Month: November 2020

Hello everyone! It is a joyous day—Thanksgiving break starts soon! I hope everybody has been having the kind of dreams where you salivate over turkey (or ham, or vegan or vegetarian Thanksgiving options, if that’s more your style). Today we are going to talk about a dream from a friend of mine, Mark. It is, quite aptly, about a joyous occasion: a wedding. However, that joyous occasion comes with a strange demand. Mark needs to be painted gold.

Onto the dream!

Paint It Gold 

[The following are a direct quotes from Mark, with minor edits for brevity and style]

“I had y’all [Mark is referring to me and our friends from high school here] over to hang out and swim in the pool, and everyone was outside having a good time and I was about to join in, but was stopped by my mom. She told me I had to be painted gold for some person’s wedding. She started helping me get painted gold, which was taking a while and I was standing around thinking ‘this sucks, I want to go have fun and hang out but here I am being painted gold because someone’s wedding is happening.'”

“We ran out of gold paint and my mom started looking for more, but I wasn’t allowed to go outside because the paint wasn’t dry and also I wasn’t done being painted. At that point I was starting to get really angry with the situation because I didn’t know if I was a wedding gift or if I was just a decoration for the wedding, and my mom had to go buy more gold paint which was going to take even longer.”

“I distinctly remember being told to calm down because I was making a scene kind of pacing around the family room just angrily yelling about how stupid the whole thing was. And that’s where it cuts off in my memory.”

The Analysis 

In this dream where Mark is painted gold for unclear purposes, feelings of frustration and anger, most prominently, but also exposure and bewilderment are evoked. The emotional landscape of a dream is vital during analysis because the underlying emotions can begin to unlock the overarching message of the dream. It can also link the dream to events in the dreamer’s life that parallel the dream and bear similar emotional responses. Mark is angry, exposed, and flabbergasted by the demand that he be painted gold and the continuation of the ordeal. Events in Mark’s life that elicit the same or similar emotional responses may be linked to this dream. 

Let’s take a closer look at the feeling of exposure. Mark says that he doesn’t know if he is a wedding gift or just a decoration for the wedding. Both questions lead back to the feeling of objectification, which is tied to exposure. Mark is made a literal object in being painted gold. He is made gaudy and bright, a shiny thing for people to look at. He is stripped of his identity as a thinking, feeling human being with the ability to connect with others, laugh, and love. The first option Mark considers for himself (gift) leads to a future of him being used as someone’s belonging. The second option Mark considers for himself (decoration) leads to a future of him being ogled at. Neither affords him the opportunity to express anywhere close to the full scope of his capacity as a human being. Mark being painted gold paints (ha) him into a corner where he is limited in his expression and limited, too, by others’ perception of him. 

There is meaning in the fact that the event is a wedding, as well. A wedding is a joining of two people, and Mark is made a gift or decoration for this wedding, stripped bare of his identity as a person who can connect and love. It is almost as if Mark is being mocked, rendered inhuman and without love while two people wed as personal punishment. 

Finally, there is rich symbolism in the gold paint. Gold is the color of precious stones and minerals and symbolized achievement and wealth. Paint hardens and makes the object or person being painted stiff. Mark being painted gold shows that Mark is like a trophy, a symbol to the wedding party of success, love, and prosperity. The fact that the gold and shiny paint will likely stiffen and make Mark immobile further objectifies him. 

Overall, Mark’s dream tells a tale of objectification made real by way of gold paint, which symbolizes prosperity and luck in love that Mark can’t have as a painted object. Stay loose and dream lucid! 

 

Hello everyone! With the end of the semester on the horizon, I’m sure you’re all having stress dreams. I know I am. Today we’ll be talking about and analyzing one of those stress dreams.

Onto the dream!

Bog Body 

[My dream was actually two dreams, straddling settings and switching between both. One dream took place above water and the other dream took place below water.]

When I am above water, I find myself in an abandoned preschool, fighting monsters I can’t see but can hear and feel. It is swampy, with my feet sticking in grey, muddy water. I ease through the school and out into the street where the water gets deeper. There, I find a dead body next to a silver truck. I nudge the body with my arm. I think it’s my mom. I’m pulled underwater.

Underwater, I am somewhere else. It is quiet and dark. The water is clear like glass. I hear water dripping, so I slowly turn to the side and see the outline of a skull. Panicked, I look forward again. I hear distant growls. I feel something sinister behind me but I don’t turn around. I keep popping above water to get out of the depths and being thrust into the above-water dream.

The Analysis 

This dream, haunting and quite soggy, evokes fear, panic, paralysis, and disorientation. Exploring themes of nurturance and the conscious and unconscious, the dream is a deep dive into my own mind.

The settings of the intertwined dreams (underwater and above water but swampy) signify an attempt to balance the unconscious (underwater) with the conscious (above water). The swampiness of the conscious-associated setting indicates that the unconscious is filtering into the conscious, leaking out and spilling over. In the conscious world, I find a preschool, where there are monsters. These are the same monsters that were in my unconscious, underwater. They feel the same, sound the same. As I wade from the preschool into the street I find my mother’s dead body in the deeper water, which signifies that this discovery takes place closer to the unconscious.

