I’ve been having much more vivid dreams recently. I’m going to attempt to recount, in detail, yesterday’s nightmare and then use my very limited understanding of dream analysis to tell you what I think it ‘means’. I expect this to be, on all counts, a resounding failure.
THE DREAM
Last night’s dream went as follows:
There’s a man outside the window. His face is wrapped in a bandana, with his hood up, so you can only really see the eyes. He’s got a girl next to him, and they’re both pressed up against the glass. This is happening at my grandmothers house. For some reason I understand that the intent of this man’s crimes are not just material but violent. I take off running to the back of the garden gate, fumbling with the lock. He catches up to me. I don’t remember the next part.
The next thing I remember is waking up and I’m at my girlfriend’s house. Her mother is telling me I need to leave, and rather than sending me home she’s sending me to some 6-week camp, and I can see the man with the bandana face on the cover of the leaflet she’s showing me. I’m begging not to go. I don’t want to leave the house. Somebody comes to the door to escort me.
When I get to the camp we’re all sat on a long table, like in Harry Potter. I’m talking to the guys next to me; they’re telling navy SEAL-esque stories about bravado and intensity. I don’t like this camp with the bandana man. Someone behind me picks up a spider, a big one, the kind where you can see it’s whole body and if you look closely, it’s eyes, and asks me if I’m scared of spiders. I understand that the right answer is no, even as my body stiffens up. They leave me alone. I feel an overwhelming desperation to get out of here.
A camp leader asks me to run to the nearby store for some food. I know this is my chance to get out. Briefly, I deliberate staying for the whole six weeks, because the experience cost £40 and I didn’t want to put my mother out of pocket. I very quickly resolved that I would be more than willing to pay her back double the amount just to get out of here.
I took off and sheltered in a nearby McDonalds. A voice says something about ‘real food’, but I’ve forgotten who it was and what they said. The man with the bandana is stalking around, the girl nowhere to be seen, and all I can think about is how dreadful it would be to be back in the camp, with no friends, communicating with my girlfriend through cryptic letters, for six weeks. The anxiety of getting caught is bubbling over, too much to bear, and I start to feel myself breaking.
I genuinely don’t know if I was about to give myself back into the bandana man or not. This is where the dream ends, with my rising anxiety, in the McDonalds, hiding from the bandana man.
I, for some reason, remember that dream in exceptional detail. Usually, I wake up from a particularly memorable dream and feel like I have to get it down instantly, because I can sense the details slipping out of my mind from the second I’m awake. Usually I don’t write it down at all, trying instead to recount it to my girlfriend later in the day, which always turns into a stuttering mess of threads, given that I’ve forgotten the central plot. I am writing this dream down a bit earlier - trying to make a habit of it - but even so, I’ve remembered more than I would have expected to.
I’ve never really looked at dream analysis before. I did a module at university this year on Literature and Psychoanalysis, and we looked at The Interpretation of Dreams as a the main reading and discussion focus for couple weeks. I honestly don’t remember too much of that work, save for the manifest/latent content distinction, and the rat-man case. I go back and forth on how much I ‘believe’ in the whole idea of dream-interpretation, which is probably a silly thing to say.
In any case, I couldn’t begin to give you a psychoanalytically solid argument as to what I thought the different elements of this dream meant. I have a few conjectures about specific details to offer:
PIECEMEAL ANALYSIS
Grandma’s house as the setting - It’s an old place, they’ve had the place for 50 years, with lots of religious iconography around the house and sometimes at night I hear things creaking. It’s a mildly scary place if I’ve just watched or read something scary, and I could freak myself out easily sitting in the living room, in the dark at night, by myself, for example. Also I’m there right now. Pretty confident in that being a decent explanation for the setting.
Fumbling with the back garden gate lock - this feels pretty obvious to me. It’s a horror movie trope, right? Trying to get away from the big Evil Monster but you trip over a branch / the door won’t open / it’s a dead end, as the monster slowly advances on you. The back garden gate is simply the furthest point away from the house, so there’s nothing spectacular about that. Again, seems to have a mundane explanation.
My girlfriend’s mother - this is where it gets really interesting. I have a good relationship with my girlfriend’s mother, certainly not the kind where I’d expect her to try and ship me off to what seems to have been a pretty intense kind of bootcamp. I can’t really make sense of this detail, her being the one to send me off - why not my own mother? I see enough of my girlfriend’s mother that it isn’t strange for her to be making an appearance in the dream itself, but her hostility and desire to get me out of there seem, at least to me, misaligned with reality. Or so I’d hope.
The camp itself - I’ve never really been to a proper like, leave your kids crying at the door kind of camp. I’ve worked at a half-term sports camp. I went to a boarding school but didn’t actually board. I don’t really know why this was a setting. I guess it’s just distance from family, more terrifying when the only people you have to go to, the camp ‘leaders’, are the ones who are causing all this fear. Probably something like that but I don’t really have a good explanation.
The spider incident - I am deathly scared of spiders. Also a similar incident happened at the sports camp when I was working just earlier this summer (was not quite as malicious), probably still in the back of my mind.
The overwhelming anxiety of escape - this probably says something more interesting about my general psychology than anything else. I’ve said before about fearing the chase more than the actual encounter, were I ever to be thrust into a horror movie. I’ve loudly, falsely proclaimed my desire to just ‘curl up in a ball and let them catch me’ rather than actually try to escape, thinking I’d probably faint from the adrenaline (and it would be utterly terrifying). Obviously I know that not a word of that is true. I have a survival instinct, and in any even remotely similar situation I have / always will try to get out of it one way or another. I would never simply surrender my life, my total conscious lived experience. And I know that adrenaline wouldn’t make you faint in a situation like that, because that would be pretty counterproductive. But it’s a joke really, a comment I’ve made on more than one occasion about situations similar to this, and that’s why I think it’s featured here.
AN UNDERLYING THREAD?
The above analysis is fine and something I take completely. I may have gotten the explanations themselves wrong; I may have gotten all of them wrong. But regardless, that aspect of dream analysis makes total sense to me. Explaining certain motifs, themes, objects by reference to real-world symbols and events seems uncontroversial.
What I find harder to grasp is the notion of there being some unifying explanation, a one-thread response to the dream as a whole which explains, in totality, what the dream meant. I think this is pretty impossible to achieve. I may have the entire institution of psychoanalysis laughing at my ignorance right now, but from my naive tower it seems incredulous. I figure two people could have substantively the same dream, like word for word the one I’ve described above, and yet have totally different psychological origins or effects. But then again I may well be wrong. I don’t really have anything to back up what I’m saying except a feeling of deep conviction.
In any case, I woke up very thankful I wasn’t at bootcamp.
Saw the title and got really worried for nonna