Medea – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Watches A Feminist Tragedy ripe for yet another moment in history….

Last night, there was a showing of Lars von Trier’s 1988 Danish made-for-television adaptation of Medea, with Larry Jost, one of our local Philosophy professors, discussing it and the play with a group of psychoanalytically interested folks.  Not having read Medea or seen it performed before, it was very helpful to get some background and, he being an old school professor, gave us handouts that included dialogue from Euripides’ play, which brought to life how Euripides originally gave form to Medea’s fury. 

The version that we saw was, as the discussant characterized it, stark and highly stylized.  Watching it was among the slowest – but also reasonably satisfying – 80 minutes of my life.  As the reluctant wife suggested, it was like watching grass grow – interesting grass – but still.  The getaway scene at the end has got to be slowest getaway scene ever recorded on film or video.

The plot starts before the film – so it was helpful to have Jost, if after the fact, play the role of the chorus and the Gods, filling us in on the back story.  Medea helped Jason and the Argonauts steal the Golden Fleece from her country.  Jason, a Greek, wooed her and they married, not just on paper but in action, becoming true partners as they figured out how to loot her father’s prize possession.  Medea was, as the film characterized her, a practitioner of the dark arts.  To slow her father and his army down when he was chasing after her and Jason, she murdered her brother, dismembered him, and scattered the parts because she knew that her father would stop the chase long enough to gather the pieces and give him a proper death rite.

Jost spared us a film version in which this is graphically and brutally depicted in the opening scenes.  In our version, there is just the title art, which depicts two children hung in a tree, foretelling the central drama of this tragedy.  Then we meet Medea  (Kirsten Oleson) on a bleak, desolate and wind and water tossed shore, being greeted by an Athenian who is sailing into town and will be leaving the next day.  He promises her safe passage, no matter what.  Jost let us know that this is one of the plot devices that Aristotle objected to – he felt that it was too convenient for Medea to have an escape plan provided for what is about to transpire.

We next learn that Jason (Udo Kier), who is an ambitious man, has decided to throw Medea over, abandoning her and her two children, to marry Glauce (Ludmilla Glinska), the daughter of Creon (Henning Jensen), who is the king of Corinth.  This would put Jason in line to the next king.  Indeed, at least in this version, immediately after the marriage it sounded like he would be taking on some or perhaps all of the executive duties of the kingdom.  There’s just one problem – Creon doesn’t want Jason’s ex (or other) wife and children hanging around – presumably as a threat to claiming the inheritance of the crown that Glauce’s children will one day own.  Again, Jost informs us that Medea is loved by the community and has been accepted by them.  But Creon tells Jason that his love for his own child trumps Jason’s love for his children, and he banishes Medea effective today – the wedding day.  When Creon delivers this message, Medea begs for an additional day to get her things in order, which he grants.

Medea accomplishes a lot in her day.  She collects some berries, makes a poisonous mash, which she attaches to her own wedding crown.  She confronts Jason – who argues that in his position as king – even after her banishment – he will be able to better care for Medea and the children than if he weren’t in this position of power (we are left in the film to imagine how pleased Medea is with his generosity – Euripides makes it clear by giving her the words to express it just how furious she is about this gambit).  She seduces Jason (whose new wife won’t join him in the marital bed until Medea is gone), and convinces him to have their two boys take the crown to Glauce as a gift – and in order to ask her to ask Creon to allow Medea and the boys to stay.

Jason and the boys head off on this errand.  Glauce is pleased with the gift – but pricks her finger on the poisoned barbs and dies – as does Creon when he finds her.  Jason finally gets it (boys can be pretty thick) and heads out towards Medea – fearing what she may next have in mind.  And this is where things get interesting in this particular film version.  In the original play, Medea murders her sons – I think off stage – with a sword.  This is enough to get the Athenians riled up.  In the “historical” myth, Medea leaves, and the Corinthians murder her children.  But Euripides solution is so much more economical and horrifying.  She could have murdered Jason.  But instead she uses the boys – whom she knows he loves as only a parent can – against him.  If she had murdered him, that would not have wreaked revenge.  Destroying the things that he loves – not just his new bride and her father – throwing his ambitions into chaos – but his offspring – and making him live with knowing that he has been, through her, the instrument of their destruction – is horrifyingly sadistic.

