I Analyze My Dreams
[b]The Dream of the Malaysian Jet Liner[/b]
On the evening of July 17, 2014 I had the following dream:
[i]I am in the city of Amsterdam in The Netherlands. It is evening (“The long day’s task is done.”). I am watching a performance of The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare that is being performed in the streets of the city. I am enthralled. The affect throughout the dream is one of elation. I don’t understand the dialogue, but I am able to follow the action. There is incidental music, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream composed by Felix Mendelssohn. I am enchanted by the music. I know I have heard it before, but I am tormented by the thought that I can’t identify it. There is a procession through one of Amsterdam’s canals, which ends the performance. I find this enchanting. After the performance I go to a bar. An attractive Dutch serving girl approaches me. I say, “English.” She responds in Dutch, then walks off. She has another server (female) who speaks English take my order. I order a bottle of beer, Heineken, a Dutch beer. After I finish the beer I walk through the streets of Amsterdam and again experience enchantment and elation. I think, “My sister has to visit Amsterdam!! It’s beautiful.”[/i]
1. Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 MH17 MAS17) was a scheduled international passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that crashed on 17 July 2014. It is believed to have been shot down with a surface-to-air missile in eastern Ukraine as a consequence of ongoing hostilities involving Russian separatists. I learn of the disaster on the CBS Evening News. I responded to the report with annoyance. I thought “When will all this fighting stop?” I might have condensed thoughts about the Ukrainian air disaster with thoughts about the fighting in Gaza.
2. Earlier in the day I had been rearranging books on a bookshelf in my apartment. I noticed a paperback copy of The Merchant of Venice. The copy dates back to January 1970, when I was an 11th grade student in high school. We read the play in David Rosenbaum’s English class. (Jay Berman was a student in that class. The Egyptian leader Nasser died in 1970. Berman said facetiously in another class, “Should I say Kaddish for Nasser?”) (Perhaps the name Rosenbaum is related to thoughts about Dutch tulips, even more tenuously to tulip mania, a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for bulbs of the recently introduced tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed (like the Malaysian jet). At the peak of tulip mania, in March 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. It is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble (or economic bubble)).
3. On July 16, 2014 I posted an excerpt from my book, Significant Moments. The excerpt talks about Wagner’s death in Venice and concludes with a quote from Shakespeare.
Like Venice, Amsterdam is a city of canals. Perhaps the canals represent the vagina, while the procession through the canal represents the sex act.
4. I visited Venice in September 1978 when I was 24 years old. I was proud of myself for going into a restaurant and ordering a pizza and beer in Italian! Upon returning to the United States in early September 1978 I entered a drug study at The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine Depression and Anxiety Clinic. The study was conducted by Jay D. Amsterdam, M.D. The study was for an experimental anti-anxiety medication.
5. I note the overdetermined theme of “incomprehension” in the dream. The dialogue of Shakespeare that I don’t understand; the music that I am unable to identify; the Dutch serving girl who doesn’t speak English. Perhaps the dream relates to prerepresentational experience when language was incomprehensible to me.
6. I suspect that an important issue in the dream is annihilation anxiety and that the affect of elation in the manifest dream masks unconscious anxiety centering on fragmentation, loss, and death. Annihilation anxiety may have been triggered by the event of the previous day: my learning of the crash of Malaysian jetliner MH17. My trip to Italy in the late summer of 1978 was the first time I had ever flown on a plane.
7. Uncannily the dream parallels an earlier dream I had in August 1995, nearly 19 years ago: The Dream of Milton’s Successor. An important triggering event of that dream was a New York Times story about the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. That afternoon I attended a continuing legal education course for the Pennsylvania Bar that featured a discussion of The Merchant of Venice. These facts support the view that the current dream expresses concerns about annihilation anxiety.
Annihilation anxiety emerging in infancy may be seen as a precursor of castration anxiety (arising in the Oedipal phase) as encapsulated in the symbol of “A pound of flesh.” The child has a projected fear of retribution for hostile wishes against a parent — or in Klein’s view, the breast.
