(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?
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