Dreams: "Departure"

(Vienna - woman, age 28)

Dream:

Somehow I was aware that someone I know, the man I like, was about to fly somewhere by plane with one of his friends. I decided to surprise him and join him. When he noticed me coming inside, his eyes lit up and he looked very surprised, but at the same time was very glad to see me. He hugged me and kissed me, and I was so happy that he reacted like that.

"We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.” - Stanislaw Lem

I went to take my seat and he came with me. We were holding hands together and acting like we were in love. When we sat together I felt cosy and comfortable. He told me he was very glad to see me and asked how I finally made my decision to come. And I couldn't answer. The plane was about to take off and we all had to sit in our seats. He said that it looks like someone is sitting next to us by the window, so I have to take a different seat. I noticed that indeed, there was some stranger sleeping at the window seat. I replied that actually it's him who needs to change to a different seat, because I bought mine in order to have more space for my legs. He looked at me with his puppy eyes and I remembered that he once told me that he hates flying because it's always inconvenient for him as he is tall and doesn't have much leg room. So I got up and sat elsewhere. I was sitting in front of him a bit further. He looked at me with his eyes, and we made eye contact from time to time. I noticed that in a row behind him was sitting his friend. They are no longer in touch. The plane was waiting to take off but eventually it never did. Like there was no where to go. It happens to me often in my dreams.

Dream interpretation:

Symbolism of the plane in the dream space, points to ambition to stand up above the challenges of reality. In Vienna's dream, the plane is about to take off, and its eventual departure would manifest reaching that state, and take her beyond the troubled mind. In order to achieve such a state, she decides to suprise her friend ( a man for whom she has feelings). Subconsciously, she connects his figure in her dream with an escape/solution to the conflict taking place at the depths of her unconsciousness. Her observation, that she feels relieved when in the dream she realises, that her surprise brings him joy may suggest that, in a sense, Vienna gives away the initiative of her own feelings into someone else's (in this regard her friend's) hands. In consequence what she feels at the depth of her Self may as well highly resonate with how she feels to be perceived from the outside. The figure of a stranger sleeping by the window symbolises the obstacle on the way to fulfilling the emptiness that resonates with the reassurance of her inner sense of love. When it turns out that the seat is occupied by someone else, one of the two (either Vienna or her friend) needs to take a seat elsewhere, which is necessary for the plane to take off. But, such a course of events stands in the way of filling the deeply a unconscious void which echoes through her mind when she feels that she is not being perceived outwardly (by her friend), in the way she would wish so. Her plan was to surprise her friend and join him i.e to connect with the male aspect of her personality that is personified in her dream as one of her friends from reality (man that makes her feel fulfilled). Nevertheless, it is her who decides to surprise and join him on the plane, in order to overcome subconscious struggle in the first place. And yet, again, she is the one of two, who sacrificed her comfort (seat) in order to make it possible for the plane to take off. Does this bring the intended effect? The plot of her dream uncovers the strategy of her psychic complex which is likely to be the best known way to cope with reality. However, it doesn't bring her full satisfaction, which in parallel with the dream allowed would lift the plane (herself) off the ground. Vienna takes a seat on the opposite side, from where she is watching her friend looking at her. Her new seat reflects the perspective in which she subconsciously perceives her own person in reality. The situation in the dream takes place in a vague sense of being in someone else's (her male friend) reality. To put it another way, being seen by her friend's Glaze (in Lacan: the sense that the object of our eye's look or glance is somehow looking back at us of its own will), rather than being in the centre of her own Self. In the sequence of the passengers' seats taken in the final scene of the dream, we can see that Vienna is not at the centre of her own plot, instead, the place she takes somehow defines her friend's future in opposition to his past embodied in contrast as a friend of his (with whom she no longer has contact). She notices this man ( whom she recognizes only from the picture as one of the old friends of the man she likes) sitting in the row right behind her man, which symbolically defines the past of the man while she herself, embodies his possible future. However, she is still not next to him, that is, with him. The dream ends where the plane is circling without departing. What may raise the question why the plane does not take off again?

Dreams: "Grade"

(Boris - man, age 46)

Dream:

"I am on the school bus. At one of the stops when the door opens I am surprised to see a big river instead of the road. I see a man swimming upstream of the river.Someone says that a lot of people around here just swim like that to work every day. The river seems quite wild and dangerous and I am amazed at this man's courage and his dedication.

“Screws fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place.” - Breakfast Club

When I arrive at school I need to use the toilet but there is a queue and it turns out that only three people are allowed in despite there being so many more toilets inside. I say to someone that this is stupid and ridiculous to make people wait. Finally after I came out of the toilet I changed my trousers, but it turns out that I have put on someone else's trousers. I feel as if they do not match my adult personality and there are some stains on them as if they had traces of childish carelessness. It turns out that I came back to school after a long break to finish the last year of high school and I feel anxious whether the math's teacher will give me a pass, because I haven't attended any classes for a long time. I met her in the school hall and asked what grade she was going to give me. The teacher informs me that I will only get two, because as a rule she cannot give me a higher grade because as she says if someone "knows but doesn't care", gets only two. I was relieved because I just wanted to pass, but with the relief comes the thought that I could do more."

