"West End"

I like that scene in Good Will Hunting – when Matt Damon says the joke about the pilot who leaves his mic on and blurts out that thing about a blowjob and a cup of coffee. After not posting for so long, maybe I should just crack a joke too, to break the silence. Only that I am probably the worst person to tell the joke. I could make a stand-up audience sit down.

What I was thinking though, it's the play I watched the other day in West End. Never mind which one. What stuck with me though, wasn’t the story but the performance - precision and confidence of the actors. I like sitting in the front rows, watching them up close, spitting on everyone whilst taking, like they own the audience. Every line, every movement - deliberate and untouched by hesitation or even a tiny bit of a self-doubt. Impressive. Watching good play, one may forget the world - and only then you know you got your money’s worth. Being so close to a performance so good - as good as it gets, because where else if not the West End? - brings imagination to life. And while what I see undoubtedly gives me thrill of entertainment, it also stirs something deeper, that I can’t quite name; something in my gut goes off and stinks. No matter how good the performance, it only plays at real feeling but never truly embodies it. It’s a bit annoying - if you think about it - or maybe I was just having a bad day. So, I am sitting there, all dolled up for the occasion, second or third best seat in the house, like a perfectly folded pierog with a suspicious filling. I get a little sceptical - like the Muppet hecklers - I feel like I'm watching perfection fucking with itself and instead of admiring it, I feel like I need to unravel it. I wonder how many times they’d rehearsed alone - talking to themselves at home, speaking to the wall or imagined partners. The result is hypnotizing. But fake. Like an edited version of reality, stripped of everything that makes real human interaction what it is. Onstage, silences are intentional rather not awkward, even if they meant to be awkward. Every response lands exactly on spot, as if life itself was just a performance. Or, the other way around.

Not quite focus on the plot, my mind wanders off. In fact, I find it more interesting to watch a different kind of performance - a little play of a person onstage with themselves. Behind every character is an actor, and behind the actor, a man. And that’s what I find intriguing, that's what I dig the most, and that's why I like to sit close. So I can search for the crack where real feeling bleeds through the craft. And it’s hard to say what makes me like an actor on stage, but most of the time I do. Ironically, it’s hard to resist a good one. And only when I see one I can stop thinking and start feeling. And their performance stops being just a performance, and I actually buy what they’re selling. I am merging into the world of a man on stage, as if some part of me is unconsciously seizing what is up there for grabs. After I leave the walls of the building, for a while, I can move through the world as if I were still on their stage, carrying a trace of their presence.

Winnicott’s idea of the true self and false self has been on my mind lately. I’ve been reading about it, but I’m not sure I get it. The true self is who we are when we’re real – the deepest ingredient of the pierog (pinch of black pepper?) so to speak - unscripted and spontaneous; the false self is the version we create to fit in, to comply with expectations of the world. It’s the McDonald’s double cheeseburger that you see on the billboard. When the false self takes over, we seem just fine on the outside but feel disconnected from who we really are. It is no rocket since, and it’s rather an obvious thing to come up with. Carl Jung came up with concepts of persona and the self, and Freud structured psyche on ego and id - but hey, forget about it, because now, true to his role as the new DJ of psychoanalytic music, Mr. D.W. Winnicott keeps remixing the same old tracks, stretching it over hundreds of pages of the theory that at the end you could mould into anything you like. And as long as you make yourself sound smart, when you explain why you are not yourself to you therapist, you probably get what he meant. Hats off to you. And if you don’t, even better - because it probably means you’re normal.

Nevertheless, some of it makes sense even to me. And it’s undoubtedly something I can connect with. After all, if we can choose what we want to say, why the hell would we pick what truly think about ourselves? Because, what's the truth anyway? But at some point, we may get lost in our own play that we play. I especially like the Winnicott's phrase is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found. How much of life, I wonder, we spent in a similar performance? When you constantly run conversations through your head and rehearse what to say. When you talk to someone else, trying to fit in; and avoid feeling exposed at any cost. I can feel you, me too. And yet, I feel most connected to people most often in those rare moments when they slip out of character - when the act drops, and something real finally shows through. Maybe some of what it means is that is not too bad to sometimes feel bad. Maybe the cracks we try to hide aren’t much of a flaw but the openings through which we become ourselves and connect with the world. The self that hurts, that struggles, isn’t a failure, but a proof that the ideal isn’t what we’re truly after. And the goal, either we like it or not, isn’t to be untouchable in the performance, but rather to touch and be touched. 

