silent partner

Where I grew up, about five minute from the house is a busy road where the buses run to take you into the city. To get to the main road you travel down one road and at the end of which is a T junction, where going right or left brings you out onto the main road. All along these roads are small houses with gardens. At the top of the T, instead of going right or left, there is a short cut when you are on foot. A short winding laneway between two of the houses brings you out onto the main road. As kids, going down that laneway felt exciting. The trees in the lane made it darker and quieter. There were a couple of houses built which have their entrances facing into the laneway and there was a story about a crazy old woman living in one of the houses. The words “crazy” and “old” conjured up the word "witch". This gave us a thrill as we hurried past her house. On braver days we would dare each other to knock on her door, relishing the few moments of fear and the dash to the end of the lane afterwards. Often, when I stepped out of the lane onto the main road I felt the difference of stepping from one atmosphere to another.

I’m at the college and a girl in the dream called Alison, which is the name of someone I know at college, but she does not look like her. She is pregnant and is planning to have an abortion. I go upstairs to a room where there is a woman professor telling people off in a classroom and Alison is hiding in a backroom of the classroom. The professor is ranting against abortion, saying it is terrible and Alison should not have one. I argue with the professor who I go right up to and grab by the shoulders and look in her face to get her to stop. Her face is clear in the dream but it’s not anyone I know in real life. I notice what shs is wearing a long dark fitted dress. I remember telling her that I understand where she is coming from but I argue against her and say that it is Alison’s personal choice. I threaten the professor that I will report her. I go to get Alison from the other room. She is upset.

I find that from different college classes I have taken, the work of Freud has been presented in very different ways. In a psychology 101 class, the young professor was reluctant to delve too deeply into the oedipus complex etc. and the idea of sexual urges being the main idea behind Freud's analysis. The tendency of us as a class, which was made up of a lot of older evening students was to scoff at the idea of all little boys wanting to kill their fathers to have sex with their mothers, many of the students being mothers themselves.

On reading Freud, I was surprised at the level of detail in his method and that kept me interested and wondering if there was some truth to it. I feel that the overall feeling from our discussions is that he takes his free association links too far. Also, when it comes to women he tends to find sexual desire as the root of all their issues. Ironically, when he interprets his own dreams, his own desires don’t get mentioned or even hinted at, even while he is dreaming about female patients, some of which he says he “admires”.
Perhaps one of the reasons why we do not discount his dream theories outright is that the debate about the causes and explanation of dreams continues without a definitive answer. With the advances in psychoanalysis and the evidence that it has helped many people with various psychological problems, it is then more difficult to dismiss other ideas from the “father” of psychoanalysis. Perhaps we do need to accept or reject each of Freud’s theories individually and I would guess that many scholars have attempted to do that.

I dreamt that I was really angry and now I am not 100% sure why but the crux of the dream is situated in the bathroom in the house I grew up in. One of my older sisters, E. and a small boy child were outside the bathroom. I was so angry I slammed the door, incredible hulk style, so that I seemed to pull it off its hinges. While I was looking at the door, the small child went into the back of the cupboard in the bathroom above the water heater, which was the opposite side of the bathroom to where it is in reality. He crawled through and laughed at me while looking at the damage and there was an instance where the child was changed into something else- an animal? a shape? I yelled really angrily at it to stop, or I would throw it. My younger sister M. was outside the bathroom door too now. Then I did push the 'thing' which hit the floor on the other side of the bathroom which would place it in my parents bedroom. It was a child again when it hit the floor, not a baby, and there is some blur after that but mostly I realized what I had done - that I could have killed him / it . I had definitely hurt it and then I was in one of the bedrooms with M. crying and saying "What have I done?". She was quite matter of fact but not judging me or against me, even though we agreed that I could have killed it. In the midst of that anguish I woke up, and I had a few seconds where I came to and said to myself, "Oh good, that did not happen!"

Background : Susan is my close friend in work. Her father-in-law died two years ago. She misses him and says she often thinks about him. His name is Jeff and he was a tailor all his life. It was just after a vacation she had this year, when she admits that she was so relaxed that she was not thinking about him at all, when she had this dream.

Dream : Jeff was standing across from Susan in her dream, complaining that his wife did not leave his sewing machine neat, that she wasn't maintaining it. He said that there were knotted threads under the bobbin and that is why he could not sew with it.He said he needed to use it, to make a jacket because sometimes it's cold where he is. Susan could see that he was holding some type of clothing. It was an unusual bright blue color, but the garment was like an all-in-one outfit with a hood, in a size that would fit a baby. Susan asked him how he could fit into it and he said he would.

While Freud has to get credit for getting the ball rolling, the way that Jung takes Freud's ideas and improves on them make Jung's theories more plausible. He moves away from saying that the basis of every dream is wish-fulfiullment, and broadens the scope by asking what is this dream (or our subconcious) trying to tell us. When I was looking back over the terms and re-read his interpretation method on page 71, he calls his procedure "taking up the context" where he is "making sure that every shade of meaning which each salient feature of the dream has for the dreamer is determined by the associations of the dreamer himself"(72). I wonder if that is a veiled critique of Freud, because as a class we noticed that some of Freud's associations did not seem to be from the dreamer at all but were associations he was making to plays, poetry etc. I also like that Jung mentions that Freud's idea about dream images masking sexual desires does not explain dreams that have actual sexual content. We could say that some people are so repressed that they cannot have sexual dreams but for those who do, then do their non-sexual dreams still hide a sexual wish?

I'm with three friends, Alan, Mark and Steph and we are at Madame Tussauds (waxworks in London) but it's not London because these are my friends in New York. We are walking around the exhibit but I don't remember seeing any wax figures. We are standing at elevators and my main concern is that my dress is too short. (In real life over the summer I was out with these 3 people and we joked about the same thing). Then I am with Alan only talking and I start crying really hard over something but I don't know what. He says "It's ok." Back to waiting on the elevators and not crying or being sad at all. Then I tell the others I don't want to be there and can they go on without me. Suddenly it's not Madame Tussauds, but a U2 concert. Alan and I are alone again in an outside area. He is telling me that he found out "it's time now.." A song comes on and I know it's going to be Bono's entrance. Then I see security-type men coming down this pathway towards us and I think Bono is behind them. There are hardly any other people along the side. I am waiting for them to pass and I see that it really is Bono and his face is painted blue. Then I shout hello to him and he grabs my hand and he walks on ahead still holding my hand so that my arm has gotten really really long in the dream. I am squeezing his hand and moving my fingers on the back of his hand. I say "Good Luck". When he is far ahead he releases it.

For the exercise in class I focused in on a non-visual detail. It's where the father says "For years I've been waiting for you to come with some such question!" When I read that I actually thought for a second that I would be getting an answer, something to make the point of the story apparent. I must have been fogetting it was Kafka and there are no guarantees. So I wondered, "What question did the son ask?" and I even went back after to see what it was. There is no question, as far as I can see.