There is, of course, a small hitch.  They are her children, too.  In the version we watched, they are not murdered off screen with a sword, but, as the title art suggests, they are hung.  The twist is that the eldest of the two boys gets what is going on and offers to help his mother complete this horrifyingly impossible task.  When his younger brother runs away from the tree, he chases after him and delivers him to the mother, who hangs this youngest son, holding him and loving him as she watches him strangle to death – as if she were putting him to sleep for the night.  The eldest son then offers her a noose that he has tied for her to use to hang him, which she again does while holding him in her arms.

Wow.  What a deeply, intimately, horrifying moment.  As one of the audience members in our conversation pointed out, the movie director did not give us more information about the boy, so anything that we say about the child’s motives would be projection.  Unfortunately that shut the conversation down because I think that is a critical addition that this director has made and he is inviting us to project into this (and much else in this tremendously pared down version of the play) what we are experiencing (As kind of footnote to that comment – it is just possible that a modern depiction of this tragedy doesn’t require Medea (or the boy) to articulate all that she is feeling – we may be better equipped than the Greeks to imagine what it feels like to have power in play in our relationships – and the variety of responses that we generate may help us realize where we are as we struggle with it).

I think the boy, like his mother, has been discarded by his father and knows that.  He knows his connection to his father has been irrevocably severed by his father, but, like his mother, he knows that this is a surface and that, underneath that surface, his father is also irrevocably connected to him – even more than his father is connected to his mother.  The only way for the father to know how deeply he is connected, though, is for the father to be the victim of the severing rather than the perpetrator of it.  It is only in this way that his father will come to know what he has actually done – and this is the only way that the boy – as well as his mother – can wreak the revenge that they both want – to remind the father of what they both (and each) mean to him.

How’s that for projection?  Well, I think it is too much.  It is worthy of Melanie Klein when she is ridiculously insinuating what the infant is fantasizing.  But it also seems to me to have a bit of the ring of truth.  So where does it belong?  I think this is something like what the Director intends – and I think it is something like what Medea must be thinking on the son’s behalf.  She is expressing, I think, not only her rage – the rage of the jilted wife – but also the rage of the jilted son – and she is acting on her own behalf, but also on his.  The son’s death becomes the vehicle of his own (real, imagined, future and/or present) rage.

A modern version of the Medea play is Tony Morrison’s Beloved.  In this novel, which I read so long ago that I cannot bring it to life here (and I am too mired in the middle of the semester to re-read it), a runaway slave kills her children – who are also the children of her master – as revenge against the master.  This drives her crazy – and Morrison writes – as I remember it – from within that craziness.   The killing of her children – as one of the discussion members last night pointed out - allows the mother to re-own herself.  She thrusts off the yoke of having born a man’s children that he does with as he will – negating her ability to own even this – the product of her body.  The only action she is left with is a destructive one – one that destroys not just the child but a part of herself.  Unfortunately, when we re-own ourselves in this way, we realize ourselves anew – and all that we are capable of.

Would that this were just fiction.  Would that this were just a tragedy on the stage.  One modern version of it has been characterized as “Parental Alienation Syndrome”.  The name is unfortunate because it medicalizes something that is much more human and tragic than it sounds.  Parental Alienation occurs in divorces when one of the parents uses a child or children to wreak revenge on the other parent – by, for instance, getting the child to accuse the other parent of sexual molestation.  This can result in a Medean equivalency, where the accused parent is jailed and prevented from having contact with the child. 

Of course, we are watching, in 2018, this film in a larger context.  The midterm elections are looming and we do not know whether the misogynistic unholy alliance of the current administration with congressional representatives of the desire to keep women and other marginalized people under control will be upheld.  As if to prove that the more things change, the more they stay the same, Medea’s children would never be Greek citizens because she in an immigrant.  The urge to have power over others – and the terribly destructive reactions that may feel like (or be) all that is left as the available alternatives to disempowerment continue to reverberate today.  Sometimes those who are drawn to power don’t realize that sharing it might enhance rather than diminish that very power, and that not sharing it - keeping others from ownership - might have tragic consequences; having nothing, one means of reclaiming yourself is destroy what has been taken from you.

At the end of this film, Medea meets the man from Athens at his boat, which is sitting on dry land.  While Jason is chasing around, finding out about the havoc she has wreaked – she waits serenely for the tide to come in – for it to lift her and her boat and carry her off to a new place and, in at least one version of the myth, a new life as the wife of the captain of the boat (where more mischief will, of course, occur).  While she is re-owning herself, Jason is driven mad by the discovery of his sons’ deaths.

