Searching Buddha

Freud says that every dream is an unfulfilled wish and that we frequently condense many images together.

An example, unshared in class:

I have a friend who is married and has two children. His biggest frustration is that his wife isn't supportive of their family life and he wishes she would be more involved. He told me about one of those real-real dreams that he had where he dreamed about another friend, who is an excellent mother. In the dream, they were married and had children together and a very close-knit family. He was horrified that this other friend would pop up in his dream in a romantic situation, because he certainly didn't feel that way about her. Also, it was awkward, because he had a great deal of respect for that friend and her husband.

My amateur psychoanalysis was that his brain just took someone who fit the desire (a good mother) and popped her into the place of the wife. The actual person was irrelevant because it was just the quality of good motherhood that mattered. The actual figure in the dream probably was his wife, but with the trait of being a good parent added. Condensation.

Watch out Freud - here I come!

For those of us that are dream-deprived, I just wanted to share some reading I've been doing on how to remember your dreams:

Practical tips without religious stuff (but New Agey links on the left)

E-How's tips

Warning on one suggestion on the e-how link - they suggest melatonin. I used to use it when I worked a night shift to help me sleep during the day and while I certainly did sleep more (and I dreamt very vividly!), it was always accompanied by a really uncomfortable period of being awake, but just way too physically tired to move my body for the first half an hour or so. So that one might be best avoided. :)

I don't remember where I read it, but one technique I used to have a lot of success with was to use a (I believe it was) Aborigine meditation when you're falling asleep. It goes like this:

Imagine yourself at the edge of a lake (mine has a floating dock on it, which I like to imagine myself sitting on). A large black swan floats up to you. This swan protects the Dreaming (the dream land). Ask the swan to take you to the Dreaming and to help you remember what you've seen.

What happens after that is between you and the swan.

I am a member of a band and we have just played a concert. We are on a bus with everyone who attended the show and there is another bus behind us. We have been forced onto the buses by the government, who were offended by the content of our music. I am not surprised by this, although the one other member of the band that stands out is beginning to freak out. We drive for a long time, though it also passes quickly.

When we arrive, I am on the first bus and we are unloaded by men with green rifles across their backs. The men themslves are indistinct, but I can remember their guns. Some people in the line ahead of me go into the building, which is a cheap structure of corrogated tin with no windows. I know that it is a killing shed and I say to the people around me, " Do not go in. Whatever you do, do not go in!" When my turn comes, I make a break for it and run with the other band members, who were with me in the line. We make it some distance away without being shot.

The dream begins again. All the details are the same -- the bus, the hysterical band member (who is indistinct, except for her hair, which is the same as my mother's), the concert. But this time I know what's going to happen, so I warn the people on my bus. When it is my turn to get off the bus, I scream to the other busload of people, "Do not go in the shed - they will kill you!" More of us get away this time.

The dream begins again...

It's hard for me to not get caught up in Freud's attitudes toward women. Apples and flowers as breasts and sexual desire is a bit tough to swallow (please don't apply Freudian analysis here - it's just a phrase), though of course the literature nerd in me can see the symbolism. Women, fertility, organics - these are all very old ideas. I think Freud gets to me because he seems to put them as the *source of a problem*, rather than respecting the validity and worth of women in their own right or treating female sexuality as something normal. Or sexuality in general, for that matter...

But that's what I get for applying modern feminist theory to a Victorian male.

Poor Irma, as subject of poking and prodding. Poor may-bug lady, who can't be defined outside of the context of her husband and her need for his "manhood," as it were.

Where do emotions like love and friendship exist in Freud's world?

I am rather dream-deprived. However, rather than remembering nothing, I do have some impressions from a dream I had this week.

My impressions were of going to work with an offer letter in hand and telling my boss about the new job. Somewhere in there, leftovers that I had taken home from a restaurant were heated up and eaten, but they were gloopy and unappetizing. Still, I ate them anyway. (In real life, I just tosssed them into the garbage, since they were never eaten). I have a sense that a lot more happened, but I can't remember any more.

I'm a cop and I'm patrolling on the edge of town with my two male partners. They're both running for political office out of this side of town, because nobody who cares to vote lives out here; it's mostly abandoned train tracks and people so crushed by poverty that they could care less about cop elections. I think the other two cops are pretty worthless, but they're who I've been assigned to.

