabit. Currently I am interested in the way that fictive narratives can use setting as a reflection of a character's consciousness, but admittedly this concept only grabbed me from seeing it play out night after night in my dreams. I'm not sure what particular dream theory this falls under, but I've noticed that the locations that appear in dreams often are more expressive of my moods and psychic phenomena than they are of real places. Even real places in my dreams take on a greater significance, and it may even be possible that this same phenomena happens when we are awake.

I found a great link [via the Dream Studies Portal] to a woman charting the urban dreamscape of her life in San Francisco. While San Fran is already a dream-laden city, due to the somewhat surreal events of the '60s that still linger in the collective unconscious, it is interesting to see someone taking the psychogeographical approach and actually mapping out specific dreams onto locations in the city. There is a great article on the front page about the practice of psychogeography, what it means, how it works, and its historical roots in the Dérive of the Situationists (long aimless walks being another fascination of mine). Great food for thought for anyone who is curious about how we invest our environments with meaning.

Perhaps one of the most in depth looks at our emotional involvement in locality is Gaston Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space," which draws on Bachelard's phenomenological ideas of reverie and the imagination to suggest the intimate way our thoughts, memories, and emotions, are wrapped up in our lived experience of intimate spaces such as closets, stairwells, and seashells, though of course the same could apply to cities, landscapes, and other environments at large.