Lily Briscoe

I am one in a trio of women; the two others are sisters. Part of the dream is in first-person view. At other moments, I am looking at myself (from an invisible, almost God-like view).
The three of us are secret agents trailing a taxi cab on Sixth Avenue. The yellow cab is large and old-fashioned. At certain spots along the street, the cab stops and drops a large black trashbag. As we follow the cab on foot, we are able to predict when and where the cab will stop next, but the pursuit feels risky and dangerous. At any second, there could be an ambush. The pattern continues for a while, sometimes dropping the packages at bus stops. Apparently, they are leaving them for their equally deviant counterparts to pick up.
The fast-paced but predictable chase ends abruptly however, when the cab outruns us. But thinking that we can predict the next drop-off, head to the next logic stop. But when the pattern is broken, we find ourselves confused and bewildered. We try to backtrack. Finally, we find the last drop-point on the route (and the most important one) on a small park bench. The package is there, but when I open it, it is empty. Disappointment and failure. The trio realizes that someone has already picked up the loot. The trail is broken, and the lead is gone. Why would the bad guys take the stuff and leave the bag?
An old homeless lady cackles something about there being too many people coming in her park and leaving their trash behind. Then we realize that something fishy is going on. The girls and I figure that we must have just missed the bad guy. He must be very close by. He must have ditched the bag in order to confuse us because it would be too conspicuous to carry it with him.
We go to a parking lot. There is a car, and the door is unlocked. I think it must be our car, because one of the girls pulls out a large pink tote bag for us to use on our mission (when we finally capture the package).
We determine that there are two places where the target may have gone to hide out: a brothel and a shelter.
The brothel is called "Sexualized" and is plain for all to see. (Yes, this is still present day NYC). We shrug off any embarassment and stride confidently inside. We get the manager to show us around. There are people everywhere in small stalls, open for anyone to see. The place smells (can't remember what it smelled like) and it is noisy with people talking and yelling. The floor is dirty with a bit of blood. The place seems full to the brim. The manager leads us deeper into the store. There are women lined up along the wall being attended to. At first, I think they are prostitutes, but then I see a baby (huge, bigger than a newborn) pop out of one of them. The manager pauses to pick the bloodly baby up off the floor, and nonchalantly drops it into a large clear plastic bag. This horrifies me, but there is still a mission to do.
Finally the manager leads us to a woman with dingy, carrot colored hair and gray skin. Clearly, she's a prostitute. The manager asks her if she's seen anything. Her response is yes, but I hear no details. After the quick questioning by the manager (which again, we can't hear), he turns to the men and women in line in front of the prostitute and says simply, "Who's next?" Everyone raises their hands.
The shelter turns out to be a drugstore for men. The trio looks down aisles wondering if the store has any makeup. I guess to make a disguise. The cashier can't help us with the cosmetics, but he does give us a crucial tip: check out the elevators.
There are six tall sandy colored apartment buildings surrounding the area. We decide that the target must be hiding in one of those buildings. We sneak past the lobby guard and run up the stairs mostly scouring the hallways. Sometimes we check the elevators that are open. We go from one building to another. There is lots of running around going up and down stairs almost feverishly. In one, we come across the office of someone who is also tracking our target. We don't really trust her, but we are desperate for any leads. We don't disclose any of our information to her, though. The other agent goes up the building and we go back down, continuing to search the other buildings. Somewhere along the search, someone from headquarters tells us that the other woman has been found dead. It shocks and scares us to tears as we realize that this mission has high stakes.
At the last apartment building, we find an apartment door open and go inside. A young man finds us, but we lock the door and demand to search the apartment. He's friendly and has just bought some Indian takeout, which he offers to us. For some reason, we believe that somewhere in this apartment lies the keys to our search. Unfortunately the dream ends here.

I've always admired thinkers like Freud who have the courage to introduce new and sometimes controversial theories. He delves deep into subjects that other people find uncomfortable and taboo. However, his fascination with the idiosyncrasies, traumas, and dark corners of the unconscious can be a hindrance sometimes. He seems to take everything to the extreme, trying to find something more, something lurking beneath the surface. It is easy (both consciously and unconsciously) to maniupulate other people's psyches and suggest a reality that might not exist. Freud’s compulsion to find a complex symbolic meaning in every element of a dream is ridiculous. Sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.
Unfortunately, his thirst for finding the sordid "truth" might cause irreparable damage and open painful wounds.

I knew I was going to die-- and soon. The anxiety and grief was overwhelming as I knew the end of my life was imminent. But I tried to distract myself by watching a baseball game. Later, I went to my mom who was lying in her bed. I cried with her, and she told me I should close my eyes, for in any second I would see heaven. I sobbed a little more, then I closed my eyes. Darkness. Suddenly, I realized I was in a small, tea-colored river in the South. There was a little baby and I played with him in the water. He giggled and I laughed with joy. I tossed him up in the air and caught him in my arms. It started slowly at first, but soon he was flying up into the sky, a few feet above my head. Through it all, I kept smiling and he kept giggling. It was a feeling I'll never forget. Just pure joy and contentedness. It wasn't clear to me in the dream whether this baby was my son or not. At the very least, I felt a strong connection with him.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that our class size wasn't overloaded. I think the intimacy of the environment will make it easier for us to share our dreams. The syllabus looks challenging, but not overwhelming. I didn't expect for the course to be so diverse; I guess I assumed that we would be reading a lot of literature. But I like that we get to study a subject through many different academic lenses. And it seems that in our essay we will have the freedom to explore dreams in our own way. I'm already coming up with some interesting ideas. Bring it on!