Behind us is an elevated train track, with a covered wooden bit. It's extremely rickety, but I'm exploring it while my partners stay outside near the car. I hear a shout from them and I go back outside. They're in a fight with a couple of perps that aren't quite human -- I can't focus on their faces, but they have long nails and teeth and pale, acne-scarred skin. I get the situation under control, by beating up the perp-demons and get them tied up with rope. I shove them into the back of the car and I send my partners back to the station, but since we picked up perps, there's no room in the car for me. They get in the car and go across a small bridge across a chasm, but I can't go that way, because the bridge knocks out behind them.

There's no way out but up, so I go back into the train structure, afraid that it's going to fall at any moment. I vault and spring my way up towards the top, surprised that the structure doesn't fall. I get to the last part that is inside and push myself through a trap door to the first level of train tracks (it is covered, like the lower level at Queensboro Plaza, although I don't have a sense that there are more train tracks above). I think to myself, "I should have known that something was wrong because the first thing I saw was a baby on the tracks." I look and there's a baby crawling along the tracks, but again, it's not really a baby because its fingers and toes are very long and bent and the nails stretch out like claws. But still, I'm a a cop, so I poke it twice, reluctantly and say, "Are you okay?"

The baby ignores me completely and keeps its slow pace crawling towards the wrong end of the tracks for me, so I pull myself through the trap door and move in the same direction that the cop car went. Out of nowhere, a ghost train appears, headed straight towards me and I wake up out of fear.

The pagan in me wants to embrace Jung wholeheartedly, because so much of neopaganism is based on Jungian ideas. I've been hearing about the collective unconscious and archetypes my entire life and how Jung is the great thinker. (A decent article that, if read with archetypes in mind, relates the general beliefs of neo-paganism to Jung can be found here.)

So I thought I'd have no problem with the general mysticism of Jung, but combined with the alchemy, I found myself giving him the same sort of skepticism that I felt with Freud. Both were amazing thinkers and to see how Jung builds upon Freudian ideas was really interesting. Jung seems like Freud without the need to shock the reader, although both are basically saying that human beings can be reduced back to the most basic desires and needs. For Freud, it's sex (or ambition, which could even be argued to lead back to sex in the sense that successful animals have a better selection of sexual partners). For Jung, it's the elements that all human beings share - the archetypes that show up in our psychology, because it is how we tell stories and relate to the world. To a neopagan, that means finding the God and Goddess (archetypes?) within all humans, which perhaps Jung would have agreed with.

The end result is, at least to me a hopeful one -- all human beings are essentially the same, no matter what constructs they use to separate themselves (gender, "race", culture, ideology, etc.). Freud and Jung may have been amiss on some of their ideas, but they do leave the world with that legacy, which is a pretty radical one for their time. Jung, despite his racist ideology about "primitive" peoples, pointed out over and over again how they shared the same thing that "civilized" peoples did.

I'm in the short story workshop class I took two semesters ago. We're sitting with our desks in a circle, but the teacher (who is my teacher) is late. I'm sitting in the very desk that I did sit in all semester.

I'm supposed to turn in a story tonight for peer review, but I don't have it. This is the biggest failure that I can imagine, because nothing is as important to me as my writing classes. I'm thinking through excuses in my head. At one point, I actually start writing furiously. However, the dream represents this to me by my putting a pen to paper and moving it, but then I'm suddenly swimming among stingrays (my favorite sea creatures). I know that the story is about the ocean. The teacher walks in and I leave the stingrays to go back to class and, at the same time, I know that I've put down my pen. She looks different than she normally does, but I still know it's her. I do comment on the difference in my dream, though.

I think to myself, "I'll e-mail it out to the class tomorrow night - I just need one more day!" But the teacher doesn't ask immediately. Instead, she starts handing out bits of yarn from a multicolored skein of yarn that I own. When she gets to me (I'm second), I say, "Hey, I have that *same* yarn!" She turns tail and walks immediately out of the classroom, then my alarm goes off.

Hartmann's analysis:
Hartmann says that our dreams represent our emotional state. This is absolutely an anxiety dream. I'm applying to graduate school for a writing program and have asked this teacher to write a letter of recommendation for me, but I haven't heard back yet. I think that explains all the missed communications.

I've also been really frustrated at not having much time to write fiction these days. I have a dedicated night per week for writing, but have missed it for a couple of weeks running because of my obligations to friends and family.

The yarn makes sense, because I knit. It happens to be a skein that I've never used for a knitting project, which goes again into the theme of unfinished projects, missed communications, etc. Freud would be pleased. ;)