Dreamwatcher By Theodore Roszak

This novel is about dreams. The setting is a psychiatric clinic built around a doctor’s research into dream states. He has stumbled upon people who can tap into the dreams of others. He can help guide them into doing this. He can train people with these innate abilities. He can develop them into tools, “instruments”, to explore and indeed, effect, the dreamscapes of others. But early on in his career, some years ago, the potentially good doctor has fallen for the sick bargain of generous funding, a clinic in his name, but the cost is secrecy and control of a government intelligence agency.
The doctor’s instruments, his dreamwatchers are used by the mind control MK-ULTRA wing of intelligence to enter the dreams of people on their hit list and neutralize, discredit them by psychiatric manipulation. 
Roszak humainizes his big story with Deirdre, a dreamwatcher, who we come to know and gain sympathy for. She and the doctor, Devane, are the main players in the story. The doctor is a good guy but is trapped in a devil’s bargain. He wants the world to know and benefit from his work, but it must be kept secret as it has been bought and weaponized by ruthless power. The critical point comes when the doctor is ordered to destroy the serenity, and public stature of a radical Catholic nun from Central America. The CIA just doesn’t want her to get the Nobel Peace Prize.
The character of the nun brings in with her a childhood connection to indiginous  spirituality. She was taken off as a child and initiated by an aunt who was connected to that stream of ancient female shamanic energy, and training; this magic.

The novel tells an exciting suspenseful story around all this.
Is this just a fun fantasy read? Is it just a spy mind control adventure?
Dreams are so important. Are our dreams manipulated by power above us. In the novel to mess with people the dreamwatchers take them to a place of dark emptiness. At this writing Senator Bernie Sanders has just withdrawn from competition for a presidential nomination. In the address that contained his announcement he said something realated to the power of a dream:

"The greatest obstacle to real social change has everything to do with the power of the corporate and political establishment to limit our vision,” he said.

Are we watching over our power to dream? Are we keeping it clear from less than wholesome influence? What dreams, or nightmares, would come from power if it actually could influence our thoughts and mental well being?  Where are the borders between awake and dreaming? Are our stories related to dreams? Do they influence dreams? When we hear a story well told around a campfire, how does part of us enter that story, feel with it? What type of stories attract us? Do the most frightening ones draw us in because we are fragile and must be aware of environmental hazards?  Do we instinctively know we have to look out for danger? Is this being exploited for nothing more than commercial interest? 

This writer is aware of mass media influencing his own dreams. 

This happened just the other night after watching a good movie on a 13” computer screen for picture and stereo headphones for audio. 

The movie was Seberg about actor/activist Jean Seberg. The movie was not so much about her but, not so distant to the theme of Dreamwatcher, about government intelligence operatives messing with her business. They spy on her and ultimately try to destroy her by spreading lies about her. 

It is brought up here, not to review the movie itself but as an example of this powerful medium to enter into dreams. 

That night this viewer had a vivid dream of being with the character of Seberg in the movie in an apartment. This was not his first experience of this sort. In this case the movie was very good and the dream benign. This dream was about fitting into the environment of the lavish new all white NYC tower apartment setting, maybe class anxiety but not with longing, greed, or lust triggered by the movie. 

Yet the movie had the power to enter the dream in this way. An expensive mass media entertainment had the power to do that little trick. It wasn’t the first time and this dreamer is a fully developed elder adult far from the relatively open vessels of children who are increasingly exposed to screen dreams direct from powerful corporations who’s only goal is to manipulate them to increase their profit and power. 

Beyond that militant intelligence is also involved with the CIA using a massive portion of their budget to direct mass media in lines with their interests. 

This is not so from the melodrama of the plot line of Roszak’s very fine and thought provoking novel from the relatively innocent times of the 1980s.

Bugs: a novel by Theodore Roszak

The story’s beginning is beautifully imagined. It is the misunderstanding of a young girl who is afraid of bugs that sets the whole thing in motion toward global disaster.

Bugs is a novel about the computer age by Theodore Roszak and published in 1981 which is nearly 40 years ago. As we all know, computer technology has exploded since then. Naturally the reader must make allowances, but I had no trouble at all fitting the story and events into something that relates to the current computerized world we live in and the scene in general.
 

The novels of Roszak could be seen as a kind of a spin-off of his main work as an academic in the field of ecopsychology. This could also be the opposite, the academic stuff might have been the day job of a novelist. At any rate this novel’s main overriding theme, and genesis, is an inquiry into the use of high-tech tools by humans and what can go on, which is mostly go wrong, because these tools have an inherent mathematical view of reality that is opposed to the overriding traditional reality of earth and all contained in it which is mysterious and ultimately unknowable or containable.

 This is the basic theme of two of his other novels. They deal with different technologies and the basic questions of the human, mostly male, desire for knowledge to be used for power and domination over the rest of the natural world which humans are only a part of. So the novel and his work is relevant to now because the story, the battle, is still going on. The issues he is on about can be directly linked to the primary issues of our time such as industrially manufactured climate change, and the culture of patriarchy.

With Bugs, noted on the cover as his first novel, the approach is something that feels like a sci-fi thriller, something that would be a cool adaptation to film. If this was the impulse, it was successful, it’s an exciting suspenseful breezy read, that is serious at its core with cautions of real and previously unknown dangers.
 

