THAT DAY

After fifty years, I'm rereading Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. Halfway so far.

His dreary Irma dream, his endless analysis. Then the editor rants on too, about it being a great milestone. I think "I ought to have it in the World Dream Bank then--except I still think what I did as a teen: what a low-quality dream! Dull, anxious, shallow." And not supporting his theories. Freud claims dreams obsess on sex, but his obsess on status and reputation, lightly garnished with worry and guilt.

Better, if unexciting: the dream of Delboeuf's fern; at least Freud draws the sensible conclusion that the unconscious forgets nothing, is cryptomnesic (unlike Stephen La Berge, who claims even lucid dreams can't remember a printed message or a clockface for two minutes... sorry, they can't both be true. So dream fluidity may be a choice not amnesia; and continuity can't prove you're awake.)

Maury's famous dream Guillotine. What's Freud think? Well, he takes it for granted the dream was instantaneous and is proof others are too--sees no other possibility. And modern sleeplab research has so far found no instantaneity, leaving orthodoxy no plausible explanation for this spectacular dream. There's precognition... but Freud's not going there! Not respectable.

Half a century and I haven't changed my mind. Freud's world of dreams has exactly nothing in common with mine. Dreamers like me just don't exist. Why waste time on him?

THAT NIGHT

I'm in the back yard of the little tract-home where I lived, age 3 to 9.

Sneak around and peek in. The current owners look like 1950s clichés--the Happy Housewife bakes, while her husband the Bearded Professor smokes his pipe and reads something scholarly.

I spy on him from the narrow shady westside alley. Through the window? No, he & his Armchair and Reading Lamp are in the alley. Odd! But the alley's narrow with wide eaves, so in storms maybe the Chair stays dry and the Lamp doesn't short. Or maybe they're slowly growing mold...

I've gotten the intel I need, so I retreat--south then east through the back yard. But... it turns into the Freudian Underworld. Dim caves, pools. Sewers! Low eyes gleam, claws scuttle--rats! Ugh. I lead a timid chubby round-faced boy in early teens along a path of stepping stones, over the water--or is it sewage? Not too foul--damp, musty, just hints of sulfur and rust--but we better not wade in that murk.

North along the wider eastside alley. We reach the gate out of the underworld... but we can't just walk down the driveway! The Happy Housewife will see from the kitchen window.

Ah! A hedge I don't recall. Lets us--no, me, I'm alone now--slip through gap into neighbor's yard to the east, out of the Housewife's view, and slink down THEIR drivway to the street, and walk away.

Whew! Escaped the lair of Freud.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Visit the patriarchal, tobacco-stained past: this edition of The Interpretation of Dreams has a biographical section with photos of Papa Freud's family.
• Anxious, don't rouse them: 1: echoes Freud's anxiety in his dream Irma's Injection. 2: "Don't rouse the sleeping Freudian dogma that got pushed on you as a kid!" Pop psychology was still heavily Freudian when I was little. It's hard to fairly read the source of dogma I saw debased & misused.
• Underworld sewer complex: Freud's own picture of dreams and the unconscious. Pretty dreary.
• The boy I led: not me when young, but an older kid down the block who hid in his room. Sexual repression, neurotic shyness--things Freud understood! I was shy too, but I hid a lot more than sex: shamanic senses, dreams and worldviews that Freud's disciples just denied. Still do.
• Stepping stones: we had these in the yard, with cloverlike dichondra between, not sewage. I'd forgotten that word "dichondra"--cryptomnesia! Echoes the Latin name of the ferns in Delboeuf's cryptomnesic dream.
• Hedge: as I built a list of WDB dreams to illustrate, saw The Hedgehog Dispensary, a sexy furry futuristic dream I watercolored as a comic. So unFreudian! A total contrast to this. Yet it wasn't escapist; it dealt seriously with pain.
• ACTION: Forget Freud. His dreamworld's a dim grim sewer. I can dream better. And maybe, O Beloved Reader, you can too.

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