Makenna Horne
Prof. Nic Helms
Rethinking Modern British Literature
7 May 2024
Déjà Rêvé and Metempsychosis in “The Gloom” of Mexican Gothic
Have you ever had a dream that then happened almost exactly in the following days, when you were awake? You go to class and someone says something that you dreamt them saying a few days ago;, it feels wild. This is called “Déjà rêvé”, where you feel as though you have dreamt something that happens afterwards while you were awake. Déjà rêvé happens in literature, in a bit of a different form. Déjà rêvé happens in literature when a character is thought to have dreamt or hallucinated something happening, then they realize it was a dream, just for it to happen again. Metempsychosis is the incarnation of an ancestral experience. In Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Noemí and Catalina experience déjà rêvé and metempsychosis due to the hallucinogenic/mind controlling effects of the mushrooms and mold present in High Place.
Déjà rêvé is thought to be found in epileptic patients and could point to temporal lobe dysfunction (Curot et al.). Curot et al. believe that this dreamy state is unknown and includes involuntary recall of memories. It’s almost déjà vu, which is the experience of believing you’ve experienced something before. Déjà vu common in “healthy” patients and epileptic patients. Curot et al. explains déjà vu as the “subjective sense of familiarity for an objectively new sensation.” They note that “Various interpretations also relate déjà-rêvé to a premonitory dream in mysticism or the reminiscence of an ancestral experience in metempsychosis.” This tracks almost exactly for Noemi and Catalina in Mexican Gothic. There isn’t a lot of research on déjà rêvé, due to its uncanny nature and subjectivity, but it can be a great start for a literary journey.
Our subjective experiences influence our dreams. Simply put, dreams are fragments of what we see or remember every day, mashed together in sometimes coherent, and other times not coherent ways. Sigmund Freud explains that “dreams include stimuli from the external world, subjective experiences, organic stimuli within the body, and mental activities during sleep” (Zhang et al.). Freud also believed that dreams are essential to learning more about a person and their unconscious brain. We dream during REM sleep. During REM and non-REM sleep we process memories and thoughts from the previous days, or as Freud puts it “the day’s residues” (Zhang et al.). Trauma can be stored through sleep and dreaming as well. This organization process was coined by Freud and is still thought to be true today:
“‘The principle of affective organization of memory” suggests that the memory network is organized by affect…; accordingly, a therapist may be able to identify a patient’s similar affective memories (e.g., traumatic experiences) via emotional material in dream content.” (Zhang et al.)
In dreams we can process anxieties and this helps us understand and develop the skills to process trauma. Noemí frequently dreams and sleepwalks in Mexican Gothic, she finds that dreaming is no escape from the constant anxieties she experiences in High Place.
In Mexican Gothic Noemí goes to El Triunfo help her cousin Catalina who is reportedly anxious about her husband trying to murder her. She soon learns that Catalina is right, that she is being poisoned by the mind controlling mushrooms and mold that live in the house. Later, Noemí is being poisoned in the same way, nearly being forced to stay in the house forever and carry on the twisted nature of the Doyles. Eventually, Noemí, Catalina, and Francis escape from High Place, but the effects of the mushrooms have the possibility of lingering. Frequently Catalina and Noemí report having strange dreams, hearing voices, and hallucinating. They later learn this is part of “the gloom,” which is a shared memory space of the Doyles, using the host body and mind of Howard Doyles’ late wife Agnes. The mushrooms have the ability to make the Doyles immortal so long as they have a healthy body to live in.
“The gloom” in Mexican Gothic is the shared memory space of the Doyles from the body and mind of the mummified Agnes Doyle. Noemí and the Doyles frequently hear an intense buzzing sound, which is the screaming of Agnes in “the gloom.” “The gloom” holds only fragments of people and memories, similar to dreams.
“She stared at him. He was confusing her more. He shook his head.
“The fungus, it runs under the house, all the way to the cemetery and back. It’s in the walls. Like a giant spider’s web. In that web we can preserve memories, thoughts, caught like the flies that wander into a real web. We call that repository of our thoughts, of our memories, the gloom” (213).
When Noemí enters “the gloom”, she is extremely confused by the intense images and feelings. She does not feel in control of her body or mind when she is in High Place, and especially so when she is in “the gloom”. Noemí, and the other characters in the book can enter “the gloom” when conscious or not. When this happens, Noemí does not know how much time has passed, and she soon learns how to escape by “opening her eyes” figuratively and literally.
