Like most people, I suppose, I dream about stories and issues other than lust and ambition. As a sociologist, perhaps, I also dream about social situations and problems, sometimes quite amusing, that provide insights I would not have arrived at when awake or, when dreaming,come up with half baked solutions because my mind has not thought of a better one, either asleep or awake. I dreamed, for some reason I can't readily assign to newspaper accounts or to general knowledge, that Israeli expatriates are infiltrating non profit organizations in New York City so as to familiarize themselves with what Jewish Americans and other Americans are thinking so as to know how to respond to America. So they go to the Met or Carnegie Hall as well as synagogues and churches to take the pulse of New York culture. Is Israel threatened? Is New York about to turn against Israeli sentiment? I don’t think so in my awakened life and the tone of the dream story does not have the tone of animosity or fear. Maybe it just shows that I have a lingering identification with Israel and my dream is a better indication of that fact than my protestations to that effect when awake might indicate. To use an overworked word correctly, dreams tell me that my feelings about Israel are authentic rather than affected.
Here is a social problem dream. Hordes of people in a gang are rushing to a neighborhood to confront another gang, some flying through the air on cargo nets, only to find when they arrive there that they are members of the same gang. And when they arrive and find themselves confused, suddenly hundreds and thousands of policemen descend on them, bearing arms, but this time also booklets of personal column items where each item is identified by an officer by name who offers to escort a gang member and provide a testimonial that they would hate ever having to discharge his gone and one would even willing to escort the police commissioner through the gang territory while carrying a gun but guaranteeing not to shoot anyone. That reading suggests, to use the Rodney King line, that we can all get along, can get nice, and so dissipating the animosity between gangs and police. There is friendship rather than animosity as the tone of the story, even if it is a dream deferred,
I also have dreams that are other than social problems. I still remember a dream I had when I was thirty or so when I pictured what my wife’s face would look like when she was sixty. It was an uncanny representation. Her face was lined and had some blotches and sagging cheeks but she was not like her mother, which is what Freud might premise,but at least I don’t think so. I think it was my ambition to have a happy married life. She looked quite warm and friendly to me, not a horror she might have become. Maybe that was about sex, her morphing into my mother, but the emotion is just feeling comfortable with her getting old, not afraid of it.
On the other hand, I dreamt just recently of me and my wife in an all out screaming match, at the height of our lungs, and I turn to my teenage son and daughter, who are not recognizable to me either in looks or feeling as the two actual son and daughter I raised, and asking my wife what should be done, neither imploring her to cut it out or feeling ashamed to have gotten my children to have intervened in their parent’s troubles. My daughter says “Stop talking to one another '' which is a way of telling me how awful the states of grief are in a divorce, something akin to Herbert Gold's novel about his divorce in “ Salt”. So the dream may be an instruction not to consider a divorce, which we never did, she dying ten years ago of cancer after a forty eight year marriage, but the tone of the dream is vivid and descriptive rather than instructional, just an insight into what a divorce is, seeing it more clearly and emotionally than i would appreciate when I was awake. Maybe my dream showed that my authentic feeling and perception was that I was scared to pull the plug. Some divorces may be cooperative and supportive, but I suspected that mine, if it happened, would be acrimonious, and so to be avoided. People contemplating such divorces, my insights and images tell me, would be like that and those contemplating it are brave people. I am reminded of Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach, two fairly successful actors fifty years ago, when she was asked in an interview whether she had ever thought about divorcing during their long marriage. Her answer was that there was never a thought of a divorce, but there were times when she thought about killing him. A worthy response by a sensible woman.
Here is another dream or set of dream fragments where it appears that the dream work is reworking or continuing the same material of an earlier dream. A middle aged woman FBI agent is investigating a robbery in a set of hotel rooms hired by another woman, who is the protagonist in the story in that the dreamer identifies with her and sees the events from her point of view. The FBI agent reminds me of Frances Macdermott in “Fargo”, but that association may not have been made until after I woke up. While walking through an elaborate lobby after the interview, she turns to the protagonist and says: “The papers found in your rooms did not just include the paper used in hotels. It also is used in the slips used for the numbers racket and other illegal activities. Can you explain this before I inquire into a deeper investigation?” Maybe the FBI agent thought, in the dream, that the protagonist was running a call girl ring. What I, the dreamer, knows, from a previous dream snippet, is that she was an espionage agent and so a bad guy.