Beer is drunk from a bottle, echoing early childhood experience where milk is drunk from a bottle.
Additional Thoughts:
Perhaps the reference to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” refers not to the Mendelssohn incidental music but to some other music. Perhaps the reference to Amsterdam conceals thoughts about another city.
I am reminded of Scene 1 of the third act of Wagner’s opera, Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg. As morning dawns, Hans Sachs is reading a large book. Lost in thought, he does not respond as David returns from delivering Beckmesser’s shoes. David finally manages to attract his master’s attention, and they discuss the upcoming festivities – it is St. John’s day, Hans Sachs’ name day (June 21, Midsummer Day)! David recites his verses for Sachs, and leaves to prepare for the festival. Alone, Sachs ponders last night’s riot. “Madness! Madness! Everywhere madness!” (Wahn! Wahn! Überall Wahn!) His attempt to prevent an elopement [note the theme of marriage] had ended in shocking violence. Nevertheless, he is resolved to make madness work for him today.
Madness! Madness! Everywhere, madness!
Whenever I look in the archives of the
city and of the world,
to look for the reason behind
why people strive to argue
in useless results
for this insanity?
What are they to gain from this:
in fits of struggle
they hunt for it
and do not hear their own pain
especially when it rips into their own flesh,
joy’s own embrace!
Who can name it?
It’s simply the same old craziness,
without it ever happening
in spite of itself!
It pauses. And then with sleep acquires a
new strength:
suddenly awakens
then who can become master of it?
In peace, truth rests
in work and in honesty
here, laying in the heart of Germany
my beloved Nurenberg?
But late one evening,
an unfortunate
incident occurred,
by youthful hot-bloodedness,
a man does not heed reason:
a shoe maker in his shop
begins the old madness again:
suddenly is streets and alleys
a raging argument begins,
man, women, child….everyone joins
all are crazed and blinded by it;
and if the insanity loses power
the argument begins to shower on all
with rocks, garbage, and anything else
the wrath begins to smoother.
God knows what happened!
An impish spell happened upon all:
a glowworm could not find his mate;
it was what aroused this wrath.
The charm: Midsummer night’s eve!
But now has dawned Midsummer day!
Let’s see, then, what Hans Sachs can do
to turn the madness his own way,
to become a more noble work:
for let it not rest in peace
even here in Nurenberg,
to use it to such an aim
and seldom by the mob’s projected goal
and never without trickery effected.
I propose that that the reference to Amsterdam in the manifest dream is a veiled reference to the city of Nuremberg, which I associated with the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. The Nuremberg trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the Allied forces after World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany. The trials were held in the city of Nuremberg, Germany. (“My sister has to visit Amsterdam” — or “My sister has to visit Nuremberg” — i.e., my sister should be tried for war crimes?)
I further propose that the thoughts about the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in the dream correspond to thoughts about another legal tribunal, the D.C. Court of Appeals, in The Dream of Milton’s Successor.
My parents took my sister and me to see the movie Judgment at Nurnberg when it first came out in 1961. I was seven years old and I remember being incredibly bored. I found the movie incomprehensible. I had no idea what the characters were talking about. Forced sterilization? What on earth was forced sterilization!! (This reaction corresponds to the theme of incomprehension in the dream.) (Coincidentally, on July 17, the day I had the dream I had an appointment with my medical doctor for a routine check up.)
One of the themes in the movie may have resonated with my personal experience. My father was Jewish (non-Aryan) and my mother was a Polish Catholic.
A key thread in the film’s plot involves a “race defilement” trial known as the “Feldenstein case.” In this fictionalized case, based on the real life Katzenberger Trial, an elderly non-“Aryan” Jewish man was tried for having a “relationship” (sexual acts) with an Aryan (German) woman. An act that had been legally defined as a “crime” under the Nuremberg Laws, which had been enacted by the German Reichstag. Under these laws the man was found guilty and was put to death in 1935. Using this and other examples, the movie explores individual conscience, responsibility in the face of unjust laws, and behavior during a time of widespread societal immorality.
