I am a dreamer. In fact, I don’t believe that I have ever gone more than a week without remembering a dream from the previous night’s sleep. I have had so many dreams over my nineteen years of existence, that if you were to ask me to explain three of them, I wouldn’t be able to. But there is one. There is one very distinct dream that I remember because I’ve had it multiple times.
In the dream, I’m walking in my house. It actually is my house too. Not some distorted dream house with unknown walls and unfamiliar dark corners. I’m tiptoeing for some reason. I glide around the corner of my hallway and stand prominently in the doorway of my brother’s bedroom. Everything is the exact same. His bed is in the far corner, his wooden desk is to my immediate left, there is a double door closet on my right that is closed, and the cowboy fabric drapes are shut across the windows. Lying in his bed is a woman. It looks as if she is in a white old-fashioned nightgown, but the covers are up to her waist, so it’s a little unclear. She isn’t anyone I know, but if I were to compare her face to a celebrity, I’d have to go with Lucille Ball. Random, yeah? Her red curly hair is in a tight bun but some stray bangs hang across her forehead. She doesn’t see me. My brother’s wall lamp is right above her head and has a pull string. From somewhere, she pulls out a dagger. She doesn’t look concerned, angered, or happy about it. She’s very nonchalant. She tries to hook the dagger on the pull string and succeeds at first. But after a few moments of watching it hang above her face, she looks dissatisfied and takes it down. She pauses, then reaches down to put the dagger beneath the bed. At that moment a giant lion springs from beneath the bed frame, grabbing the woman’s arm, and pulling her from the covers. At this point in the dream, I run away.
Like I said, I’ve had this dream multiple times. It never occurred to me to stay and find out what happens after. And during the dream, I have a strange sense of déjà vu but not strong enough to remove myself from the scene. When I was young, I had night terrors. So I grew to learn how to acknowledge I was in a dream and then wake myself up by blinking. This is the only dream I can recall where I was never aware that I was unconscious. I have always loved trying to decode dreams. But to be honest, Freud had ruined it for me!
While rewriting my dream just now, I was thinking about Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Knowing that practically all dreams looked at by Freud distinguish some sort of sexual character, I had a hard time writing out what I truly remember. Part of me wanted to change parts of the dream to make it less easy to turn sexual. Point being, the desk in my brothers room is wood. But would it have been less sexual if it were made of a different material? Metal, maybe? And the fact that there was a grown woman in his bed. Okay, now looking back I see how it looks. But back then I just thought it was odd seeing a stranger in my house. Period. And, according to Freud, the fact that she’s trying to hide a dagger must be some sort of phallic symbol, mustn’t it?
But in the section we read from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, he breaks down his dream without making it of a sexual character. This inspired me. Since it has been years since I had this dream, I don’t remember the specifics of the day leading up to it. But when reading Freud, I couldn’t help but laugh at how convinced he seemed to feel that his analysis on the dream of the Botanical Monograph was definitely the reason for him having the dream. I was especially amused at how he connected the dried specimen of the plant included in the monograph to a memory from his secondary school. And so, I feel that I can definitely analyze this dream, ten years later just by knowing the relationship I had with my brother at that time.
I often ran to my parent’s room as a child seeking comfort and entertainment right as I woke up. However, they divorced when I was six, making what was once my parent’s room, my dad’s room. Because of their separation, my older brother and I saw each parent for one week at a time. Even though I only saw my mom every other week and my dad on those weeks in between, I was always with my brother. And so, I grew a stronger bond with him throughout the years and eventually, instead of running to my parents room, I’d run to my brothers room. At that time, I couldn’t have imagined anything more terrifying than being separated from my brother, as he was my comfort blanket. In the dream, I am glued to the doorway when I see a stranger in his bed. Often times in dreams, you just take the person you see in the familiar environment as being the one you seek, despite their obviously different appearance. That’s one thing I definitely remember about dreams. But in this dream, I knew it wasn’t him and I was confused. My dad stayed in the house and my mom left, so it was missing the maternal feel it had once had. Perhaps this woman, in the old, white nightgown, was in a sick bed. Perhaps it represented that the maternal figure had left the house and so, in my mind, I was looking at the sick and weak frame of maternal warmth as it was fading away from the house. After reading too much Shakespeare, a dagger symbolizes word to me. And so, this woman represented my mother, who had thrown daggers (figuratively speaking, of course) at my father and now, my mother was “hanging it up” and letting it go. She is trying to put away her fighting words, when the lion (perhaps a representation of my father) takes her from her sick bed, uprooting the maternal figure. This “uprooting” in reality could be my dad keeping the house and having my mom move out. This is when I run away because I don’t want to see anymore.
And so, I have chosen to take from this dream the unconscious feeling of a little girl observing her divorcing parents. She is afraid of not having her older brother there to comfort her, which is why he’s not in the room when she searches for him. She is watching the maternal comfort leave her home and seeing her mother give up trying to talk issues out with her father. And, in her eyes, she sees her father as a beast of some sort uprooting the household by throwing the representation of maternal comfort from the bed.
I find it funny that I was able to analyze my dream. And I believe it to be pretty darn accurate as well! It just seems that we can take any dream and make it work with something in our life, no matter its significance. Basically, we can make all dreams about what we want them to be about. I guess this goes to show that I’m not convinced that the way Freud decodes dreams are accurate. It can all be totally made up! I believe that dreams and other vents of the unconscious can’t accurately be analyzed. There are always so many thoughts and so many things going on around and within something that I find it really hard to believe that true feelings of the unconscious can ever be really identified. Sorry, Freud. I guess I just need more convincing.
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