I am walking in the rain, but I don't care that I'm getting soaked. I see a couple of people rush under an awning.While they huddle together, I just pass them by. Suddenly, I wander into a whole other world. It's like the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door and finds herself in the land of her Technicolor dreams.
The sun comes out and I've found myself in an exotic city like nothing I've ever seen before. I see several large but narrow buildings. The closest that I can compare the architecture to is like the design of the United States Capitol Building. The ring around the Capitol dome was similar to the long ribbon of windows around these buildings. The length is long, but the width is thick. The height is low, probably about 15 feet.
The sun is shining brilliantly and the buildings gleam with golden light, like the kind that shines on the Manhattan skyline at sunset. Yet the sun is also directly overhead. It didn't seem strange to me then. I guess I was just drinking everything in. So I'm looking at this cluster of buildings in awe but don't go any further. I want to show my friends the majestic white beauty that I've found.

We're in a big bus, me, a few people I know and some strangers, too. At the front of the bus, a fortune teller (who looks just like an ordinary person: no turban, no jewelry) is giving each passenger readings. She's telling the fortune of an aquaintance of mine (let's call him Pete). She warns Pete about his wife and he's pretty concerned about the whole thing.

I'm not paying too much attention to the details, because I'm waiting for my turn. I'm excited to hear what this psychic will say about my future (I've never been to a psychic, but I'm not a skeptic, either). I'm also a bit apprehensive: she's doing readings in front of everyone and I don't know if I want anyone else to hear what she might reveal about me. In addition, I'm worried that she might tell me that my future is bleak and loserish.

I admire how much respect Jung has for Freud in this book. He doesn't bash his former mentor, but he doesn't pretend Freud doesn't exist either.

What I liked about Jung is that he carefully distances himself from his subjects and their dreams. He doesn't probe too far into his patient's history. One of the reasons I disliked Freud was that he often analyzed his own dreams and concerned himself too much with his friends and colleagues. I also felt that he patronized his patients and wasn't very therapeutic.

I also enjoyed Jung's illustrations and anecdotes from literature, art, and history. The examples are clear and convincing. Freud sometimes refers to things assuming that we'll know what he's talking about. It kind of dates his work.

I've always been fascinated with Jung's concept of the collective unconscious. I don't believe that it is a coincidence that the same dream motifs pop up in every culture. I think there is something in our genes or our souls--if you want to get metaphysical--that links us with every human being that has ever lived. We have a shared destiny. That is why in myths, legends, and fairy tales the same archetypes keep popping up.

In my opinion, the most striking Kafka story was “A Country Doctor.” I've often had dreams where I've felt anxious and bewildered like the narrator. These dreams usually involve trying to do something or complete a task, but finding myself struggling and thwarted at every turn.

The country doctor spends most of the story worrying and feeling helpless. He is not confident in his abilities and is convinced that he has erred. He feels guilty for not being able to control what’s happening around him.

The horses in the story are particularly significant. The doc’s own horse has died, “worn out by the fatigues of this icy winter.” Luckily, two horses named Brother and Sister squeeze out of a pigsty. That these enormous, magnificent creatures are compressed into a tight space and must squeeze through a small doorway is a comical image. The servant girl remarks that “you never know what you’re going to find in your own house.”
The doctor is surprised that such animals were in his own house, and he says that he had never sat behind them before. Perhaps this is an indication of his feelings of inadequacy. He also seems to feel undeserving and uneasy.

I dreamed that I was taking a test, but as I go to read the essay question, I can't find it coherent. Then, when I think I understand it, I'm stumped. But then I come up with an answer, I can't seem to write down the words that are in my head. Finally, I've written down something that seems logical, but before I can pat myself on the back for acing the test, I realize that the question is different than the one I had read when I started. I feel incredible frustration, but also anxiety, because I know I'm going to run out of time on the test and fail miserably.

I can't help but recall a study in Hartmann's Dreams and Nightmares about how people rarely, if ever read, write, or calculate in dreams. However, I think the meaning behind this particular dream seems, to me, quite transparent. I definitely have "performance anxiety" when it comes to examinations. Despite how I've prepared and studied like hell for a test, I'm always convinced that I'm going to screw up. Even if the test isn't quite as hard as I thought it might be, I still doubt that I'm going to score very well. As the professor hands out the graded tests and I see that I've scored an A , I am sort of shocked. Then I just figure that I've lucked out. This cycle inevitably repeats itself throughout the semester.