Skunk Dreams

I will start off this entry by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed reading Louise Erdrich’s Skunk Dreams. I found her writing to be very complex with its layers of drawn out descriptions of all she encountered. It is not difficult to read in terms of sentence structure or thought process; it just tends to leave you in a maze of descriptive words if you are not paying attention. Although, it was these descriptions that led me to enjoy the piece even more. I found it a perfect example of how a good writer can truly transport you to the land he or she is describing.

I liked her willingness to see dreams as sorts of omens for dealings in the “real” world. The dream she had while staying in the Valley City motel was what originally caught my attention. I found it odd that she dreamed of an actual place, which she later encountered in her waking life. Most of the dreams I have are more symbolic and less bluntly “real”. If I were to have this dream, it would be a metaphor: the elk would represent something beautiful from which I was cut off by a thin, almost permeable, barrier. I also found it enjoyable how her dream brought me back to a scene from one of my favorite movies of all time, Princess Mononoke. It was curious to me how the scene from this movie was almost exactly the same as the dream Erdrich experienced. It invoked a great sense of déjà vu, which seemed to persist with me throughout this reading. Perhaps that is why I enjoyed it as much as I did.

This feeling of déjà vu was brought back to my mind when she was living in New Hampshire and happened upon the same fence as she saw in her dreams. I thought it was interesting that it was a large hunting ground with animals imported from all over the country, but it felt like she described it was without judgment. Then when she describes her desire to cross the boundary and enter the land, I love how she references the writings of Adam Phillips. His ideas on desire seem to be very true to me. I loved how he stated that dreams are often a place where boundaries have been removed entirely. We can often do things in dreams that we normally wouldn’t be able to do in real life, such as fly or breath underwater. I do think it was interesting that he left out the point that she implied: very often the dreams we remember are dreams where our desires were left unfulfilled by the obnoxious twang of an alarm clock or the gentle breaking of the sun through our window.

Other interesting things:

• I’m not really sure what she means, but I like where she writes “every inch of the ground turned over more than once”
• Her description of fertile land in the West being measured in inches (mostly because it’s so true).
• The description of her desire to cross the fence being like poachers lust, but only wanting to smell the air