This column had its origin in a dream. I woke up in one of those liminal moments before time had picked its team. Neither day nor night, just gradations of darkness or light and the powerful conviction that this complete column had presented itself to me like a fully formed screed and must be immediately transcribed. I was quite the worthy bore in my previous iteration. I wrote about serious, high-minded things: politics, development, a smattering of economics. God knows, this was a departure.
I was compelled to write about the disillusion of a former Iranian revolutionary — Marxist, it must be said — who discovered that she was misguided about what she thought she was fighting for, while ridding Iran of the playboy Shah, who was on a long leash from Washington. What she got instead was a brutally repressive religious regime of men who insisted she start wearing a headscarf (because God takes a particular interest in the dress codes of humans) and stop teaching subversive Western literature to her students, whose numbers had been suddenly halved. She was only allowed to teach girls now. The subject of their secret underground reading group in Tehran was Lolita — the quintessentially objectified creature in Vladimir Nabokov's novel of the same name, caught in the crosshairs of the male gaze and rather prosaic desire. Her female students could all somehow see themselves in the hapless sexy girl-child, groomed by French literature professor Humbert Humbert, the book's narrator, who eventually escapes into dull domesticity.
This subject still has legs several decades down the line, given our own recent brush with Iran and Washington and the fact that those poor Iranian revolutionary ladies are still under the cosh. But I'm more interested in the dream.
A new cinematic version of Frankenstein is about to be released and, if you ask me, it's not a moment too soon, as our friends over at AI headquarters rush to animate the ghost in the machine. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein straight from a dream. She was 18 years old and living on the shores of a Swiss lake with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and her stepsister — in a loose romantic arrangement — having already suffered the death of her first child with Percy, who was still married to someone else. It was unseasonably cold and rainy that entire summer so the young people turned their attention from the various romances, both literary and revolutionary, to ghost stories. Byron came up with a game; everyone would have to present an original tale to fill the wet and empty days. One of Mary’s biographers calculated by the position of the planets and the moon at the time, that Frankenstein bubbled up from her subconscious between 2am and 3am on June 16 1816.
We always seem to be wondering where the creative impulse comes from and a waking dream is, I guess, as good a place as any. It's a compelling argument that there's always a creative genius at play — a person who single-handedly makes things up, birthing new ideas from nowhere and nothing. But the subconscious mind isn't acting alone when it presents us with fully formed stories, scientific breakthroughs or mathematical theorems. The subconscious is filtering information from the long arm of experience and giving it voice and form. It's making metaphors so that we can apprehend the vast and formless void and bring it to a head. It's tapping into the collective unconscious and throwing up signs and portents to explain it all, or simply to illustrate some point.
However you choose to read or understand the crazed experiments of Dr Frankenstein and the “sapient creature” he created one dark and stormy night by cobbling together bits of human, the end result was trauma and disaster.
Take Mary: her full name at the time she dreamed the story of Frankenstein into existence was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Her parents were revolutionaries, her mother the protofeminist wrote A vindication of the rights of women, and died of puerperal fever 11 days after giving birth to Mary. Her father was a radical anarchist philosopher whose ideas about marriage, the social order and utilitarianism were anarchical then and, it seems, still pretty subversive today.
However you choose to read or understand the crazed experiments of Dr Frankenstein and the “sapient creature” he created one dark and stormy night by cobbling together bits of human, the end result was trauma and disaster. The “monster” kills its maker in a terrible chase after pathetically trying to connect with him — his very own god-daddy — Dr Victor Frankenstein. Mary’s own anarchical protofeminist world soon imploded too.
The tragedy is that it all could have gone differently once the creature learnt language from a close study of the intellectual family it stalked through the windows — but everyone who chanced upon this “horrific other” responded in terror instead of empathy, which turned the monster violent and retributive.
The subtitle of the book was A Modern Prometheus, a not-too-subtle invocation of the problems inherent in gifting humans the animating fire of creativity. We're all in one way or another dreaming (in the gloaming, sometime before dawn) the creatures and the stories that bubble up from our collective unconscious — feminism, equality, Neo Platonism, independence, Christianity, statehood, wokeness, quadratic equations, Make America Great Again, artificial intelligence, technocracy, democracy, Marxism, Sharia, all neither here nor there, just a great, big human creative soup of inventions that we birth into the world and then wait to see if they'll be loved or loathed. Will people run screaming from them or welcome them into the fold as strange, marvellous, new beings that we dreamed up early one morning?
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