So why pay for a West End show when you can just visit friends, go to work, walk down the street and have argument with your wife again, or a homeless bum for a change? Everywhere you look, it’s all just acting - unless... Oh right, now I remember! We pay cause at West End is as good as it gets and in life you just get what you get: same shit different day. But anyway, I almost forget to tell you what happened to me the other day...

“I was on this plane... And I'm sittin' there and the captain comes on and he does his whole, "We'll be cruising at 35,000 feet," then he puts the mike down but he forgets to turn it off. Then he turns to the copilot and goes, "You know, all I could go for right now is a f***in' blow job and a cup of coffee." So the stewardess f***in' goes bombin' up from the back of the plane to tell him the mic's still on, and this guy behind me goes, "Hey hon, don't forget the coffee!"

Dreams: "Runner"

(Adrian - man, age 29)

Dream:

"I was in space, inside a spaceship and I was dressed like a character from a science fiction movie - like Star Wars or Star-Trek. I had a shotgun in my hand. I held it pointed forward just as I was ready to shoot...

“If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens.” - Andrei Tarkovsky

The weapon somehow made me feel stronger. There was a little boy standing next to me, and I was holding his hand. Then behind my back I heard someone talking about me - "look at him, he is trying to be like some kind of a hero or something". These annoyed me because I didn't want to be seen as I am trying to pretend to be like someone. I replied: "not like a movie hero, I want to be like me, but with a gun". Then the little boy who was holding my hand suddenly ran away. I ran after him, but I couldn't find him anywhere."

Dream interpretation:

The dream came the night after one of the monthly meetings at work. At the meeting Adrian disagreed with one of his colleagues. After he took his voice publicly, his boss showed interest in what he was saying and asked him some questions. Adrian then felt nervous as he "had been put on the spot" and found it difficult to follow up and explain the point he made earlier. He said that when he spoke publicly, he felt shy and afterwards felt very frustrated that he could not explain more precisely what he meant. This real (awake) life context may with no doubt be the opening point for the dream interpretation.

Adrian is dressed up as a movie hero. The outfit embodies his Persona i.e., how he would like to be seen. He also has a shotgun, which he associates with strength. The gun in his hand in fact represents the subconscious compensation for how vulnerable he may have felt at the meeting. In his other hand, he holds the hand of a little boy who eventually, runs away from him. The boy is a symbol of what the dreamer perceives as his own weakness but on the other hand is also (and more importantly!) a symbol of creativity. Perhaps the creativity which he lacked when he was trying to express himself at the work meeting. And, quite literally, the creativity imprisoned by himself, or to be more precise, by his Persona. If we follow the dream, we will see that, Adrian dressed as a movie hero (Persona), holds the boy's hand (is holding to a certain idea of strength) and with his gun pointed forward (perhaps ready to verbally counter his colleague). The boys escape from the dreamer's own hands may resemble the essential (unconscious) wish and in fact symbolises the unspoken words during the work meeting.

Dreams: "Landscapes"

(Pascal, man - age 40)

Dream:

"I am in a nice apartment. Something catches my attention; the beautiful landscapes that extend over the edges of the room. Strangely when I came closer, I notice that it is only a very realistic-looking model of the landscape - not the real landscape as I thought. In the next part of the dream, I am in the same room, my brother is also there. I can’t help myself but feel some sort of self-importance, as if I had achieved something.