Postscript:  While I have labeled this a feminist tragedy - and I think it is - it is important to note that it was written by a man at a time when women had no voice.  It is what a man imagines it must be like to be scorned.  This movie version is also written by a man - as an homage, in fact, to another man's interpretation of the tragedy.  I am reminded of the feminist who objected to Caitlin Jenner's feeling comfortable determining what it means to be a woman - from a perspective that was originally that of a man.  Succinctly she said, "I am tired of men determining what it means to be a woman.

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Episodes – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Realizes that Sometimes it takes a Brit to help us see ourselves....

The Reluctant Wife has been binge watching a series called Episodes.   Originally available on Showtime, it is now a completed series of five seasons that is available on Netflix.  The premise of the show is that two British comedy writers married to each other, Sean (Stephen Mangan) and Beverly (Tamsin Greig), have a successful show in England and the rights to it and their talent are bought up by a Hollywood network to air the series in the US and Matt LeBlanc (Played by Matt LeBlanc) is plunked into that series by the producers and agents and studio heads and powers that be, ruining the show, their marriage, and rudely awakening them to what Hollywood and fame can do to undermine their integrity while simultaneously casting a spell on them so that they become starstruck, transfixed and mired in a world that they hate but can’t seem to pull away from.

Watching this series has felt like eating candy – it tastes good, but it doesn’t fill me up – in fact, I feel a little sick – OK, rotten to the core – after watching it.  I feel as sucked into the series and Sean and Beverly feel sucked into Hollywood.  And that reminds me, oddly, of the feeling of having been sucked into watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was teenager.  Just as I am currently identifying with the good, clean Sean and Beverly from England, I identified then with Brad and Janet – virginal kids from the Midwest who stumble into an alien universe.  Hollywood as the alien universe is filled with beautiful people who are so enamored with themselves and so pampered that they don’t even know where the sheets are kept.  Rocky Horror’s alternate universe included a seemingly seamier assortment of sexually obsessed transsexuals, transvestites and, of course, Meatloaf.  In both cases, I am both repulsed and fascinated.  I want nothing to do with these alternate universes – and I want to live – or wallow – in them and their lurid qualities.

The actors who play Sean and Beverly don’t fit on the screen with any of the others.  Beverly has lines around her eyes – delightful, expressive lines that help make her real and alive – but no other woman character has any lines – their faces are all stretched tight by genes, botox, surgery or some combination.  Sean is just plain goofy looking.  At one point, he is compared to Wallace and Gromit, the British claymation characters, and it is an apt description.  It is not hard to see how this dweeby couple would be star struck.  It is also not hard to see how they would experience themselves as simultaneously superior to these characters whose antics betray levels of shallowness that compete with the Himalayas.  Every time LeBlanc or his pals do something low – they top it with something even more astoundingly low.

So what is the fascination?  With Rocky Horror, it’s clear.  Sex – as messy and dirty and confusing as it is – especially when we start bending genders – is still sex.  We are built to be drawn to it.  Brad and Janet’s prim personas soon drop away and they, like we, revel in what the “creatures of the night” have to offer.  How is it that Matt LeBlanc – the least interesting of the pretty banal group of white kids that hung out in New York together in Friends those many years ago – holds any fascination at all?  I fear that it may have to do with a crazy identification with him.  I think that he is a bit like us.

“Hold on,” you may say, “are you saying that you feel like one of the beautiful people – one the vacuous beautiful people?  You aren’t that pretty, pal.”  True.  And I don’t play basketball well either, but I still dream of being Michael Jordan.  But it’s more than identification based on wishing to be like.  I think we are, in odd ways, quite close to the essence of the Matt LeBlanc that Matt LeBlanc plays in this dramedy.

I am fond of pointing out to anyone who will listen, that we are the most privileged people to have ever walked the earth.  Queen Victoria – Alexander the Great – Louis the XVth – have very little on us.  For one thing, we have indoor plumbing and none of them – with the possible exception of the Queen in her dotage – did.  We can also fly.  In fact, we can get from city to city faster than any of them could, whether by land, sea or air, and in much greater comfort.  And when we get there, we can find accommodations that they could not have imagined – and we don’t have to carry bring along a whole retinue - we can stick a few things in an overnight bag and go.  We live in homes that are warmer – and cooler – than any of them did.  We are living (perhaps not sustainably, but still…) better than anyone in history has ever lived.

