The Remains Of The Day
I woke up this morning to the insistent buzzing of my cellphone. Grumpy and disoriented, I stumbled into my living room only to discover that my cellphone had multiplied - where once there was one, there were five or six. Immediately sizing up the situation, as one who is dreaming can so readily do, I set about to waking myself. For me, this usually involves opening my eyes as wide as possible, hoping, I gather, to trigger some corresponding effect in the waking world. Upon finally waking, I stumbled into my living room, grumpy and disoriented, only to find the screen of my computer monitor peeling from its frame. Frustrated, I set out once again, expanding my eyelids in an exaggerated manner.
As Freud has become synonymous with the unconscious, it seems almost injudicious to couch his psychoanalytical discourse in the trajectory of Enlightenment thought. Yet his Interpretation of Dreams is a positivist work of the most insidious nature: the reduction of the last bastion of Romantic thought - the dream world - to concise scientific formula. Or as Freud wrote, "What animals dream of I do not know. There is a proverb, mentioned to me by one of my students, which claims to know, for it asks the question: What does a goose dream of? and answers: Corn. The entire theory that the dream is a wish-fulfilment is contained in these two sentences." Even my bizarre, labyrinthine dream, while distorted in the veil of the remains of the day, stemmed from simple wish-fulfillment: having read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams I set about to undermine his theory by dreaming my way into disrupting my own dreams - perhaps to even prevent myself from discovering the true nature of my unconscious desires!
Or something like that. Freud was more adept at twisting dreams through his counter-intuitive psychoanalytical apparatus than I am - usually with something sexual, no matter how oblique the connection, underpinning the entire interpretation. In the explication of one of his own dreams, it is the word trimethylamine which bafflingly triggers a sexual aetiology to the whole endeavor. Ticking clocks, chemical compounds, train stations - for Freud, it all leads back to the sexual somehow.
This is quite an elaborate exposition for very little pay off.
At a holiday party a few years ago, I was describing to some friends how I was having a reoccurring problem with my sex dreams. Right before the explicit act, something would occur, derailing the entire dream. If all dreams emanate from wish-fulfillment surely there was a reason for such ego interference. My friend Matt commiserated:
MATT: "I totally have that same problem. Last night I dreamt that I was doing calculus with Pamela Anderson and Jenna Jameson... And we totally got it on!"
LOGAN: "That doesn't sound anything like my dream."
MATT: "Oh yeah. You're right!"
As Freud has become synonymous with the unconscious, it seems almost injudicious to couch his psychoanalytical discourse in the trajectory of Enlightenment thought. Yet his Interpretation of Dreams is a positivist work of the most insidious nature: the reduction of the last bastion of Romantic thought - the dream world - to concise scientific formula. Or as Freud wrote, "What animals dream of I do not know. There is a proverb, mentioned to me by one of my students, which claims to know, for it asks the question: What does a goose dream of? and answers: Corn. The entire theory that the dream is a wish-fulfilment is contained in these two sentences." Even my bizarre, labyrinthine dream, while distorted in the veil of the remains of the day, stemmed from simple wish-fulfillment: having read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams I set about to undermine his theory by dreaming my way into disrupting my own dreams - perhaps to even prevent myself from discovering the true nature of my unconscious desires!
Or something like that. Freud was more adept at twisting dreams through his counter-intuitive psychoanalytical apparatus than I am - usually with something sexual, no matter how oblique the connection, underpinning the entire interpretation. In the explication of one of his own dreams, it is the word trimethylamine which bafflingly triggers a sexual aetiology to the whole endeavor. Ticking clocks, chemical compounds, train stations - for Freud, it all leads back to the sexual somehow.
This is quite an elaborate exposition for very little pay off.
At a holiday party a few years ago, I was describing to some friends how I was having a reoccurring problem with my sex dreams. Right before the explicit act, something would occur, derailing the entire dream. If all dreams emanate from wish-fulfillment surely there was a reason for such ego interference. My friend Matt commiserated:
MATT: "I totally have that same problem. Last night I dreamt that I was doing calculus with Pamela Anderson and Jenna Jameson... And we totally got it on!"
LOGAN: "That doesn't sound anything like my dream."
MATT: "Oh yeah. You're right!"
posted by d l wright at 5/14/2006 08:32:00 PM
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