Wednesday 3 January 2001

Pic of the day: No, it just ain't the same.

In your dreams, Dr Freud

Freud is dead. Well, of course, he has been dead for decades. But in my personal life he died when I was 13.

It is a weird thing, that I actually believed in Freud when I was 12. At an age when a healthy normal boy would be memorizing the names and faces of famous football players (and they probably remember them to this day) I pored over Freuds works of Traumdeutung - dream interpretation - and the invisible foot of the subconscious, kicking the feet from under us all from time to time. I still admire his collection of printing errors and other meaningful mishaps. But as for his dream theories, they died a wet and sticky death when I was 13.

According to Dr Freud, the human soul has 3 major parts: The superego (roughly equals conscience), the ego (our personal self) and the id (the animalistic subconscious). A rather rough sketch compared to the detailed maps provided by Carl Gustaf Jung and his followers, perhaps, but a good introduction. However, for some obscure and probably very personal reason, Sigmund Freud believed that sexuality was the stuff our subconscious was made of. While slightly modified over time, the sexuality theory was his life's work, which he defended intensely. According to this, our dreams consist of sexual symbols heaped upon each other. If you dream of an umbrella, it's really a penis. If you dream of apples and oranges, it is really breasts. And so on. OK, I guess there are people like that. (A coworker comes to mind.) But while sex was perhaps the critical factor for intellectual Jews in Austria a century ago, things may be different for other people at other times and other places.

My belief in Freud was shattered when I started to dream very uncensored sexual dreams at puberty. (You don't really expect me to relate those, do you?) The elaborate theories of dream censorship evidently did not apply to me, and so Freud went into the trash bin of the mind. Until now.

***

It was dark, it was silent, it was way past midnight. On my double bed I was turning restlessly. My eyes were dry from tiredness, but my mind was spinning. I was thinking of my sins, both those I had done and those I would have done if I had the chance, and wondering what would become of me. For a while, sleep escaped me, or rather I escaped it. But then suddenly I must have fallen asleep, for I woke up from a vivid dream, almost as clear as reality itself. I looked at the clock, and saw that it was but ten minutes or so since last I saw its face. It was as if the dream had been waiting restlessly for me to come, so that it might be dreamt. And here it is.

I was in the living room of a female friend, who shall not be named. (Much good that will do.) Someone else was there too, watching the television, but I do not know who. Presumably a family member. "I need a sports bra" said my friend, and in my mind I agreed, because she is fairly well endowed in the mammarian department. (For some obscure reason, this seems to apply to most of my friends, btw.) The next time I looked at her, however, she was much flatter in front. I thought she was wearing a tight shirt under, and that it flattened her chest.[1] She did not say so, but she indicated it by cupping her breasts, and I could see from the contours that they were under pressure. As I was by then standing rather close, I reached out and touched her body a hand's span lower than she had and almost out on the side. And outside the clothes of course. She chuckled and told me to feel for myself. I can't say now if she talked or just gestured, but the third person in the room did not react to any of this. I reached out, tentatively at first, to hold her breasts, one in each hand. Not wanting to look as awkward as I felt, I did it again with more certainty and less fumbling. The part I was holding was the lower half, much as she had done herself. After this, I slipped my left arm down and laid it around her waist, but immediately decided this was too intimate (!) and removed it. I looked toward the TV. The dream ended.

Suddenly jolted sharply awake by the clarity of the dream and its abrupt end, like that of a prepared screenplay, I extended my body awareness and noticed that my body was not aroused by the dream. My heart was not beating hard, my breath was not deepened or quickened, and my genitals were not affected. Evidently the dream was not in its nature sexual, despite the rather blatant action at the surface of it.

I got up, grabbed my Cassiopeia and wrote down the dream. And I thought about Freud, and his theories of dream censorship, that what we see is not really what we dream. That dreams act to fulfill wishes, but at a deeper level than the images we think we see.

I wonder, now. Perhaps for those living in an age of floor length skirts, dreaming of fruit actually meant breasts. But does dreaming of breasts mean that I long for fruit? (Light knows I have not been able to eat nearly as much of it as I wanted, because my digestion runs wild if I get too much fiber.) Or perhaps I just miss someone to hold, a friend to be close to ...

Yeah, right. In my dreams.

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[1]: Already in the dream, the flattening of my friend's chest made me remember a comment in the game manual to Darklands, incidentally a very good source on late medieval Germany, that some female adventurers at that time did strap their breasts close to the body to look like men.