It came in a dream

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speakup

The other day... No, that's wrong. The other night, I had a dream in which I ended up playing with a gigantic panther as if it were a kitten. This is supposed to have some hidden meaning.

The interpretation of dreams has been around for a very long time. Remember Joseph and the Pharaoh's dreams?

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Fredericton where I visited a used book store. Sitting atop one pile was a huge volume bearing the title, The Interpretation of Dreams. It seemed to be about 800 pages or so. That's just a guess, because I didn't even pick if up. I don't want to know that much about dream interpretation.

Freud and his colleagues got pretty involved in the meanings behind dreams. As far as I understand it, they listened to a lot of their patients talking about their dreams and built theories about dream interpretation based on those stories.

Now, the Freudians tell us that our conscious minds block most of our dreams and disguise what we do remember. That means that our minds are presenting us with interpretations of what we really dreamed. So, the psychiatrists take our interpretations and interpret them. They then build theories of interpretation based upon interpretations of interpretations. They then use those theories of interpretation to interpret additional dreams, present us with their interpretations and pronounce us cured.

And that's why I didn't bother to even look beyond the cover of that book. I figure that I'm quite happy with the thought that I was playing with a panther in my dream. I don't want to find that it had some sinister hidden meaning that is probably best left alone. My dreams are my business, right? Of course they are.

When I was much, much younger, I had a friend who was studying psychology. He told me that my dreams weren't really what I thought they were. He explained, in rather dogmatic fashion, that dreams about flying have to do with sex. He gave explanations about dreams of falling and swimming and so on. I suggested that this might not always be true. It always seemed to me that if a pilot says he dreams about flying, then it may well be that he was dreaming about flying. I suspect that if, say, a sky diver dreams about falling its meaning may be very different from a similar dream that comes to, say, a construction worker. I bet that Olympic swimmers dream about swimming, and there's no reason to attach any deeper meaning to it.

Of course, there are probably people who dream about sinister things and disguise them as something else. That, supposedly, is the way they tell themselves that the things running through their heads are acceptable. I imagine that those involved in organized crime dream about things that would shock us, but for them it's perfectly normal. I can't for the life of me imagine what lawyers dream about. It's not the sort of thing you want to think about.

I recall one dream that came to me a few years ago. This was back in the days when the editor of this newspaper laid out the front page on his computer rather than having it done by the composition folks. I had the page done when it fell off the monitor screen and broke on the floor. I screamed, and the whole newspaper staff came running to my side. They started picking up the pieces and taping them back on the screen. At this point, I woke up laughing.

There, all you analysts and such, interpret that one.