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.