His later novel, The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, is a more serious and to me the better, deeper, novel. These two works also shame a polar conflict dynamic between Male-Science-Technology-Dominionism-Power and Female-Naturist-Wiccan-Magical-Unity, in direct opposition in both novels. The origin of the conflict being an aggressiveness from the “Male” side, a reach too far to a wrong type knowledge while walking away from a long standing human more feminine culture and ignoring its more subtle but deeper in nature, more fundamentally nourishing, old technology rituals and riches. 

In the Frankenstein book it was Victor’s need to create and dominate life while denying unity with Elizabeth and Nature, and the chance to be trained as another type of magician. 

Bugs is set in a national computer center, The Brain, with the male functionary director losing control of the now deadly technology, seeking assistance from a cult of artists and academics that is reviving ancient Wiccan spells and dancing naked in the moonlight.
 

I am happy to have discovered this fine mind wandering the stacks in a Long Island last year. His work has had a lasting effect on me and my view of myself, as the world and in the world. The male/female, nature vs machine, material, being of most use to me currently.

I borrowed Bugs from the Brooklyn Public Library. I was in the main branch. It wasn’t on the accessible fiction shelves but they had it for me out of storage ten minutes after I asked for it. Not many others reading these odd old books that I enjoy so much.

The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein: A novel by Theodore Roszak

   This can be viewed as a political novel about the most basic of struggles; The need of humans to own, control, make, and know as opposed to a call-of-the-wild acknowledgement of life and feeling being in everything and humans just a part of it all, more integrated. It is also a psychological study of humans and their interface with the rest of nature. It deals with issues personal and global at the same time, through story, metaphor. Or simply a story about the internal struggle between the thinking self and the feeling self in the individual.
It is the Prometheus story retold from another angle.

To me this is one of these holographic things available on view from varying perspectives. 

 It’s about different starting points of view of humans place in the earth. The notion that human lives were lived differently before beginning the naming, separation, discrimination, quantification of things done with the aim of the betterment, advancement, and expansion of human life separate and over all other earth entities. Dominion of humans over the earth God bestowed on them is basically the notion in vogue. Ownership an idea of accumulating what flies by. As if it is beneficial to keep it, as if it is even possible. Constant anxiety about scarcity.

The novel is set at a point when ancient feminist ritualistic nature-based technology meets with the rise of modern science and logic. Science being associated with the male impulse.

There is a possibility of the marriage of the two, the Mother Nature with the male logic/science. The memoir is a last testament of the nature side, about to be lost, maybe forever. Yet another fall from Eden. 

That’s the big picture overriding the whole thing. Moving in closer there is a young couple that cannot really bond. They cannot bond because he will not bond. He can’t believe, he must know. He can’t imagine, he must fabricate. He goes along up to a point, then withholds. Their ritualized sex is interrupted by his desires, his will.
The novel is written from Elizabeth Frankenstein’s point of view. I have not read Mary Shelley’s book in many years. This novel was therefore taken on its own terms rather than having any personal memory reference to the original material, so I wasn’t upset by anything that might have felt inconsistent with Shelley’s work. 

In close-up, the story is a tragedy, a beautiful romance and marriage that could create a beautiful magical powerful world for them. That can never be. A woman, Elizabeth, is longing and ready to learn to really bond, become one, through alchemical magic ritual, but this cannot happen because of something resistant in the man, Victor. In the beginning of the process he really wants to bond, wants to learn the magic pre-science technologies of witchcraft, but even the times are against this. The flow of interest, at the very end of the 16th Century Europe, is moving toward reason, science, rationality, thought, invention, and dominionism, as it continues to be. There are persecutions elsewhere in Europe referred to, burnings of women going on. 

The book presents this moment of the path of unity diverging into separation and commodification. 

Maybe we are at another fork in the road, or at least we see where this one leads and are looking back to see what happened in search of a direction. The big issues dealt with in the book are now even more with us and feel like they are coming to a head and something must be done. There is a growing number of people interested in more of a connection with something, spirit, nature, something other than the empty competitive consumer world we have inherited from the church of science and religion.

This book was written 25 years ago, but speaks to a counter movement that has grown with the hazards of the domiminist world view.
It turns out that the novel deal with topics and feelings related to the new psychedelic movement which is very much about this attempt to connect to the reality we live in, honoring it’s limits while exploring abandoned paths that could lead (back?) to wonder.

It can be a deep journey to read this beautifully crafted novel. It is a very serious piece within a successfully entertaining structure. 

There is a good deal of magic, wiccan, stuff going on early in the novel. There is even a communicative bird entry friend. 

It’s bold for a male writer to take on a young female first person like this. Although I can’t say I was with this all the way. There were few passages where I wondered what a woman would think of the portrayal of Elizabeth’s erotic thoughts. Maybe women don’t need to read this, only I and my kind, needed to.

I was very set up to enjoy this. I even found similar thematic connections to the book I read before this, Kangaroo by D H Lawrence. Lawrence hungered for the very same sort of thing, a reintegration. But these issues have always been in the background in my life.

Overall, considering the theme, this is one of the best novels I have read. Theodore Roszak is a great novelist. I read the outstanding Flicker this year. But this one even tops that. Pontfex, his first novel is very good but a victim of its setting 1970 type revolution scene and that makes it feel dated which doesn’t help in getting the point across. The point that is not far from this novel. Roszak’s academic field was something called Ecopsychology. Perhaps this is what I read in his novels. He may be teaching me that. I’m happy that there are two more novels of his I have yet to read.