I Analyze My Dreams
Here are my thoughts about a dream I had last week:
Upon retiring on the evening of November 6, 2017 I had the following distressing dream. I had had a therapy session with my therapist earlier that afternoon.
[i]I was about to enter my third year of law school. I received a letter from the law school that read: “You have completed only 57% of the course credits required for graduation.” Of course, I should have completed 66% of my course credits. In a panic I thought, “How am I going to squeeze all the courses I need into one year.”[/i]
Does the dream reflect my concern about my mortality? Was I really expressing the idea, “How am I going to squeeze all the things I want to accomplish in the remaining years I have?”
The dream reminds me of Erikson’s observations about Freud (Insight and Responsibility).
[i]
Freud at times [during the 1890s when he was in his forties] expressed some despair and confessed to some neurotic symptoms which reveal phenomological aspects of a creative crisis. He suffered from a “railroad phobia” and from acute fears of an early death—both symptoms of an overconcern with the all too rapid passage of time. “Railroad phobia” is an awkwardly clinical way of translating Reisefieber—a feverish combination of pleasant excitement and anxiety. But it all meant, it seems, on more than one level that he was “coming too late,” that he was “missing the train,” that he would perish before reaching some “promised land.” He could not see how he could complete what he had visualized if every single step took so much “work, time and error.”[/i]
Preceding events:
On the afternoon of the dream (Monday, November 6, 2017) I had a psychotherapy session. I was in a notably depressed mood, especially in comparison with the two previous therapy sessions at which I displayed an almost hypomanic state of excitement. In the two previous sessions I had talked nonstop, without therapist intervention, for 50 minutes. I attributed my depressed state on November 6 to a kind of “post-partum depression.” I told the therapist that I had finished the novel I had been working on since January 2014. I said that I had read that creative people can experience a kind of post-partum depression when they complete a project. I said that I felt the same way in the year 2004 after I had completed my last novel.
The theme of the manifest dream was the three-year law program. Likewise, pregnancy is measured in trimesters from the first day of the woman’s last menstrual period, totaling 40 weeks. The first trimester of pregnancy is week 1 through week 12, or about 3 months. The second trimester is week 13 to week 27. And the third trimester of pregnancy spans from week 28 to the birth. Like law school, pregnancy is a time limited event.
A lifetime is a time-limited event beginning with birth and ending in death. Perhaps, Freud would have been fascinated by this dream as it suggests the riddle of the Sphinx that Oedipus solved. The Sphinx posed the question: What walks on four legs, then two legs, and finally on three legs. Oedipus found the answer to the riddle with ease, replying: “Man, who as a baby crawls on four legs, then walks on two legs as an adult and in old age walks with a cane as his third leg…” That is, the span of a person’s life is divided into three parts. Is this dream Oedipal in some way? Note how I had previously talked about how I see things I am not supposed to see. I solve riddles I am not supposed to solve. I had linked this propensity to the primal scene and my drive for forbidden knowledge.
Also, in my second year of law school I took a course in constitutional law where we studied the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion ruling that framed the pertinent legal issues in terms of the trimester format.
A psychotherapy session is a time-limited event confined to a 50-minute period. At a previous therapy session I struggled with the issue of whether or not it is appropriate to begin a session with material that had been left unsaid at the end of the previous session. I had said to the therapist: “Last week, at the end of the session, I wanted to mention an anecdote and you stopped me. You said we had run out of time. You suggested that I could talk about the anecdote at the next session. Well, you know I’m an obsessive person and I obsessed about that issue in a philosophical way for the last week. Should I tell you what I wanted to tell you last time, or leave it unsaid? I’m inclined not to tell you the anecdote I wanted to mention last time. A therapy session should be “in the moment.” This week I should begin talking about what is on my mind this week, and not what I wanted to say last week but didn’t get a chance to say. I struggled with that issue. I was thinking of something. You know when a young person dies, maybe he’s 30 years old — he’s married and has young kids and people will say, “He was so young. He’ll never get a chance to see his kids grow up–get married, have kids.” But another way of looking at it is: he lived the life that he lived. That was his life. He did what he did. That was his life. It’s like a composer, maybe he dies young and maybe he could have gone on to write all kinds of great music, but he wrote what he wrote in his lifetime and that’s it. He’s judged based on what he wrote in his lifetime. When Beethoven died, that was it. There was no next session for Beethoven. There was no continuation for him to say what he wanted to say. He died when he died, and that was it. He wrote what he wrote. I’m thinking maybe a therapy session is like that. A narrative is what it is and when the 50 minutes are done, that’s it. The next session, you start anew based on what’s on your mind the next week. You begin a new narrative. The old narrative is what it is at the end of the 50 minutes. That’s it. Therapy is not a debriefing. It’s not me telling you the story of my life. It’s about what is on my mind in the moment.”
