Dream Analysis
Freud Would Hate This.
Most days I wake up knowing I’ve had a dream about something but can’t for the life of me remember what. This morning was different. I won’t bore you with the details, because honestly, nothing is more tedious than a person recounting a dream, unless that dream involves the person it is being recounted to in a shocking or funny way. But I will say it involved backing a van into a small parking space in a parking garage, making a bed, and escaping from bad guys through a closet that turned out to have a trapdoor in the ceiling.
I used to try to interpret my dreams but finally concluded that even though they were full of sound and fury and, on occasion, naked David Cassidy of The Partridge Family, they signified nothing. But then, Dr. Williams, the psychiatrist my parents sent me to when I was sixteen, was all about Freudian dream analysis. In fact, I used to make up dreams so we’d have something to talk about. I’m sure he was hoping for snakes and tunnels but all I gave him was showing up at school in my underwear. Secretly, I enjoyed making him think my subconscious was a dead end, which speaks to why I needed a psychiatrist in the first place.
But I digress. I woke this morning with the dream I’d had and mulled it over. As much as the dream had many moving parts, my general sense was that I’d handled them all well. The van got parked and bed made. I eluded the bad guys. And now, the sun was rising, and I was ready to start the day.
Though I maintain that dream analysis is a shaky nail upon which to hang your hat, last night, I think I subconsciously retraced my life over the past few years. I accomplished the things with which I was tasked, some difficult and scary, and others, mundane. In the end, I did okay. Rounding everything, this moment, right in front of my eyes, is this real-life sunrise, an ending metaphor that I know is such a cliché but one I happily leave to interpretation.