Where Wishes Come True

Notice how the title isn't "where dreams come true".

I've not had a chance to take off the music (I was thinking of a mute button, instead). Many apologies.

What I've read so far since last week is basically Freud rambling on about his own dream interpretation; a sample analysis (which I have to say, was very unpleasant since there was a ton of medical mumbo-jumbo that I didn't get). Basically in real life, he has a patient, and he believes he's at fault for not being unable to diagnose her properly. In a dream, he dreams of meeting up with the same patient in some sort of social gathering. In the end, after noticing her physical condition and the claims of another doctor, he realizes he wasn't at fault and that it was another doctor who was at fault. Basically, as a doctor, Freud didn't want to feel bad for not being able to diagnose the patient. As a result, he dreamt that he was not. Freud follows up by saying that dreams often fulfill things. In this case, a wish was fulfilled. Freud also adds that dreams may also go the opposite way and fulfill fears. They may also reflect or just restate old memories. Obviously, there are more, but Freud seems to focus on these four to begin with.

I have several good examples of fulfillment of a wish and fear. But tonight, I would like to explore a wish, to back up Freud. This one is personal but I feel that I can use it without revealing too much. It's something you would think is typical of a person very interested in another person. This dream is dated in my dream journal: September 28, 2007. I have analyzed it previously, but very very briefly as one dream in a set of dreams that occurred in one week (I usually do analyses for a week of dreams, not individually, because I don't have enough time to record it and analyze before I have to get ready to leave home). So here we go:

Context: The person I'm interested in is really just an acquaintance, and we only have one thing in common, we both participate in the same extra-cirricular activity. I haven't talked to her much, maybe only three times, total, but I certainly wish I could talk to her more often. Oh yeah, we don't reside in the same area. So I don't see her on a daily basis. Oh yes, I'll refer to her as Paige (one of my favorite girl names).

Dream: I'm outside. I see a large brick building, maybe 15-20 feet away from me. There are two white, glass doors into the building. School doors, but really nice school doors. In the space ahead of me, I see a bunch of round white lunch tables. I somehow end up standing at the end of a rectangular table. I look beyond the other end and see a nice flower garden, green bushes, and mulch with a lively brown color. I look at my end of the table, and there are some people sitting down. To my left, behind the person closest to me is Paige. She's sitting down, with a yellow pencil in her hand, writing stuff down on a regular sheet of white, lined paper. I look at it. It's math. Homework, apparently. I ask her, "Ooh, math homework. Do you need help?" She says no thanks. I try to engage her in conversation but it ends in awkward silence. I notice that she has very nice fingernails...non-acrylic ones, natural. I see that her thumbnail on her right hand is the longest. Time passes. We are at a round table, and a bunch of people sit down. There's bacon on my lunch plate. I grab my fork, and as I'm about to dig in, Paige starts to talk. She says that the bacon I'm about to eat isn't bacon from pigs. I continue to eat but the people around us begin to talk about bacon.

Analysis: I'm just going to say, the setting is a dream version of the lunch-area set of "Ned's Declassified", one of my favorite shows. That set is beautiful, and open. I sometimes wish that the school in the show was my own, so there's the first fulfillment. I wish to be in a more aesthetically appealing environment and my dream provided it by substituting a scene I considered to be very pretty in real life. Following Freud's decoding interpretation, it might be interesting to note that the tables were white, the doors were white, and doors had glass in them. White is often thought as pure, but even now, I'm not sure what "pure" would refer to. The flower garden, the bushes, the mulch still refer to the beauty of the environment. Finally, we get to Paige. Why she's on my left, I'm not sure. But I do know why she's not the immediate person in front of me. Since we're just acquaintances, I'm not exactly in her "posse", if you will, so she's behind another person which represents that I'm not exactly a friend to her, or not familiar with her. The homework was math. Math is a subject that usually comes easily to me, hence, I see the "math" homework as something we have in common, or some common topic we can talk about. So, there's another wish. I wished to have a few more things in common and math came into the picture. Next was a conversation. Although it was relatively pathetic, it did fulfill my wish to talk to her more (or try to talk to her more). Remember how this was dreamt in September? Now, in November, I still don't know why I noticed her nails, or why I noticed that one of them was longer than the rest. The change to a round table, I can't really explain. Maybe the rectangular one was "square" and "rigid" like my conversation. And the round table was more open, and casual (we talked about "bacon"? That's pretty random). I don't know why we talked about bacon. I really don't. But Freud asserts that every detail, as crazy or random as it may be, has some significance. I don't see it right now, but maybe I will later on. The analysis is over, basically, I've had wishes to be more of a friend, and less of an acquaintance to Paige, and my dream attempted to fulfill those (though it failed in many respects). To end this analysis, I just want to say that when I woke up from the dream, my mother had made bacon for breakfast (I'm not lying!).

I've got a few focus questions I'd like to add to the side panel. In fact, I should reorganize it. One question I'm sure my instructor would like to see is "How relevant is Freud in dream interpretation, today?". After all, he wrote this nearly a century ago. That's definitely a question I need to consider and I have a few answers, but I'll save them for another time.