Dream-work

Well maybe I like Freud afterall.

I recently had a dream that I decided to get married. I’m currently involved with someone – we’ve been dear “friends” for a very long time and we are now “something more.” But in this dream, I had a clear sense that he and I were not ready for marriage so I would have to pick someone else, and out of all the men in the world I rummaged up S.E., a man who once asked me to scratch “Jesus” into the sunscreen on his skin with my fingernail. He also dumped me out of a canoe, and did many other inappropriate and socially awkward things in my short (non-romantic) association with him.

Anyway, the morning of the wedding, I was running around the church in a state of disarray, wearing sweat pants – not one of my many sleek pairs of Lululemon yoga pants from my year of spandex-selling-purgatory before grad school, but shapeless and schluppy sweats. Definitely a bad sign. With sudden clarity I knew it could never happen, and that I would save myself from a life in the oil rigs, or the wedding singer circuit, or wherever that guy has ended up. I decided to make an announcement that there would not be a wedding, but there would be coffee.

And now Freud tells me that simple wish-fulfillment dreams are infantile: this dream may have been ridiculous, but at least it was not infantile. He also says there was a “latent dream” behind the manifest dream of marrying S.E., and the process of that latent dream becoming manifest is the dream-work. The work of interpretation will undo the dream-work.

And even more importantly, he informs me that having compared the interpretations of many dreams, he is prepared to elucidate what the dream-work does with latent dream-thoughts. You have to admire him for this, this shocking (and almost arrogant) claim to be able to wade into the world of dreams, like Beowulf diving endlessly through the black water to Grendel’s mother, where he will confront the question of whether having screwed up dreams means we are fundamentally screwed up (or maybe he won’t, but we would like him to).

He also says this:

“I beg you, however, not to try to understand too much of what I tell you. It will be a piece of description which should be listened to with quiet attention.”

I adore him for this. For leading us down the rabbit hole but not expecting us to fight with Grendel’s mother at the bottom. Derrida could learn a lot from him.