The dream seems clearly Oedipal: I wanted to put my father on trial for the war crime of having a relationship with my mother.
In the Dream of Milton’s Successor I had the thought: “I am at a bookstore on the campus of Harvard University. There is a stairway in the bookstore.”
Perhaps the stairway in that dream is the symbolic equivalent of the canal in the present dream. In Freud’s dream theory, the act of walking on stairs is symbolic of the sex act.
Psychoanalytic writers have equated annihilation anxiety and sexual union: “Glasser (1979) locates the historical trauma at an even earlier stage of development than Stoller. In his view, at the centre of the psychopathology of those presenting with perversions is a constellation of feelings, attitudes and ideas which he calls the “core complex”, rooted in early infantile experience. A major element of this is a profound longing for union, even fusion with another, the fantasy of a blissful state of oneness, in which the individual is made absolutely secure and all destructive feelings are contained and made safe, a “back in the womb” type experience. Whilst such longings are found in many loving relationships, in some individuals this fantasy evokes terror: a fear of permanent loss of self, annihilation, falling into a black hole. If the individual responds to this terror by retreat to a safe distance, he or she risks isolation and exposure.”
Note the quality of overdetermination of elation in my dreams and dream interpretations. Many of my dreams express the affect of elation. While my act of interpreting my dreams — and the positive affect associated with gaining self-understanding — is also infused with elation. “Narcissistic elation may subsequently be reactivated within a therapeutic context. Edmund Bergler wrote of ‘the narcissistic elation that comes from self-understanding’; while Herbert Rosenfeld described what he called the re-emergence of ‘”narcissistic omnipotent object relations”…in the clinical situation’.
Somewhat similarly, Lacan spoke of ‘the megalomaniac ebriety which…[i]s the index of the termination of the analysis in present practice’.”
On the evening of July 17, 2014 I had the following dream:
[i]I am in the city of Amsterdam in The Netherlands. It is evening (“The long day’s task is done.”). I am watching a performance of The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare that is being performed in the streets of the city. I am enthralled. The affect throughout the dream is one of elation. I don’t understand the dialogue, but I am able to follow the action. There is incidental music, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream composed by Felix Mendelssohn. I am enchanted by the music. I know I have heard it before, but I am tormented by the thought that I can’t identify it. There is a procession through one of Amsterdam’s canals, which ends the performance. I find this enchanting. After the performance I go to a bar. An attractive Dutch serving girl approaches me. I say, “English.” She responds in Dutch, then walks off. She has another server (female) who speaks English take my order. I order a bottle of beer, Heineken, a Dutch beer. After I finish the beer I walk through the streets of Amsterdam and again experience enchantment and elation. I think, “My sister has to visit Amsterdam!! It’s beautiful.”[/i]
1. Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 MH17 MAS17) was a scheduled international passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that crashed on 17 July 2014. It is believed to have been shot down with a surface-to-air missile in eastern Ukraine as a consequence of ongoing hostilities involving Russian separatists. I learn of the disaster on the CBS Evening News. I responded to the report with annoyance. I thought “When will all this fighting stop?” I might have condensed thoughts about the Ukrainian air disaster with thoughts about the fighting in Gaza.
2. Earlier in the day I had been rearranging books on a bookshelf in my apartment. I noticed a paperback copy of The Merchant of Venice. The copy dates back to January 1970, when I was an 11th grade student in high school. We read the play in David Rosenbaum’s English class. (Jay Berman was a student in that class. The Egyptian leader Nasser died in 1970. Berman said facetiously in another class, “Should I say Kaddish for Nasser?”) (Perhaps the name Rosenbaum is related to thoughts about Dutch tulips, even more tenuously to tulip mania, a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for bulbs of the recently introduced tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed (like the Malaysian jet). At the peak of tulip mania, in March 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. It is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble (or economic bubble)).