The reference in the dream to the number 57 is possibly significant. Beethoven died in his 57th year. The following is a related dream I had about Beethoven, four years ago. The dream concerns my anxieties about Beethoven reaching the end of his life, the end of his creative lifespan. There was no “next session” for Beethoven.
A significant issue that links Beethoven to the manifest dream is the fact that Beethoven’s creative output is measured in three periods. The first period was imitative; he followed the models set down by his teachers, Mozart and Haydn. The second period is the so-called heroic period in which he came into his own. The last period, the third period, is marked by extreme originality and profundity.
Anthony Storr writes about Beethoven’s work: Beethoven’s creative output has been famously described as tripartite, with an early, middle, and late period. Actually, according to some psychologists, the work of all artists (artists worthy of the name artist, at least) typically passes through three phases, provided they live long enough. Third period works have certain characteristics. First, they are less concerned with communication than what has gone before. Second, they are often unconventional in form, and appear to be striving to achieve a new kind of unity between elements which at first sight are extremely disparate, Third, they are characterized by an absence of rhetoric or any need to convince. Fourth, they seem to be exploring remote areas of experience which are intrapersonal or suprapersonal rather than interpersonal. That is, the artist is looking into the depths of his own psyche and is not very much concerned as to whether anyone else will follow him or understand him.
A striking issue is that I had the dream about Beethoven in December 2013, weeks before I started working on the novel I began on January 1, 2014, the novel whose completion had possibly triggered my depressed mood on November 9, 2017, my so-called “post-partum depression.” What does that mean?
Upon retiring on the evening of November 6, 2017 I had the following distressing dream. I had had a therapy session with my therapist earlier that afternoon.
[i]I was about to enter my third year of law school. I received a letter from the law school that read: “You have completed only 57% of the course credits required for graduation.” Of course, I should have completed 66% of my course credits. In a panic I thought, “How am I going to squeeze all the courses I need into one year.”[/i]
Does the dream reflect my concern about my mortality? Was I really expressing the idea, “How am I going to squeeze all the things I want to accomplish in the remaining years I have?”
The dream reminds me of Erikson’s observations about Freud (Insight and Responsibility).
[i]
Freud at times [during the 1890s when he was in his forties] expressed some despair and confessed to some neurotic symptoms which reveal phenomological aspects of a creative crisis. He suffered from a “railroad phobia” and from acute fears of an early death—both symptoms of an overconcern with the all too rapid passage of time. “Railroad phobia” is an awkwardly clinical way of translating Reisefieber—a feverish combination of pleasant excitement and anxiety. But it all meant, it seems, on more than one level that he was “coming too late,” that he was “missing the train,” that he would perish before reaching some “promised land.” He could not see how he could complete what he had visualized if every single step took so much “work, time and error.”[/i]
Preceding events:
On the afternoon of the dream (Monday, November 6, 2017) I had a psychotherapy session. I was in a notably depressed mood, especially in comparison with the two previous therapy sessions at which I displayed an almost hypomanic state of excitement. In the two previous sessions I had talked nonstop, without therapist intervention, for 50 minutes. I attributed my depressed state on November 6 to a kind of “post-partum depression.” I told the therapist that I had finished the novel I had been working on since January 2014. I said that I had read that creative people can experience a kind of post-partum depression when they complete a project. I said that I felt the same way in the year 2004 after I had completed my last novel.
The theme of the manifest dream was the three-year law program. Likewise, pregnancy is measured in trimesters from the first day of the woman’s last menstrual period, totaling 40 weeks. The first trimester of pregnancy is week 1 through week 12, or about 3 months. The second trimester is week 13 to week 27. And the third trimester of pregnancy spans from week 28 to the birth. Like law school, pregnancy is a time limited event.
