Real Kato Blog: What Dreams May Come

I sometimes do dream analysis for my friends. Here's a peek inside my own psyche.

Dreams are the source of such mystery to us: no one else can ever see our dreams, and we frequently don't understand them.

I've read a couple of books on dream analysis, including Freud's, which is really still the defining work on the topic. Mostly, the various books seem to agree that the subconscious mind is expressing its desires and fears using images, and what we remember as "dreams" are our conscious interpretations of those images.

So, I'm somewhat of an oddball in that I like it when people tell me about the dreams they had the night before. I like to dive in and help people figure out the symbolism. Sometimes it leads to an interesting revelation; sometimes it's pretty mundane.

Back when I was in college, I wrote down a few of my dreams and ran through the interpretations. The result was pretty consistent: I was extremely paranoid. A lot of my dreams involved vast conspiracies against me, perpetuated by unseen evil forces. That evaluation actually was extremely helpful to me: I realized that paranoia was having a detrimental effect on my relationships with people. So I changed my behavior as a result of my self-psychoanalysis. By the time I graduated from college, I was a very different person.

Here's a dream I remember from last night. I was sitting in some sort of giant restaurant, but all the seating was bar stools and long bar tables. At some point, some kind of parade or show started up, and a line of people started snaking its way through the restaurant. Some of the people were patrons; others were dressed in elaborate costumes with giant foam heads on them. But people weren't walking; the parade was driven by some sort of hidden conveyor belt. Somehow my bar stool got on the conveyor belt, and suddenly I was part of the parade. I just sat on the stool and went where the conveyor belt took me. The parade seemed kind of aimless; at one point I was behind a bar, then I was behind a counter with a taffy machine... no one could figure out what the parade was supposed to be about.

So what this dream means is that I'm somewhat of an unwilling participant in the Parade of Life. I like to sit and observe; and if I do participate, I'm uncomfortable following the same path as everyone else, especially if there is no apparent purpose to it. The reason this dream is significant is that I've recently been thinking about all the pressure I feel to get married and have kids, and to follow the same life track as everyone else; and, I've been worrying about the consequences if I didn't follow that track. So the dream provided me with no answers, but it did tell me a little bit about my fears.

The dream evolved a bit as it went on. I reached the end of the parade route in an adjoining room, where people were eating breakfast. I got up off my stool, and someone took it away. I wanted to sit and join people at breakfast but I didn't have a place to sit, whereas everyone else seemed to have an assigned seat. I saw a bunch of women at a table; they were all married friends of mine. They let me squeeze into their table and I ordered pancakes and sausage. The plate arrived and it was just one tiny pancake and one sad-looking sausage, but I was still grateful for it.

It took me a while to figure this one out, but it has to do with blogging, of all things! Many of the blogs I read are "mommy blogs". I seem to have tapped into a giant interconnected community of mommy blogs, primarily via Suburban Bliss*. Now I'm getting more web traffic as a result; it's a mere trickle compared to popular sites like Suburban Bliss and Dooce, but it's something. And although I still feel like an outsider among all the mommies, I'm grateful to be included in the community. So to all the mommies out there: thanks for the pancakes and sausage.

Just don't ask Freud what the sausage means.

*Don't go to suburbanbliss.net. Someone else bought the domain and Melissa no longer writes there.

Permalink 1 Comment

Posted by Ken in: life

Comments

Comment #1 from minty (Guest)
2005 Feb 20 - 8:26 pm : #

Fascinating! I love hearing about other peoples' dreams. I used to jot mine down in a notebook I kept beside the bed, and think about them later. It's been a long time since I remembered any dreams, but when I do I think I'll start writing them down again, and write in my blog about any interesting ones!

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