Dream interpretation:

School trip symbolises a journey to the memories and emotions that relate to Boris's adolescence. Reliving emotions repressed from consciousness in the dream often points out to unresolved inner conflicts linked to the same period of one's life. The man swimming in the river in a symbolic way stands in opposition to the dreamer, who is trapped inside the school bus taking him to the past. Swimming against the stream manifests intention to free himself from unconscious conflicts associated with the school period in his life. At the school, Boris has to queue in order to use the toilet. He is waiting with a sense of absurdity to limit the toilet capacity for no rational reason. The urge to use the school toilet in the dream is a metaphor of his need to release certain traumas related to childhood. He lives in the constant conflict of his adult Self, which continuously has to act-out itself in reality on the adolescent note, which can often not be adequate to the situation. To put it otherwise, Boris feels frustrated by how irrational are his uncontrolled responses (that resonate with the child's trauma) to certain stimuli to reality. The presence of this undeveloped (childish) part of his Self in his unconsciousness is symbolically uncovered when he puts on someone else's pants by mistake, a pants that resonate with some kind of immaturity which does not suit him in his opinion. His final grade, is in fact a symbol of closing the chapter of childhood that is still open in the subconscious and resonates with something that, despite the passage of years, still torments him. In consequence, now an adult man in his late forties dreams about being anxious that his teacher may fail him because he has not attended classes. In a dream, he comes face to face with his subconscious fear and asks the teacher how she intends to grade him. The teacher's words, "If someone knows but doesn't care" (can only pass with the lowest grade), can be interpreted as an liberation despite avoiding what is known in therapy as “working through” these difficult childhood emotions. In a sense, such "success" brings relief but leaves a scratch in the image of his Ego. The symbolic absolution is essentially the result of a self-acceptance that arose naturally over the years at a deeper level of the Self.

Dreams: "Gun"

(Dannika, woman - age 25)

"In a dream I live with my husband and my two children who are not his, but are from a previous relationship (In reality I don't have any kids and I am not married). I want to leave my husband. There is another man with whom I am in love, and he loves me too and asks me to leave my husband and run away with him. I have the same feelings about him and I want to leave my husband, but I am afraid of him...

“One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Suddenly the three of us are in the same room and my husband tells my lover to not to trust me, and he says that I have a gun in my left hand. And at this moment I am stunned to realise that he's right, and I do indeed have a gun in my hand. I hold the weapon in my left hand, hidden behind my jacket. On the outside my hand is replaced with an artificial hand. I shot the man in the head. I felt guilty but is strange feeling, I feel guiltyfor pretending that I did not have a gun and that my husband was right after all more than about the fact that i killed him. If that makes sense. After that, I still want to leave my husband and I try to escape twice, but I get caught each time. First time my husband was waiting for me outside and I had to listen to him and come back inside. I was afraid of him, but at the same time I saw a bit of decency in him because he took me with two children who were not even his and he cared for them and me on the way. Another time I wanted to lock him in the bathroom and escape, but just as I was about to lock the door from the outside, he suddenly opened the door and knew what I was going to do. I felt like I couldn't escape, wanted to look normal and wore sunglasses so people wouldn't see me cry and I woke up. In tears.

Dream interpretation:

In her dream Dannika is cast as a prisoner of her own morality, portrayed in a character of the husband. She perceives him, as if she owes him gratitude for the home that he made for her and her children. She is afraid of him and she wants to leave him, yet at the same time she recognizes a dose of decency about what he represents. These feelings in fact are a reflection of the feelings of gratitude towards her own parents. She is loyal to the figure of the husband in the dream, in the same way as in the parallel of reality she is tied to the ideals that were imposed in her early childhood by her parents. Plot of the dream twists when another man shows up. A dream figure of her lover manifests desires that are repressed from her consciousness. Dannika wants to leave her husband. This scenario reveals an unconscious moral conflict. The figure of the other man, symbolises Freudian "Id", that is, the part of her Psyche that demands to satisfy primordial instincts more than anything. The fact that Dannika intends to leave her husband and run away with her lover, can be interpreted as the urge to satisfy her unconscious desires. Her lover represents passions that need to be repressed in order to obey the Reality Principle. The scene where she shoots him resonates with the touch of the everlasting dilemma of humanity. The dilemma that arises from the conflict of the need to control one's own desires in order to be accepted and function in reality. It is her Superego embodied in the figure of her husband that metaphorically puts a gun in her hand. A gun that she didn't even realise existed, until it was brought to her attention by the figure of husband. The artificial hand, which covers the weapon, symbolises her Persona; the outer mask underneath which lays her power of free will, and consequently (in Dannika's case) the reason for repression of her emotions. In metaphor, and quite literally, "the choice is in her hands”, and she can either choose to fulfil her desires or to obey the reality and keep the image of her Persona. She shoots her lover in the head, and by doing so turns the object of her desire into a repressed part in her unconsciousness. As a consequence of this choice, she lives a life in line with her moral values, yet it is likely that she feels trapped and unhappy in her skin. All further attempts to escape are unsuccessful, and she becomes imprisoned in the image of herself that she had creates in reality. The tears of her soul are as real as it gets and she wakes up from the dream. Crying.