So, while Matt LeBlanc, like Queen Victoria, has no idea where his sheets are kept – we (who wash and put away our own sheets, thank you very much), like Matt and the Queen, command more luxury than our grandparents could have imagined.  And what are we doing with that?  How are we using it to serve the greater good?  Do we appreciate it?  Do we wake up in awe each morning that our homes are reasonably clean, dry and temperate?  That we eat fresh food that comes from halfway around the world?  Nah, we complain that the oranges we bought last week are going moldy or that our internet connection is lousy or that we ran into too many red lights on the way into work this morning.

When we see through Sean and Beverly’s eyes what Matt and his ilk are up to, we are, I think, gazing at a fun-house mirror version of ourselves.  We see a pampered group of people who are so concerned about getting their own cut of whatever pie is being cut up that they don’t actually taste the pie – they don't have a clue just how damn good it is.

OK, but it is not just a mirror.  We are, as Hannah Gadsby points out, looking at the people who are responsible for our stories – for the narratives that we carry around inside of us and that will give order and meaning to the lives we lead.  And these people – perhaps oddly reflecting us – are as distracted by things like texts and pettiness as we are.  As a neighbor recently pointed out to me when I was complaining about the political state of affairs while walking the dog – we are living in Rome, not Athens.  We are not the beacon shining bright to gather others in – we are self-absorbed idiots in search of even greater creature comforts - and a good fight at the Coliseum.

As I was writing this piece in my head, I thought to myself – if people have read other posts, they will wonder what has happened to the irrepressible optimist who wrote at least some of them.  The more psychologically minded might wonder if that fellow is depressed.  Well, all is not currently jolly around here – locally, regionally, or nationally – but I think this show and its craving for me (I don’t desire IT - IT wants me to watch and admire it) – evokes an awareness of the finitude of narrative – of the limits of the story about the human condition to lift ourselves above the human condition.  It does not quite have that power.  We are always – in fact, we are always more deeply – human.  We are drawn to sex and creature comforts – and to believing that whatever we are interested in at this very moment is the most interesting thing ever.

Thank goodness Beverly and Sean are lurking around the corner – noticing what we are doing, calling us on it, and writing about it (and the writing on this show is very good).  Perhaps, in addition to being sucked in and drowning in the saccharine sweetness of it all, we can also laugh at ourselves a bit – step back – and take a moment to appreciate that this is a pretty wonderful world that we live in – the one that’s just outside our own craniums.

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Blogging about Blogging II: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Articulates His Blogging Envy and Concerns about Net Neutrality

I have been blogging for about six years and wrote about the process of blogging four years ago.  This is an extended postscript to that, but it is informed by having written a post in a very different environment and also by some interest in the disappearance of net neutrality.   First things first.  With some nudging, I wrote a heavily edited piece for the American Psychoanalytic Association’s blog, one that is on the Psychology Today blog site and with my real life name as the byline.  My initial version of the post – they asked me to write about dreaming after refusing my first offering to explain what psychoanalysis is (here) – was considered way too wordy and was not catchy enough.   

The intention of the feedback about my first attempt at a dream post (here) was to make the post more attractive to the average blog user.  The feedback from the editors (isn’t a blog supposed to a reasonably immediate and spontaneous reaction to the world?) was not scathing - they wanted me to retitle the piece – to call it 7 Reasons you should interpret your dreams – or something like that - and to create more white space on the page – and for God’s sake (they said) use less words. The intent was to make the material more visually appealing, especially for people accessing the blog from their phones, which is the way that people increasingly read blog posts these days.

In addition to offering suggestions about what I should do, they moved my words around in ways that sometimes didn't make sense to me – the coherence of the piece was lost.  So I rearranged my now fewer words to get some coherence and tried to reinsert ideas that I thought were important to the overarching idea of the piece, and I used their proposed outline of 7 reasons.  The resulting piece, I thought, was fine, but a bit fluffy, at least when I sent it off (you can judge for yourself - I included it at the end of this post).

 

The central concern I had when I reread the fluffier dream post on an official blog site with my name attached was that it gives the impression that learning to interpret your own dreams is pretty easy.  In the post, I reported that we (a co-teacher and I) had good luck getting students to interpret dreams in a class.  When I have talked with others who have tried to accomplish dream interpretation with a class, they want to know how we did it because they have not had a similar experience.  I don’t know if the process we used will work in other settings, or, if we repeat it, with another class – but it is a process that includes readings about dream interpretation and practicing by interpreting other people’s dreams and interpreting literature as a dream of the author before starting in on interpreting, with the help of classmates and teachers, one’s own dreams.