This dream plays with levels of consciousness. Underwater, I am unconscious. Above water, I am in the conscious zone, but I range from being fully conscious to slipping out of consciousness into the secrets that are harbored in the unconscious, like the body of my mother.

My mother’s body symbolizes a loss of feelings of support and nurturance, something I know just barely consciously. The fact that the body is not certainly my mother’s body but rather a body that I think might be my mother’s body shows that the care and nurturance she represents can be generalized to other figures in my life. Her death and decomposition is the erosion of those feelings of care and love in my own life.

The preschool is another potent symbol in this dream. Monsters lurk in the preschool, haunting it. The preschool is not the preschool I went to, but it does feel familiar. Here, a motif of an abandoned childhood and abandoned childhood dreams arises. This corresponds with the symbol of the dead body that represents a lack of care and nurturance, because when one grows up, they generally receive less care and nurturance than they do when they are a baby.

In summation, this nightmare calls upon me to unify the unconscious and the conscious mind and find love and nurturance, as well as to revisit childhood dreams. Stay loose and dream lucid!

Hello everyone! I’m sure this has been a stressful week for everyone, so let’s unwind with some Japanese science fiction. Paprika is a Japanese animated film about a team of psychiatrists who have created a device (the DC mini) to enter the dreams of their clients. Unfortunately, the psychiatrists haven’t properly secured this device, so a nefarious agent hacks into the mainframe and begins controlling the clients’ behaviors in the real world through their dreams. With the help of a police inspector, the psychiatrist Chiba and her alter ego Paprika rush through the dream world to find the agent responsible for the security breach.

This week we’ll be examining one particular dream sequence that occurs early on in the movie. We will not be using Jungian psychology or literary tools to analyze this dream today; we will be using pure dream analytic tradition!

Onto the dream!

Circus Doubles 

[Here is a clip of the dream. It lasts from 0:00 to 2:35. Unfortunately I could not find any videos with English subtitles, but you should be able to get the gist of the dream from the footage above. I will also type a description of the dream sequence below for those of you who prefer to read.]

The dream opens in a circus full of children and bright colors. A lion jumps through a blazing ring of fire and acrobats fly through the air. The police inspector speaks surreptitiously with Paprika on the phone in the crowd. The ringmaster of the circus enters and pulls away a red sheet, revealing that the police inspector is somehow trapped in a cage onstage despite being in the crowd moments before. People rush out from the crowd toward him and as they come closer it becomes apparent that they all have the police inspector’s face. They reach through the cage and the police inspector falls through the floor.

He is caught in the air by a daring Paprika, who is flying on an acrobatic swing. As they fly through the air, they fall into the roles of Tarzan and Jane. They are knocked off of their jungle rope and suddenly find themselves in a speeding train, where the police inspector is cornered by a man trying to cut his throat with a wire cutter. Paprika hits the man with a suitcase.

As the suitcase hits the man, it becomes a guitar. Paprika and the police inspector find themselves on a red carpet with live music. The police inspector holds a camera and gestures for Paprika to pose for a picture, but then they see a shadow rushing through the crowd. They chase after it.

The police inspector chases the shadow into a back building, where he sees a boy being shot, his body falling to the ground. The shadow runs through a door down the hallway. The police inspector tries to follow it, but the floor warps, scrunching up, and he falls through the ground. This is where the dream sequence ends.

The Analysis 

This dream sequence perfectly captures just how bizarre dreams can be! Jumping from one setting to another, at a surface level the police inspector’s dream has no discernible connective tissue. However, upon further (police) inspection, we see that the dream means quite a bit.

The first notable symbol in this dream sequence is how, once the police inspector is caged, the people that rush toward him and begin crowding the cage all have his face. This produces a chilling, quite creepy effect in the video. Being caged and surrounded are motifs in dreams that indicate a fear of being trapped. This fear is evident in the way his dreams jump from one setting to the next, never settling on one place for long. He doesn’t want to get stuck in one location (even in his mind), so he keeps flitting from Setting to setting.

The fact that the people that stoke this fear of being trapped or confined all have his face shows a lack of union with the self. This could indicate that the police inspector has a dark past or shadowy part of his personality that he hasn’t reconciled with. Indeed, the movie alludes to a dark past.

Another symbol in the dream sequence is the camera that the police inspector tries to take a picture of Paprika with. Cameras are entangled with the concept of memory. To have this symbol in the dream indicates that the police inspector wants to remember Paprika and his dream when he wakes up. Because Paprika is Chiba’s (the psychiatrist’s) alter ego, the police inspector only gets to interact with her in dreams. The police inspector comes to have feelings for Paprika, which he tries to immortalize with a snapshot. She is his dream girl (literally).

This absurd dream sequence shows that the police inspector fears being trapped and confined, especially when it’s confinement of his own making. In addition, it highlights his desire to remember Paprika. Wouldn’t you want to remember a dream-hopping pixie alter ego? Stay loose and dream lucid!