“The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.” - Sigmund Freud "The Interpretation of Dreams"

At the same time my brother seems to feel a bit uncomfortable in this flat. This is probably due to the fact, that I have lived there for a long time, unlike my brother who just moved in. The dream ends with a strange conversation over the phone. I make a phone call and tell someone (I don't remember who) what I recall as a fun fact. That is, that my wife was trying to teach a cat poo like a human, but this didn’t work out."

Dream interpretation:

The dream ends with the dreamer’s words: “My wife was trying to teach a cat poo like a human, but this didn’t work out.". According to Freud, dreams are representation of a “disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish”. That’s the reason why often, dreams at many cases appear very random. The more repressed the content is, the more disguised shapes dream may take in order to communicate it to the dreamer. Core message brought to Pascal’s attention, and ultimately his repressed wish is contained in his words mentioned above. But what would be uncovered meaning of something so bizarre, even in the context of the given dream plot? What does it really mean?

We may assume, that the room symbolically portraits the dreamer’s Ego as a whole. Pascal associated his brother’s presence in the room with conversation he had with his brother a few days before the dream. His brother mentioned something unpleasant that happened to him at work, to which the dreamer replied, “maybe it’s the time to ask for the promotion?”. Considering the feeling of self-importance that came to him in the dream, in contrast to how his brother feels i.e. “uncomfortable”. We may draw some conclusions. We may assume that his professional gives him a feeling of comfort. On the other hand, the edges of the room which are filled with fake landscapes, may symbolically show how the dreamer is becoming more conscious of his limitations. Professional position (“fake landscapes”) which he created over the years make him feel comfortable and fill his Ego with sense of self-importance. The dreamer gets surprised when he discovers that they are not real. Fake landscapes my also reveal a sense of illusion that his Ego clings to. As Freud once put it referring to the importance of the unconsciousness and its influence on everyone’s life “the ego is not master in its own house”. The dream symbolically reveal's this inner relationship, and fact that such idea of control of ones (Ego) own destiny maybe only illusory, and perhaps in the dreamer's case also limiting.

In order to get some insight on what I take, was ultimately the repressed content that the dream brought up to the Pascal’s attention. I asked him why his wife would want to teach a cat to poo like a human. “My wife" - he replied - “very often puts a lot of attention to be too proper in my opinion”. The dreamer also said that recently he had a very bad argument with her which eventually caused him to move out for a few days. He said that his wife made him feel like the person he wouldn’t think of himself - “I was angry at myself as I thought I came across small minded, and stingy”. He also said that he felt bad when he saw his wife leaving the room and calling her mother. The dreamer, unlike his wife, felt like didn’t have no one to talk to about it. His father passed away years ago, and he never had a good relationship with his mother. The dreamer’s association of an argument and the feeling of having (unlike his wife) no one to talk to, puts a different light on content of our interpretation. We may now look at the dream from different angle. Perhaps the edges of a room portraited as in the dream and see how they outline the feeling of being alone and trapped in the frames of his Ego. Dummy landscapes which frame that picture may symbolise a wall he builds around himself where the only person he can relate to is his brother and his work.

After moment’s thought something else came to the dreamer’s mind. That is, the recollection associated with the actual thought of cat trying to sit straight up like a human (in contrast to the animal's natural posture), brought up a certain memory. The dreamer as a child, had to wear a posture corrector on his back. Despite his aversions, his mother made sure he wore it regularly. The dreamer reported that he didn’t remember who he spoke with on the phone in his dream. This shows that the unconscious can only lay out its message to the dreamer in the disguise form, the only way to “fool” our-selves from our Self and not let our Ego cut it off. After all, it was unacceptable on the first place. Also, the dreamer couldn’t remember who he talked to on the phone, but what came to his mind whilst trying to recall that from his memory, was the phone call that him make to his mother. It was the first conversation he had with her in a couple of years. Perhaps his words “My wife was trying to teach a cat poo like a human, but this didn’t work out." resemble the argument that he had with his wife, which left him feel “small minded” (surrounded by the fake landscapes). The dreamer’s wish after all is, that he would have someone to talk to talk to. Perhaps he wishes that he could talk to his mother and be able tell her how he felt in the face of the awful argument he recently had with his wife.