   

The point is that writing a post that is light, fluffy and engaging can mislead people who will then be frustrated when they wake up in the morning and are puzzled by dream symbols that they don’t feel they have the skills to interpret (because they don’t in fact have those skills).  It might make for good reading and also, though, disappointment if people want to execute the process.  But, because this might be exactly what people want to hear, according to my editor, they will be drawn into reading the piece and, after all, isn’t that the point?

I was recently told that Psychology Today decided to feature the edited dream post on their website – they chose to put it out there for their 1.7 million follower’s on Facebook.  This will, based on past results, likely result in somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 page views of the post.  Wow.  To put that into context, I have been blogging for six years as the Reluctant P.  I have a total of 130,000 page views of over 200 posts.  My most popular post has about 3,500 views that have been garnered over the course of five years.  So, 10,000 views in the first month of a post? Wow.

As evidenced by the last paragraph, part of blogging is the feedback loop that comes from the statistics that are gathered.  In a recent Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Jerry Seinfeld talked about not understanding how novelists and other writers work.  As a stand-up comedian, he gets immediate feedback about the quality of his jokes – people laugh or they don’t.  If someone writes a bestseller – why?  What is it about the piece that led the people at Psychology Today to nominate my post to be headlined on their website?  I don’t know.  What leads people to read this Reluctant P. post but not that one?  I don’t always know.  Sometimes I am able to discover what people have searched for and that helps (and sometimes there is little other material out there about a topic), but which posts are the ones that readers get excited enough to browse for other posts at the end of their reading?  I don’t know.  All I have is the gross numbers.

I also don’t know why the Psychology Today editors chose to highlight the piece on Facebook.  Is part of the reason the post was selected was that it was short?  Was it because it was suggesting that a hard thing is easy, and that it was therefore sexy?  Should my posts follow this pattern?  I am not willing to mislead people in exchange for more readers – which leads me to wonder why I was willing to do that when I actually put my name to it.

But I think another reason is that it was on a very different platform – whether it was featured on the Facebook page or not, it likely would have garnered more views than a similar post on the Reluctant P. site, which is stand alone.  More insidiously, the Reluctant Psychologist site has been losing readers.  People are not coming to the site at the rate they were.  My paranoid self wonders if the timing of this is related to the ending of the net neutrality laws.  Has Google changed their algorithm to include in the rankings of sites that those that have advertising (which mine has not had to this point) would be rated below those that have ads?  This is my hypothesis.

 

The data that I have to this point is limited.  One of the things that I can access is where searches are coming from.  In the history of my site, the ratio of hits from the US has been 50 to 1 over the next country – Canada – and 100 to one over the country after that – England.  But in the past month, there have only been four times as many hits from the US as from Canada.  I think this is a little fishy.  But it is not proof.  I also don’t know whether the decrease in hits might have to do with factors other than including ads – the ads that Google would supply to me would, I think, probably not raise great revenues for them – then again, every dollar, or penny in the case of clicks, is a penny in the Google bank.

So, I have been thinking about an experiment (at the risk of repulsing my readers and – perhaps more to the point having them get bored with what I write and clicking to sites that would advertise on mine – thus losing them forever).   In this experiment, I will add ads to my site, and see what happens to traffic.  After they’ve been around for a while, I will get rid of them (apparently it will cost me ten bucks to do that) and we’ll see if things change after that.  If the traffic goes up then down, I’ll bring them back on board, to prove the relationship. 

Even if the ads bring in readers, should I keep the ads?  Psychology Today wants short posts – people can’t attend to longer material is the implication.  Am I contributing to this by including flashing doohickeys that will distract the reader from reading my post – and send them careening off to another corner of the internet?  Isn’t the point of psychoanalysis to engender deeper rather than more surface engagement with material that is, or should be, enthralling?  At what point does this medium, one that helps me connect with people about something I care deeply about (despite my ambivalence) actually interfere with the intended communication?  

The insidious concern is that we are driving ourselves to distraction.  By building a world that is filled with more and more shiny objects there is more opportunity to engage with that world (I am, btw, all in favor of that), but engaging deeply - and learning how to follow a train of thought without being distracted into another area - is the real gift of analysis.  I believe that when people are freely associating they are able to follow a thought to its roots, to not be distracted, in the case of neurosis, by defensive functions and, in the case of being an engaged reader or thinking, not being distracted by stray thoughts that are not central to the thesis.  Great works of art and of thought involve immense effort as people work to articulate what is at the heart of a given complex matter.  For us to truly follow them there requires more than skimming a wikipedia article about the topic - it involves immersing ourselves in it - of being quietly connected to a living, breathing person, idea or experience and resonating with it.  I fear that we are building a culture that is, from stem to stern, opposed to this lofty but difficult to achieve goal.

