A Long Row of Happy Dead

Sometimes the only part of a dream that you'll remember is an arresting image. It's particularly important to attempt to illustrate these dreams if you want to penetrate what the dream means to you.

A Dream Image: This was part of a longer dream, but I don't remember it—except that there was a man, about 48, sitting in a chair. He had a few days growth of beard like a contemporary actor, and looked like one. He was someone's father. We went to where he was sitting and realized he was dead. Then we noticed a row of seated people with very large heads and over-sized, odd faces. They were all dead, leaning comfortably and companionably on one another.

Interpretation: Since what I remembered of this dream had no narrative, its meaning could only be unlocked by thinking about the image it created. As I developed the image a couple of things surprised me. First, the characters were indeed comfortable, and second, I chose to paint them in cheerful colors. Could these dead characters represent parts of myself that had had a “life” and were satisfied with what it had been, in other words, fulfilled? If that's the case they could indeed lounge comfortably and companionably, leaving behind the things I sometimes associate with the past: mistakes, failures, losses. It's as if they are saying, “That's over now.”

The one differentiated character is an actor, and aren't we all actors in our own life drama? He's “contemporary,” so he's been alive for me until this dream. My dream is telling me to follow the path of authenticity—the “actor” is dead, and that's a good thing. Since he was someone's father, he was instrumental in giving birth to the one who goes on, but he and his fellow dead, with their distorted heads (over-sized intellects) won't be going forward into my future. The light and bright colors tell me this is a happy development.

All In It Together

The Dream: A woman has been tasked with beating a man who lies face down, prone. He is covered with a blanket, and she must beat him with a whip until his blood runs black. She is appalled at this thing she is doing, but does it anyway. The power that set her to her dismal task is Christian.

I am an onlooker, also horrified. At some point his blood does run black, and she begins to rail against Christianity for having one set of rules for its followers while the hierarchy behaves quite differently. She is very angry, but never questions her own acquiescence, in other words, why she did as she was told rather than follow her conscience.

Interpretation: First I'll look at some things that triggered this dream: At the time of the dream I was reading Eric Kandel's The Age of Insight, and was at the place where Freud analyzes one of his own dreams and feels it has pointed out that he has suppressed his own guilt, just as my dream beater does. This was around the time of the horrific terrorist shooting at a mall in Kenya, following close on the heels of a shooting by a mentally ill person of people at an American Navy installation.

I feel guilty when I hear about these, and other, world situations, as well as disappointment and anger that the country I was brought up to believe had some sort of moral superiority now appears as venal and self-serving as the rest of the world. In the dream, Christianity stands for bankrupt values and hypocrisy on a national scale, and I ponder my own guilt as a citizen, even though I, like the dream actor, go along with it and feel powerless to stop it. I feel forced, as she does, to participate in things I find morally reprehensible. The dream implies my guilt and asks me why I don't  stop.

Transfiguration

In this dream the goddess, mourned in the last dream, has re-emerged.
The Dream: A woman in archaic costume is transfigured into a goddess. I see this happen, and I see the changes that take place on her face. For a moment I see reflected in her face a naked power. She composes herself and holds herself erect and majestic. Others doubt, and will doubt, her godhood. She, however, is completely assured.

Interpretation: It's the time of year that I expect a god to be born, and this dream reflects that expectation. The dream tells me I don't have to accept a fixed idea about who or what a god may be; gods will appear in ways that astonish.

Guest Dreamer: Rebecca: In Your Face

The Dream: I had been told that there were a bunch of horses in England. So much so that the smell of them penetrated the air. That fact didn’t bother me, and I wanted to go anyway. I ended up over there, and was with two horses in a pasture, eating from the same stack of hay. The face of the horse on the left (when looking from the front) was about twice the size, maybe could be a little more, of a regular horse. (The horse was regular size, but I’m thinking the face was that size to make a point, which I knew this while dreaming.) As the horses started eating, the horse on the left started getting after the other, so it could eat the hay by itself. This didn’t bother the other horse. As the horse on the left would nudge, I would tell it (don’t know the sex) to share. After saying this a couple times, the horse calmed down.

Carla's thoughts: As usual, I'll interpret Rebecca's dream as if it were my own. She will be the judge of whether or not my thoughts are relevant for her, and I hope she'll let us know how she sees her dream.

For me, horses are symbolic of my instincts or drives, my inner animal. Tony Crisp points out that the drives a horse symbolizes are those “that have to some extent become 'tamed' or directed.” Smell, our most basic sense, tells me that I'm dealing with something primitive, and the fact that these horses are in a foreign county says that I might be encountering something new, unfamiliar, or “foreign” in my life. In any case, the core feelings that smell represents are so strong that their odor has penetrated the air; you could say that these feelings have created an atmosphere!

The foreign land holding my horses (Hold your horses!) is England. What associations do I have with England or the British people, and how might this influence my dream's meaning? The British are known for their “stiff upper lip,” for being strong in the face of adversity and deprivation, for tolerating these without complaint and, in general, for behaving properly. Have my feelings, my drives, my instincts, been shipped over to this land to be tightly controlled?

I am becoming conscious that I have acquiesced to social pressure to “behave.” The left symbolizes feelings and instincts, again emphasizing their importance in this dream. The left horse's face has enlarged. A part of my instinctive energy or libido or desire has become a large thing for me to face. The left horse demands a bigger share of what it likes, the thing that nourishes it (its food). I intervene to stop this part of myself from taking what it wants. Interestingly, the “greedy” behavior doesn't bother the second horse, the one that I felt was being deprived. The right horse doesn't seem to mind the left horse getting something extra, but a part of me is not comfortable with it. I, as the dream ego, keep trying to get my left horse to behave, and it finally gives in to my repeated demands. The dream is telling me that I am too quick to intervene to stop my desires, and that they are not hurting anyone. I think my dream wants me to relax and enjoy life.

Malicious Masks

The Dream: An image of malicious mask-faces.

Interpretation: I wondered why I had this disturbing dream vision, and then I remembered that I’m reading Orlando Figes’ Natasha’s Dance; A Cultural History of Russia. I’m on the chapter dealing with the Soviet purges of artists. The secret police are everywhere; a poet might read a piece critical of the regime to “friends” only to find out she has been informed on. Figes quotes Osip Mandelstram: “Poetry is respected only in this country. There’s no place where more people are killed for it.”* And from a poem by Anna Akhmatova: “This is when the ones who smiled / Were the dead . . . .”**

*Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance; A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Picador, 2002), 482.
**Ibid., 487.