(Pascal, man - age 40)
Dream:
"Myself and my very good friend, are in the middle of the desert. In a dream, we are both children and on vacation. We feel very excited about the upcoming fun. We are inside a huge crater, it is hot and sunny all around. I decide to climb to go up to the top of this crater. I leave my friend and alone, walk up a very steep slope...
“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.” - F.Scott Fitzgerald
When I get to the top It's hard to explain but I feel like I have fallen into something bad, like taking some drug or getting involved in some shady business. I come back completely bumped up with a stings of guilt on my shoulders. The visit to the top of the hill seems to have irreversible consequences. I feel very bad when I come back to my friend, as if something irreversible happened to me over there. My friend is still excited about the vacation and everything, but now, I can't help but feel terribly concerned. And I am not quite sure why? I can't remember what exactly happened and what is the source of all these disturbing feelings, but i just feel awful, it almost feels as if someone just fucked me up there. At this point, the plot of the dream changes, now we both are older, and of our normal age. A friend of mine talks about how time flies and he seems very serious on this matter. His reasoning is that our childhood and vacation that were in the first part of the dream have passed as if in the blink of an eye, and we inevitably move towards the soon death. I try to cheer him up a bit and I say that we can frame the same situation in a positive manner. I try to explain that now ,we are exactly the same age as our parents were at the time when we were on this vacation in a dream we just had. And I say that, if we look at it that way, we may as well see another life ahead of us, which for some reason, and may sound odd, but in a sense, is the life of our parents. At least that is how it feels at the time I say it; just as I live someone else's life. At this moment I realise that I can either follow this reasoning, or turn it around and decide the future myself despite the past."
Dream interpretation:
The idea of upcoming vacations refers to the dreamer's childhood and unveils the feelings of anticipation and innocence that he must have felt at that time. For some reason these emotions become repressed and kept closed inside the subconscious mind (inside the crater). The dream is parallel to life itself, it doesn't give away one explicit memory nor the reason for its repression. However these emotions came from the depth of the subconscious mind to the dreamer’s attention. What the dreamer experiences when he arrives inside the crater could relate to the singular repressed memory, or it could be a story made up by the subconscious mind in order to represent a certain mindset from his adolescence. Upon interpretation, we should not confuse what's made up with what is not real. In fact, in the light of the subconscious mind the so-called “made up” emerges as the essence of the real. It evokes experience as pure as the rough diamond, unblemished by any hasty conclusions that one's mind would prompt to attach to it, depending on the stance of its Ego. Isn't that exactly what I am doing now?
The dreamer finds himself to be a young boy again. He is accompanied by his childhood friend and they arrive for vacation in the middle of a desert. The crater symbolises the essence of the dreamer’s childhood, a place where he can feel safe. Inside the crater, he is protected from the depth of the desert which in turn symbolises the unknown features of the upcoming life, or in the paralell of the analycal psychology his own subconcious mind. Nonetheless, the dreamer decides to go up the hill. Such a journey may be a manifestion of some forgotten memories that turned to be overwhelming, yet left an imprint of coming out of age. Whatever happened upon the top of the hill in the dream, resonates with memories that were pushed back into the subconcious, and may have had an inevitable consequencess upon his childhood and perhaps his life - "I almost feel like someone just fucked me up there" - such a load of aggressive emotions comes from a deeply anchored animal instinct that came to the fore when the plot of the dream touched the emotions pushed into the subconscious. In other words, the trip up the hill reveals the loss of childhood innocence.
The dream consists of two separate parts. At the beginning Pascal is taken back to his childhood, where he gets in touch with the memories that appear as the personal recollection of the feeling of freedom, and an almost electrifying excitement of the libidinal force that he must have felt at that time. The second part of the dream, in contrast, resonates with the grown up parts of himself. Where he is at the task of realisation of the meaning behind dream. We could say that the first part relates to the dreamer's emotions whilst the second with his conscious mind. What he described as the crater, is in fact a place that still exists in his subconscious mind. Just like the land of mythological Kairos it consists of the essence of pure nature framed as the singular moment caught in time i.e. the childhood memory. A moment of anticipation for an upcoming vacation that was cut through something that forced him to suppress the whole memory and now comes back to him in the dream.
In the second part he comes to the dialogue with his friend when both men are adults. The dialogue about the passing may resonate as the parallel of the mythological encounter of two Greek Gods of time. A moment ago a young boy, and now an adult man can represent a mythological Kairos who faces the Shadow-like figure of his friend. In the frames set by the dream scenario the Shadow consists of the features of the first Greek God of time Kronos. Who was Kairos's father and in the dreamer context personifies his own Shadow. During a short dialogue, his friend unveils the deep fear of death and sets the narration for what we previously defined as the ”lost innocence", in a devouring sense of being consumed by what in turn might be described as an adulthood. Thereupon, the dreamer (i.e. Kairos) comes to the very important realisation that in spite of the fact that the cycle of his life essentially relates to his parents, there still is a way (and the need) to come out of this circle.
Comments