  

By the way, I’m under no delusions – adding a few ads will not give me the power of Psychology Today – they have a stable of people writing – and managing their content and web presence.  They know what their readers want (that said, I have taken some satisfaction in the rejected post – the one on what psychoanalysis is – having been my “best seller” of the last few months).  I have added below the content of the material that ended up in the Psychology Today post – if you are curious to compare…  

[Post script:  I am somewhat relieved that when I tried to add ads to this blog I was rejected.  The robot that makes decisions did not include reasons for the rejection, though did encourage me to resubmit when I had fixed the problems.  When I wrote to Google about this as a quandary, they responded that they could not individually respond to emails...  So, I am stuck with my paranoid ruminations - I can't perform my experiment.  But at least I preserve the uncluttered reading space.]

7 Reasons You Should be Interpreting Your Dreams

How to get to know your unconscious self

As we age the things that we desire from life become more complicated. Sometimes we want things that don’t feel right to us.   For example, we may want our boss’s job.  If she knew that, it could get us into trouble. So we hide that desire from both our boss and from ourselves.

Instead of talking or thinking about taking that job, we might dream about beating someone at a game.  The person that we beat would resemble the boss in some important way, but also NOT resemble the boss in some other important way.  Our unconscious recognizes the symbolized person as being equal to the boss, feels satisfied by the dream, and lets us continue to sleep because our secret wish is being gratified. 

Dreaming is a very complicated activity. According to Sigmund Freud, the goal of a dream is to satisfy those desires that we can’t even voice, much less work towards satisfying, when awake. This means that we need to decode our dreams in order for them to reveal our unconscious wishes. This is not always easy! 

Dreams Are Not Just Random

In a class I teach on dream interpretation students are asked to bring in their own dreams to analyze. Every time a student presents their dream something similar happens.  As dreamers begin to analyze their dreams they describe the process as “unnerving”.  They thought they were bringing meaningless dreams to class, but the dreams end up having important and relevant information about what is currently going on in their life and about their wishes and desires.  Each student discovers that their dreams are not just random, but have important meanings.

For instance, a student had dreamt about being on a luxury liner that she was swimming on and off of.  As she began associating and had supportive ideas from her classmates, she began to think about this as representing her family: a vehicle that had carried her to this point, but one that she was increasingly “swimming away from” as she began to direct her own life.

Dreams can be unsettling

When a dream is interpreted, it can reveal something that is very disturbing. For example, we may discover that we are in a relationship with someone who reminds us in very important ways of a parent and wonder whether we have married our mother or father. There may be an uncomfortable moment that this person is too close or too familiar – that there is something incestuous about the relationship. Thus, dreams can reveal uncanny, extraordinary and unexpected aspects of ourselves.

Here are 7 reasons why it is important to interpret your dreams:

1.           Take advantage of your dreams. You dream every night. When you wake up and think about a dream, you have an opportunity to access a product of your unconscious.

2.           Dreams are familiar territory.  They are formed, in part, by what has gone on the day before. 

3.           Dreams are not just reiterations of what happened during the day. They also include our actively working on problems that were “insoluble” in the light of day. Some important scientific discoveries occurred as the result of a dream.

4.           Remembering and interpreting your dreams can open up the weird and offbeat parts of yourself that are kept under wraps.

5.           Although we may be unaware of the unconscious, it is revealed in our dreams.  If we understand how the dream is constructed, we can understand something about the part of our minds that we can’t see. 

6.           Dreams are meaningful.  Each of us makes up our own sets of symbols and we use these symbols to hide the meaning of our dreams. So the boat in the dream of the student does not mean that all boats symbolize a family. This is her own idiosyncratic use of the symbol.

7.           The meaning in dreams is hidden because the truths of dreams can be strange and unsettling. Dreams are intended to keep us asleep.  To do this they grant the wishes of the parts of ourselves that want something – and would wake us up to get it.  For example, a child who is hungry will dream of eating something wonderful and this will satisfy them enough that they can stay asleep.

To get started interpreting your own dreams try these:

•            Keep a dream journal by your bed and write down the dream as you wake up.

•            Try to think about the dream soon after having it. The longer you wait the harder it is to remember. 

•            Consider telling the dream to someone who knows you well. It need not be a therapist; a close friend or lover can often see things that are out of your awareness. 

•            Think about your dream as a work of fiction or a poem and try to interpret it as you would a work of art. 

Sweet dreams!

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