Adorno's dreams, indexed

While I was in Portland I found a book of Theodor Adorno's dreams. And the publisher was kind enough to index the major motifs. Imagine having an index to your own dreams--your own set of subconscious reference books.

Here's a snippet from Adorno's:

Serkin, Rudolf 61-2
sex: Babamüll technique 14-15, 96; in bed with L.'s wives 19-21; comments called out 50; cutlets playing a dog's game 50-1; and death 36, 101; prick washing machine 75; 'Verkehr' 96; vivdly dreamt 58; see also brothels; women
Shakespeare, William: The Comedy of Errors 25
shaving 29
Siegfried (mythological) 2
social manners and breaches: Kaiser Wilhelm and 24-5; at opera 9; ragged children and hoodlums 26; squeezing girls 50
sociology exam anxiety 57-8
Spann, Othmar 60-1
stars 35-6
Statue of Liberty 3
Steuermann, Eduard 41, 76
Stravinsky, Igor 46
Suhrkamp, Peter 73
sunglasses 11

Adorno seemed to hold a special fascination in his dreams with the architecture of brothels: one was devoted 80% to administrative staff, with only one dark room for the women. Another was located high in an American skyscraper, but resembled on the inside the sleeper car of a train--each woman in a different curtained vestibule.

He considered the dream journal a literary genre in its own right, and the afterword by Jan Phillip Reemstma attempts to explore it as such, especially in its dependence on non-meaning. And while this is true, one thing that struck me most about Adorno's dreams--and my own, in hindsight--is the almost voluptuous excess feeling of meaning you can feel in them--not so much in direct and readable information, which is sparse, but in the gut sense that something important has just passed--that a critical idea, or love, or connection has been made inside the dreaming mind, and has been lost on waking.

I don't believe that anything so critical actually does flash through our brains at night--rather, I think the parts of our minds that know how to make us feel as if we've just stood in the presence of the sublime feel it to be the only time they might trot outside, stretch their neurons. And we bask in the mystery of their calisthenics for the rest of the morning.