3. On July 16, 2014 I posted an excerpt from my book, Significant Moments. The excerpt talks about Wagner’s death in Venice and concludes with a quote from Shakespeare.
Like Venice, Amsterdam is a city of canals. Perhaps the canals represent the vagina, while the procession through the canal represents the sex act.
4. I visited Venice in September 1978 when I was 24 years old. I was proud of myself for going into a restaurant and ordering a pizza and beer in Italian! Upon returning to the United States in early September 1978 I entered a drug study at The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine Depression and Anxiety Clinic. The study was conducted by Jay D. Amsterdam, M.D. The study was for an experimental anti-anxiety medication.
5. I note the overdetermined theme of “incomprehension” in the dream. The dialogue of Shakespeare that I don’t understand; the music that I am unable to identify; the Dutch serving girl who doesn’t speak English. Perhaps the dream relates to prerepresentational experience when language was incomprehensible to me.
6. I suspect that an important issue in the dream is annihilation anxiety and that the affect of elation in the manifest dream masks unconscious anxiety centering on fragmentation, loss, and death. Annihilation anxiety may have been triggered by the event of the previous day: my learning of the crash of Malaysian jetliner MH17. My trip to Italy in the late summer of 1978 was the first time I had ever flown on a plane.
7. Uncannily the dream parallels an earlier dream I had in August 1995, nearly 19 years ago: The Dream of Milton’s Successor. An important triggering event of that dream was a New York Times story about the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. That afternoon I attended a continuing legal education course for the Pennsylvania Bar that featured a discussion of The Merchant of Venice. These facts support the view that the current dream expresses concerns about annihilation anxiety.
Annihilation anxiety emerging in infancy may be seen as a precursor of castration anxiety (arising in the Oedipal phase) as encapsulated in the symbol of “A pound of flesh.” The child has a projected fear of retribution for hostile wishes against a parent — or in Klein’s view, the breast.
Beer is drunk from a bottle, echoing early childhood experience where milk is drunk from a bottle.
Additional Thoughts:
Perhaps the reference to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” refers not to the Mendelssohn incidental music but to some other music. Perhaps the reference to Amsterdam conceals thoughts about another city.
I am reminded of Scene 1 of the third act of Wagner’s opera, Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg. As morning dawns, Hans Sachs is reading a large book. Lost in thought, he does not respond as David returns from delivering Beckmesser’s shoes. David finally manages to attract his master’s attention, and they discuss the upcoming festivities – it is St. John’s day, Hans Sachs’ name day (June 21, Midsummer Day)! David recites his verses for Sachs, and leaves to prepare for the festival. Alone, Sachs ponders last night’s riot. “Madness! Madness! Everywhere madness!” (Wahn! Wahn! Überall Wahn!) His attempt to prevent an elopement [note the theme of marriage] had ended in shocking violence. Nevertheless, he is resolved to make madness work for him today.
Madness! Madness! Everywhere, madness!
Whenever I look in the archives of the
city and of the world,
to look for the reason behind
why people strive to argue
in useless results
for this insanity?
What are they to gain from this:
in fits of struggle
they hunt for it
and do not hear their own pain
especially when it rips into their own flesh,
joy’s own embrace!
Who can name it?
It’s simply the same old craziness,
without it ever happening
in spite of itself!
It pauses. And then with sleep acquires a
new strength:
suddenly awakens
then who can become master of it?
In peace, truth rests
in work and in honesty
here, laying in the heart of Germany
my beloved Nurenberg?
But late one evening,
an unfortunate
incident occurred,
by youthful hot-bloodedness,
a man does not heed reason:
a shoe maker in his shop
begins the old madness again:
suddenly is streets and alleys
a raging argument begins,
man, women, child….everyone joins
all are crazed and blinded by it;
and if the insanity loses power
the argument begins to shower on all
with rocks, garbage, and anything else
the wrath begins to smoother.
