29

ONE NIGHT, I HAD A DREAM

COBB: You create the world of the dream. We bring the subject into that dream and fill it with their subconscious.

ARIADNE: How could I ever acquire enough detail to make them think that it’s reality?

COBB: Well, dreams, they feel real while we’re in them, right? It’s only when we wake up then we realize that something was actually strange.

          —Inception, 2010, Christopher Nolan.

THERE WAS A PARTY. At a restaurant some friends were waiting for me. Near to that table, there was a man drinking with his friends while watching the revelry. Suddenly, he got up and headed to the party. He asked, “Who are you waiting for?” They said the party was for me. He responded, “I’ll wait for her here.” Soon after, I arrived to that party and I found him there. I asked him, “What are you doing here?” He said he didn’t want to lose me again. We hugged.

Actually, it’s 4.17pm. A worker is dragging boxes, placing them in line. His colleague sorts out the valuable stuff, getting rid of the trash. This is a mechanism we see at the marketplace, but also in our dreams.

While we sleep, our psyche carries out a job of selection and classification. The unconscious is the part of the psyche which sorts out our thinking and our feelings. That part of our own world that we only know.1

There are many types of dreams. We remember some; we forget others. Though if we dare to dive in, we find our most secret desires. Even, as Freud stated, the oneiric world represents our ideal sexual images with no obstacles.

True enough, through dreams we can obtain some valuable information about ourselves, and also repressed impulses. Probably what we don’t know about ourselves becomes who we truly are.

Freud, as a neurologist, found out that dreams are the key of the soul. He broke up with the philosophical thinking of the extraordinary qualities of a man—his ability to think and reflect, his rationality, and above all, his consciousness—so much so that his publisher, receiving the manuscript “The interpretation of dreams” in 1899,  placed 1900 as a publishing date.

Soul messages become recognizable in the interpretations of dreams through psychoanalysis. As dreams are attempts by the unconscious to resolve a conflict of some sort and, as they say, words spoken to us in our dreams should be taken literally, in no time, I made a beeline for the man I had dreamed of.

To play psychoanalyst here, I don’t think my dream needed deeper interpretation, but I realized that life had something to show me. It actually did.

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1 It’s remarkable how this is one of the hindrances we bump into when confronting death. To say goodbye to that inner world that only belongs to us.


Copyright © 2012 by THE PYTHAGOREAN STORYTELLER. All rights reserved.