Dream #2: The Alibi

Hello everyone! I hope you’ve all been having some vivid dreams lately.

This week we are going to be analyzing a dream from my friend Jen. This is our first time analyzing someone else’s dreams, so I’ll give you a rundown of how this is going to work. For posts where I analyze a friend, peer, or family member’s dreams, I will give direct excerpts from the person’s texts describing the dream or paraphrase their verbal account of the dream. Then I will analyze the dream using the usual tools— Jungian psychology and the literary tradition. The only difference between the analysis of someone else’s dreams and my own dreams is that analyses of other people’s dreams will have someone else’s account of their dreams in the post.

Onto the dream!

The Alibi

[Note: The following text is taken directly from a text conversation with Jen, with permission. I have made minor edits and omissions for grammar and brevity’s sake. In general, I believe in only making minor edits and omissions to the other person’s account of the dream in order to preserve the chain of memory that is formed when someone recalls a dream or talks about their dreams.]

“Here’s one: I was working with a lawyer to try and prove this girl’s alibi that she was buying coffee at the time of the crime, but the only way I could see the security camera footage was by pretending to be a garbage truck driver (so I could casually talk about the case and they just like showed me the footage??). So after I got the security footage which showed the girl and one guy entering the coffee place (but now the guy was a suspect?? rather than it being an alibi), I had to drive the garbage truck which was very hard because we were in NYC.

“There was another guy in the truck with me who I was trying to trick into thinking I did this for a living – anyway this guy was telling me where to go. Then we were on campus and he was part of my investigation team so we went to our office and I kept getting stung by mosquitos?? – so we went in the office and the rest of our Team was there but I didn’t tell them what we found because I thought that the room was bugged so we started looking for recording devices.

“We found recording devices (and they were huge and weird looking and all in one corner of the room). I shared the room with one of the prosecutors for some reason (who was also the professor I’m doing research with in real life), so I didn’t want to tell her what was going on in case she had something to do with it. But of course she walked in right at that moment, so to avoid talking to her I pretended that I just got my tonsils removed?? And the funny part is in the dream I had gotten my wisdom teeth out (which was also a valid excuse?? but I just wanted to lie). She kept telling me to go lie down cause I just had surgery but I was crawling on the floor looking for recording devices so I didn’t want to.”

The Analysis  

Jen’s dream has themes of blurred roles or role confusion, secrecy, subterfuge, and paranoia.

She starts the dream as the Hero figure, one of Jung’s archetypes. She stands for justice— she is trying to prove a girl’s alibi. However, Jen uses deception to achieve her ultimate goal of justice by pretending to be a garbage truck driver to get the security footage. This distorts the Hero archetype and leads it to mingle with the Shadow. Jen continues to deceive others, tricking the man in the truck into thinking that she drives the truck for a living. She even pretends she got her tonsils removed in front of the prosecutor despite having just gotten her wisdom teeth removed. She “just wanted to lie.” The hold of the Shadow has insidious effects on her, and she begins to exhibit (perhaps reasonable) paranoia, believing that the room is bugged. At the end of the dream, Jen has wholly succumbed to paranoia, crawling around the floor looking for more recording devices, unable to engage with anything other than her mounting paranoia. Primal hypervigilance overtakes her.

All of this was to defend one person against accusations of a crime Jen doesn’t even know the nature of. We witness in this dream the corrosion of Jen’s moral sense because of her desire to protect this girl. Who is this girl? What does she represent? Perhaps only Jen herself can answer that question.

There are two motifs in the dream worth further examination: the mosquitos and the tonsils.

Jen gets stung by mosquitos when she goes back to her office with the man from the garbage truck. In literature, mosquitos can represent the draining of someone’s psychic or physical energy. They are associated with intense irritation and blood. In Jen’s dream, they serve only as a minor irritation, but they are noteworthy because they are a common motif. They may represent the feeling that the investigation is draining her— protecting this girl, whoever she is, is draining her.

Jen also pretends that she just got her tonsils removed when she in fact had just gotten her wisdom teeth removed. Teeth are another common motif in literature and dreams. Teeth being removed can symbolize a loss of identity or a lack of ability to communicate directly. In the dream, Jen may feel that through protecting this girl, she is losing herself. Alternatively, the teeth removal may indicate that she feels unable to communicate with people directly because of who she is protecting, so she lies and deceives endlessly.

Jen’s dream speaks to a need to balance the responsibility of protecting or caring for someone with the maintenance of moral integrity. If I were to apply this dream to Jen’s waking life, I would say that Jen needs to figure out who or what she’s protecting, caring for, or overextending herself to nurture and make sure she isn’t losing herself in that process. Stay loose and dream lucid!