God knows what happened!
An impish spell happened upon all:
a glowworm could not find his mate;
it was what aroused this wrath.
The charm: Midsummer night’s eve!
But now has dawned Midsummer day!
Let’s see, then, what Hans Sachs can do
to turn the madness his own way,
to become a more noble work:
for let it not rest in peace
even here in Nurenberg,
to use it to such an aim
and seldom by the mob’s projected goal
and never without trickery effected.
I propose that that the reference to Amsterdam in the manifest dream is a veiled reference to the city of Nuremberg, which I associated with the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. The Nuremberg trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the Allied forces after World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany. The trials were held in the city of Nuremberg, Germany. (“My sister has to visit Amsterdam” — or “My sister has to visit Nuremberg” — i.e., my sister should be tried for war crimes?)
I further propose that the thoughts about the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in the dream correspond to thoughts about another legal tribunal, the D.C. Court of Appeals, in The Dream of Milton’s Successor.
My parents took my sister and me to see the movie Judgment at Nurnberg when it first came out in 1961. I was seven years old and I remember being incredibly bored. I found the movie incomprehensible. I had no idea what the characters were talking about. Forced sterilization? What on earth was forced sterilization!! (This reaction corresponds to the theme of incomprehension in the dream.) (Coincidentally, on July 17, the day I had the dream I had an appointment with my medical doctor for a routine check up.)
One of the themes in the movie may have resonated with my personal experience. My father was Jewish (non-Aryan) and my mother was a Polish Catholic.
A key thread in the film’s plot involves a “race defilement” trial known as the “Feldenstein case.” In this fictionalized case, based on the real life Katzenberger Trial, an elderly non-“Aryan” Jewish man was tried for having a “relationship” (sexual acts) with an Aryan (German) woman. An act that had been legally defined as a “crime” under the Nuremberg Laws, which had been enacted by the German Reichstag. Under these laws the man was found guilty and was put to death in 1935. Using this and other examples, the movie explores individual conscience, responsibility in the face of unjust laws, and behavior during a time of widespread societal immorality.
The dream seems clearly Oedipal: I wanted to put my father on trial for the war crime of having a relationship with my mother.
In the Dream of Milton’s Successor I had the thought: “I am at a bookstore on the campus of Harvard University. There is a stairway in the bookstore.”
Perhaps the stairway in that dream is the symbolic equivalent of the canal in the present dream. In Freud’s dream theory, the act of walking on stairs is symbolic of the sex act.
Psychoanalytic writers have equated annihilation anxiety and sexual union: “Glasser (1979) locates the historical trauma at an even earlier stage of development than Stoller. In his view, at the centre of the psychopathology of those presenting with perversions is a constellation of feelings, attitudes and ideas which he calls the “core complex”, rooted in early infantile experience. A major element of this is a profound longing for union, even fusion with another, the fantasy of a blissful state of oneness, in which the individual is made absolutely secure and all destructive feelings are contained and made safe, a “back in the womb” type experience. Whilst such longings are found in many loving relationships, in some individuals this fantasy evokes terror: a fear of permanent loss of self, annihilation, falling into a black hole. If the individual responds to this terror by retreat to a safe distance, he or she risks isolation and exposure.”
Note the quality of overdetermination of elation in my dreams and dream interpretations. Many of my dreams express the affect of elation. While my act of interpreting my dreams — and the positive affect associated with gaining self-understanding — is also infused with elation. “Narcissistic elation may subsequently be reactivated within a therapeutic context. Edmund Bergler wrote of ‘the narcissistic elation that comes from self-understanding’; while Herbert Rosenfeld described what he called the re-emergence of ‘”narcissistic omnipotent object relations”…in the clinical situation’.
Somewhat similarly, Lacan spoke of ‘the megalomaniac ebriety which…[i]s the index of the termination of the analysis in present practice’.”
