I feel bad for dreams- we put too much pressure on them. They are alternatively omens of future success or trouble, or they are portals into a past we do not want to remember or can never relive. Dreams have a tough assignment: they must decode our emotional responses to, not only the day’s numerous events, but to the day’s immeasurable fantasies, thoughts, and whims; they must express our deepest anxieties and hopes in such a way that we feel some relief without yet knowing the reason; and they must mine our past for those events, feelings, desires, even selves, that we were once unable to confront, and determine which among them is ready for presentation.
The psychoanalysis of dreams is a lot like evolution, in my opinion. It doesn’t get the entire picture, perhaps, but it’s definitely better than anything else out there and it will probably be part of whatever is the final theory. Freud (like his disciple Jung), unfortunately, was equal parts crackpot and intuitive genius. He probably went a little too far with some of his theories, but on the other hand, he was talking about neurotics (which I believe there are exponentially more neurotics now than in his day) and he was pointing out extreme cases (we’re all a little crazy, after all, and at our core, we can each admit to recognizing some feature of ourselves in his theories). Freud did get part of the motivation for dreaming correct; undoubtably, there is a component of what he called “wish fulfillment”, but which we might (because the term is cliched today) refer to as “If I could change this” syndrome (aka The Pygmalion Project). Freud, in his most popular literature at least, did not discuss the other function of dreams, the mundane “defragmenting”, as one metaphor runs, of the day’s emotional responses to events and, often more importantly, to thoughts and fantasies.
For example, I dreamed that Keli was driving my SUV and I was a passenger. There was a family of three in another, very old and delapidated car, heading straight for us. (Aside: This occurred at a stoplight on Crossland Avenue, at Greenwood Avenue) Rather than collide, however, we swapped vehicles. Keli pulled onto Crossland and headed toward Riverside, and the family followed us (we were now in their car, they were in mine). They sat comically in the front row of my car, shoulder-to-shoulder (an impossibility, since I have a center console), staring stupidly ahead. When we got onto Riverside, I told Keli to slow down so that we could swap again. I was very distressed about my vehicle. She slowed a little and I (somewhat critically, hard to believe I know) told her she would have to slow down drastically. My last image of the dream is of that family headed toward us, blandly staring straight ahead like some old, cartoonish nightmare.
What to make of this dream? Well, it is very simple, actually. The vehicle incident combined with the acute anxiety I felt about my vehicle’s saftey is symbolic of several events that occurred yesterday. While house cleaning (with pneumonia, fyi, bad girl!) Keli (or someone helping her, as she did have help!) put some unprotected DVDs I had burned into my computer bag; when I found them later, I was worried they would be scratched and unusable. Further, someone put a paperback book I had been annotating (“As I Lay Dying”) into the drawer of my bedside table, and then shut the drawer. It must have taken great effort to shut the drawer, because the book’s front cover was torn long-ways (the drawer was rather full and the book really didn’t fit). Anyone who knows me knows the value I place on books (I couldn’t even trash a Stephanie Meyer book), and this was a Faulkner book I had had for ten years. Thus, the strange car-swap becomes a metaphor for events that disturbed me during the day, with poor Keli assuming the role of fault (even though she was innocent, that’s what spouses do, and I love her very much!) because dreams (like movies) prefer to condense and simplify. As for the carttonish family, for two days, a member of that family has stopped me as I tried to go somewhere (they have otherwise ignored me, but it’s semester’s end and they suddenly care about their kid’s grade in my class). The cartoonish, facially neutral, comically stupid and bland, persons in my hijacked vehicle were none other than that family- the perfect representatives of destruction and decay in my mind (harsh, but true).
Of course, there are other dreams that I could discuss, but then again, who wants to know THAT much about someone else? Would any of us want the “wish fulfillment” dreams shared with the world (even if it was a non-sexual desire)? That’s probably the final burden of dreams- we don’t want to acknowledge them, even to ourselves, because they are intensely personal. Often, they are the dreams of the person we fear that we are, and not our own dreams. Nonetheless, they truly are ours, like it or not; they are the gift we do not want to receive. However, open it up and take a look, and what you once thought to be a burden might turn out to be a revelatory blessing, instead.