“She glanced at the oil lamp burning by her bedside and realized she had no idea how much time had passed. How long she’d been in the gloom. It could have been hours, it could have been days. She couldn’t hear the patter of the rain anymore” (214).
“The gloom” holds similar powers to déjà-rêvé, where a person will see something in “the gloom” and believe it hasn’t happened, only to learn that it did, or will.
Noemí has no shortage of traumatic experiences in High Place. Several times her consent is relinquished from her in real life and “the gloom”. Virgil Doyle is sure to point this out to her when he says this:
“‘You can pass me the robe now.’ He didn’t reply. ‘I said, you can—’ His hand dipped into the water, settling on her leg, and Noemí pushed herself back, slamming against the tub, making water splash onto the floor. Her instinct was to stand up, jump out of the tub, and run out of the room. But the position he occupied meant her path would be blocked if she did. He knew it too. The tub, the water, seemed to the young woman her shield, and she drew her knees against her chest.
‘Get out,’ she said, trying to sound firm rather than afraid.
‘What? Are you suddenly bashful?’ he asked. ‘Last time we were here it wasn’t the case.’
‘That was a dream,’ she stammered.
‘It doesn’t mean it wasn’t real’” (228).
Noemí has trouble distinguishing real from “the gloom.” Déjà-rêvé behaves in a similar fashion to the quote above. Noemí believes that the first incident with Virgil was a dream, but then it happens while she’s awake. “The gloom” can distort memories, and similarly to déjà-rêvé, it can make you feel like you have experienced something before.
Metempsychosis is the feeling that you are experiencing something that someone who is now deceased also felt. Derived from Pythagoras’, the theory is that
“the soul is immortal and passes through cycles of incarnation in birth and release from the body at death. The behavior of the individual during a particular life can determine the form the soul takes in the next life.” (English.Hawaii.Edu)
Noemí and Catalina, as well as the rest of the Doyles experience metempsychosis in a way, they experience the thoughts and memories of “the gloom”. In “the gloom” Noemí can hear what the deceased Doyles say.
“She pressed her head back against the pillows after that and let the drowsiness take over. Later—she wasn’t sure how much later— she heard a rustling of cloth and sat up. Ruth Doyle was perched at the foot of her bed, looking down at the floor.
Not Ruth. A memory? A ghost? Not quite a ghost. She realized that what she had been seeing, the voice whispering to her, urging her to open her eyes, was the mind of Ruth, which still nestled in the gloom, in the crevices and mold-covered walls. There must be other minds, bits of persons, hidden underneath the wallpaper, but none as solid, as tangible as Ruth” (236).
Ruth interacts with Noemí in a strange way. Ruth speaks to Noemí and warns her constantly to get rid of or away from the Doyles. Ruth tried to escape High Place with her lover many years back;, she shot Howard but was unable to kill him. She reaps the consequences and is now stuck in “the gloom.” This warning is similar to the warnings that Francis gives Noemí. Several times in the beginning of the novel He tells her she is better off if she leaves. It can be argued that Noemí and Francis are “reincarnations” of Ruth and Benito. They both attempt to kill and escape High Place, but only Noemí and Francis are successful. Metempsychosis is a possible explanation for why Noemí is able to escape., Ruth is living through her to kill the Doyles and destroy High Place for good.
In Mexican Gothic, Noemí and Catalina share similar experiences to getting sick and succumbing to the shared memory space of the Doyles called “the gloom”..” They live through the failed attempts of escaping and destroying High Places coined by Ruth Doyle, who attempted to run away with her lover and murder Howard Doyle. This process is similar to metempsychosis, which is nearly reincarnation. Noemí and Catalina also experience déjà-rêvé several times during their stay at High Place due to the hallucinogenic and mind controlling powers of the mushrooms and mold present at High Place. Déjà-rêvé and metempsychosis are good explanations for why Noemí, Catalina, and Francis are able to escape and destroy High Place.
Works Cited
Curot, Jonathan, et al. “Déjà-Rêvé: Prior Dreams Induced by Direct Electrical Brain Stimulation.” Brain Stimulation, vol. 11, no. 4, July 2018, pp. 875–85, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brs.2018.02.016.
English.Hawaii.Edu. “Plato: Phaedrus.” Www.english.hawaii.edu, www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/plato/terms/metem.html.
Moreno-Garcia, Silvia. Mexican Gothic. Del Rey, 2020.
Zhang, Wei, and Benyu Guo. “Freud’s Dream Interpretation: A Different Perspective Based on the Self-Organization Theory of Dreaming.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, no. 1553, Aug. 2018, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01553.
Sprockets and Springes 