There are two aspects of this dream. First, does the FBI have the technology to look so carefully into the paper they come across? I don’t know if I read about this technology or whether my dreamwork, which is me, invented it. Clever idea, though my conscious mind thinks that might be an invasion of privacy. Second, the emotion within the dream is the pleasure of considering how the protagonist is going to figure out how to get away without being caught in her even bigger crime than illegal betting. That is a pleasure of the whodunit, for the writer to arrange things with irony and reversals, something my dream world discovered as an aspect of literary craft, and newly or restored to my waking person as a literary critic. A previous dream fragment had identified the protagonist as a Soviet spy, perhaps modeled on or borrowed from the protagonist in a quickie movi from 1942 I had seen a few days ago called “Spy Ship” where the equivalent of an American Firster is a Nazi spy who provides coded messges that allow U-Boats to sink ships, this movie adopting the usual historical amnesia when just a few months before the American Firsters might well include respectable people, like the Kennedys, who had a different point of view, but not traitors. So the dream fragments put together a set of literary tropes, amusing because hey were a collection of slices, and I woke up cheered for that experience rather than frightened by a serious spy movie or a murder mystery.
Here is another one. I dream of a young woman who is up for an Emmy during the 1950’s. She is on a talk show where people can preen about her as a rising star, but the interviewer says instead that Jackie Gleason has made sure that she won’t win the award. Crestfallen, the girl says, bemused rather than angry, “How could he have done that to me?”.That is all the snippet of a dream that I can recall. The dream is deep into popular culture lore about figures that are long past. I associate it with the time when Julius La Rosa was fired by Arther Godfrey. And the dream recasts the story in “All About Eve”, where an up and coming star challenges an older well established one and that is the nature of life rather than just a vicious and mean event. There is also something very present that reverberates: the slap heard round the world when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for what seemed to me sufficient reason rather than villainized and apologetic. It was a slap and not a punch, not meant to hurt but to insult. Maybe the evidence of that dream and the Academy Awards event was that the young woman in the dream was Black, but dreams like reality have become multiracial, people not typecast but just part of the scene. So there are so many things going on in this snippet: blending times and events and genres to arrive at an understanding of events and the pleasure of having solved a mystery by combining all these allusions so as to see what popular culture really is; eventful and surprising but in accord with tropes themselves taken from popular culture. The dream is about the ambition of the young lady but not of my own that I do experience in other dreams, but is about its subject matter, which is show business, something of which I have only experienced vicariously, my head filled with such references and so telling me about my preoccupations, such as to observe the world looking past me, but that may already reading in too much-- too general, too psychological-- about what the dream yields.
Here is something obvious and distinctive about dreams: they are formed into narrative and, as well, into stories, however abbreviated or cutting too quickly from one scene to another as if the mind was too impatient to spell it out. But think of the alternative. Rather than a story, a dream could be just a feeling, which I think is the case with Freud, however much he wants to unravel the secret of a dream. Nor is a dream a portrait or a still life. Rather, they move along in time with dialogue and images and dramatic cruxes and ironies, the whole shebang. That suggests just how deep a story is, deeper than music or image, however complicated it may have become over time when cavemen dreamt of fears and dreamt of being eaten by tigers. That too was a story and so different from the cave drawings whose primitiveness does not make it any less a predecessor than the Old Masters. Though dreams are measured by psychologists as lasting merely for seconds, however long the apparent duration of a dream, the clear evidence is that they are fraught with complexity, irony, detailed settings, and the other apparatus of storytelling and perform that an inquisitive mind is at work. Kiv Ullmann told the story of being awakened in the middle of the night so that Ingmar Bergman could recount for her the dream he had just experienced and that six months later she was starring in a movie he had written and directed a movie he had made based on that dream. Not diminishing the conscious efforts that allowed Bergman to transform one thing to the other, that seems to me to be about right. Both are the inventions of stories, one of the unconscious and the other adapted to the screen by the conscious mind.