A lifetime is a time-limited event beginning with birth and ending in death. Perhaps, Freud would have been fascinated by this dream as it suggests the riddle of the Sphinx that Oedipus solved. The Sphinx posed the question: What walks on four legs, then two legs, and finally on three legs. Oedipus found the answer to the riddle with ease, replying: “Man, who as a baby crawls on four legs, then walks on two legs as an adult and in old age walks with a cane as his third leg…” That is, the span of a person’s life is divided into three parts. Is this dream Oedipal in some way? Note how I had previously talked about how I see things I am not supposed to see. I solve riddles I am not supposed to solve. I had linked this propensity to the primal scene and my drive for forbidden knowledge.
Also, in my second year of law school I took a course in constitutional law where we studied the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion ruling that framed the pertinent legal issues in terms of the trimester format.
A psychotherapy session is a time-limited event confined to a 50-minute period. At a previous therapy session I struggled with the issue of whether or not it is appropriate to begin a session with material that had been left unsaid at the end of the previous session. I had said to the therapist: “Last week, at the end of the session, I wanted to mention an anecdote and you stopped me. You said we had run out of time. You suggested that I could talk about the anecdote at the next session. Well, you know I’m an obsessive person and I obsessed about that issue in a philosophical way for the last week. Should I tell you what I wanted to tell you last time, or leave it unsaid? I’m inclined not to tell you the anecdote I wanted to mention last time. A therapy session should be “in the moment.” This week I should begin talking about what is on my mind this week, and not what I wanted to say last week but didn’t get a chance to say. I struggled with that issue. I was thinking of something. You know when a young person dies, maybe he’s 30 years old — he’s married and has young kids and people will say, “He was so young. He’ll never get a chance to see his kids grow up–get married, have kids.” But another way of looking at it is: he lived the life that he lived. That was his life. He did what he did. That was his life. It’s like a composer, maybe he dies young and maybe he could have gone on to write all kinds of great music, but he wrote what he wrote in his lifetime and that’s it. He’s judged based on what he wrote in his lifetime. When Beethoven died, that was it. There was no next session for Beethoven. There was no continuation for him to say what he wanted to say. He died when he died, and that was it. He wrote what he wrote. I’m thinking maybe a therapy session is like that. A narrative is what it is and when the 50 minutes are done, that’s it. The next session, you start anew based on what’s on your mind the next week. You begin a new narrative. The old narrative is what it is at the end of the 50 minutes. That’s it. Therapy is not a debriefing. It’s not me telling you the story of my life. It’s about what is on my mind in the moment.”
The reference in the dream to the number 57 is possibly significant. Beethoven died in his 57th year. The following is a related dream I had about Beethoven, four years ago. The dream concerns my anxieties about Beethoven reaching the end of his life, the end of his creative lifespan. There was no “next session” for Beethoven.
A significant issue that links Beethoven to the manifest dream is the fact that Beethoven’s creative output is measured in three periods. The first period was imitative; he followed the models set down by his teachers, Mozart and Haydn. The second period is the so-called heroic period in which he came into his own. The last period, the third period, is marked by extreme originality and profundity.
Anthony Storr writes about Beethoven’s work: Beethoven’s creative output has been famously described as tripartite, with an early, middle, and late period. Actually, according to some psychologists, the work of all artists (artists worthy of the name artist, at least) typically passes through three phases, provided they live long enough. Third period works have certain characteristics. First, they are less concerned with communication than what has gone before. Second, they are often unconventional in form, and appear to be striving to achieve a new kind of unity between elements which at first sight are extremely disparate, Third, they are characterized by an absence of rhetoric or any need to convince. Fourth, they seem to be exploring remote areas of experience which are intrapersonal or suprapersonal rather than interpersonal. That is, the artist is looking into the depths of his own psyche and is not very much concerned as to whether anyone else will follow him or understand him.
A striking issue is that I had the dream about Beethoven in December 2013, weeks before I started working on the novel I began on January 1, 2014, the novel whose completion had possibly triggered my depressed mood on November 9, 2017, my so-called “post-partum depression.” What does that mean?
