I was sent to a Jungian analyst when I was in high school because at least one of my parents thought it would help me become less snarky and maybe more outdoorsy and certainly more focused on being a good person in the wider world and less on, like, cute boys that don’t like me and omg, what if people think I’m a poser. Said therapist correctly ascertained upon intake that I was a late-blooming sixteen, drowning in hormones and teenage bullshit, that getting my head out of my own ass would require an act of God or a time machine and she wasn’t getting paid enough for that.
So instead of uselessly casting about in my subconscious for something archetypal or transformational, my therapist spent several months listening to me bitch a little about the particular tyranny of floppy-haired boys and then told me about the times her young heart had been broken in what sounded like a lushly cinematic Italian adolescence. I don’t know that hearing about what Marcello with the poetic eyes said to my therapist after he kissed her tenderly at dusk by the old Roman fountain on the untended edge of a Tuscan olive grove was exactly therapeutic, but it did confirm that I’d been born into the wrong body at the wrong place and the wrong time. Was this a better parental expenditure toward my greater well-being than a new-to-me piece of shit car? Probably not, but my therapist was beautiful and she had a beautiful office and a beautiful Italian-accented cigarettes and chianti contralto voice, which meant the overall effect was something like having Isabella Rossellini smile knowingly at you for 50 minutes a week.
I’d hoped to gain some insight into the world of dream analysis, which, like Tai Chi and Bill Clinton, seemed to be a thing that the adults of my world were way into in the early 1990s. I’d picked up an old paperback at the thrift shop that purported to explain what dreams meant. Most of which seemed pretty obvious (your dream your teeth fall out=you are anxious) and not very helpful to me personally. I could not find a single chapter, for example, about what it meant if you dreamed that Robert Smith from the Cure kept showing up for breakfast in your childhood home to perform a “Hee Haw”-inspired skit about canned ravioli. This might have been a good question for my Jungian analyst but to be honest, I’d become really invested in what was going on with Marcello and how he totally lied when he said he had mono and instead took Graziella with the pink bikini to Viareggio for the day in his new Fiat.
Fucking Marcello. That’s what “poetic eyes” will get you. Every. Time.
Even then, I was mostly of the mind that dreams didn’t really mean anything. Or to paraphrase my mother, in her attempt to quell my childhood fear of ghosts, “they only mean something if you want them to.” I didn’t think I wanted them to. My dreams seem to follow a pretty clear, shimmy-through the over-stuffed rubbish room of my brain. They’re sometimes anxious, occasionally scary, and usually mildly entertaining. Sometimes they follow a plot structure, which is awesome, and even better are the times when I realize I’m in a dream and am therefore able to have some control of the outcome without consequence. Like the time I was able to stop a horde of ravenous vampires chasing me by remarking to the leader that he bore an uncanny resemblance to Joey Ramone (His response: “Really? I’m a huge Ramones fan. How flattering!”). Or the time I visited a hairdresser who was maybe Javier Bardem and talked him into giving me a Mia Farrow “Rosemary’s Baby”-ish restyle and we ended up fooling around in the kind of idyllic Italian seaside town that Marcello would have frequented, drinking prosecco that was illuminated by the same stars that were glittering over the Mediterranean (reader: that was a very good dream).
I guess you could try to stitch together some complex over-arching narrative about my identity and mental health (like I’m slightly anxious, overly imaginative, easily distracted, and spend too much time making up stories and thinking about the past? Caught me), but if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that you can string together complex, over-arching narratives about pretty much anything if you have the will and enough time on your hands. That doesn’t make said narratives true or useful. The pizza place is just a pizza place not a global cannibal sex conspiracy. The real-feeling, granular detail dreams about leading a political rebellion in a starkly beautiful landscape are a result of watching “Andor” (which is great, ps) upon immediate return from Scottish Highlands, not a scene from a past life.
Still, I like the dreams. I often remember them. I used to write them down. I got some decent story material from the ol’ subconscious junk drawer, including the start of an old, not-great, but at least completed first novel. I like hearing about other people’s dreams too, which some of you probably will take as sign that I’m a masochist. I’m just nosy and you never know where you’ll find good material. Sometimes I remember the dreams you tell me, too. Especially the funny ones and the scary ones and the funny, scary ones (often my favorite).
For much of the last couple of years, my dreams have been breathless slogs through political and pandemic related anxieties. I honestly don’t know how many times I woke up in a panic because I realized, in the dream, that I was at the mall shopping without a mask or realizing that I’d grown unspeakably old and out of touch, subsisting on quarantine stores, stuck in my house, without knowing that the rest of the world had moved on. Most of them were so quotidian that their drab, repetitive banality made them somehow more anxious. At their worst, they were nightmares: locked hospital wards full of faceless specters, yellow air so thick that each breath paralyzed another part of me, people chased down and murdered in my yard, in front of me and I could do nothing to stop it.
I don’t know if it’s that I’ve gotten used to the uncertainty of now (because now is certainly no less unsettling) but most of these have subsided. I’m delighted I’m back to the old trash heaps, one minute plotting revolution in a Viking-themed amusement park on a high green peak, then turning over and finding myself in heated argument with my old record store co-workers about how to handle customers that trying to special order bootlegs of the World Series on VHS just so they can watch a surprise seventh inning performance from a new Bonnie Tyler jukebox musical. “Just sell them a copy of the Footloose soundtrack,” my coworker said, in last night’s, “All they want is Holding Out for a Hero” (truer words).
It’s good to know my brain is still doing the stupid thing. It might not be useful, or meaningful, but like a glamorous Italian lady telling you about her teenage heartbreak, it’s weirdly comforting.
Tiny Commotions 