CRITICA

A few days ago, I had a dream about the boy I had a crush on in elementary school. The central image of this dream felt so charged that it began to help me move through a series of thoughts I had been having about the act of dreaming while teaching a course called Literature as Psychoanalysis/Psychoanalysis as Literature. Rather than focus on the dream “narrative,” I want to zero in on something that I can call a photograph, let’s say, or something that is purely visual. What I want so urgently to express, as I think my unconscious did, is the body of the boy- his physical presence– as it appeared in the dream, not only as a presence, but as a zone or tactile force whose impact on my dream self was so intense that I woke up feeling transformed, affected, touched, in the way we can only feel from actual, profound heart-pounding contact with an incontrovertibly present, live, human being. 

All he did, in the dream, was hold me, quite briefly, actually, in a manifestation of himself that seemed to be the dream-wish adult version of the boy who once lured me—in third grade, sixth grade, with his death metal t- shirts and his black converse and a hysterical humor which even then felt like the shattering of the fourth wall of controlled reality, and I thought he looked like Keanu Rreeves, and I wanted to go to his house. 

I have not seen this person in 25 years, but packed in his arriving in my dream as he did is an opening to the question I have been contemplating along with my students, about whether or not Freud’s conception of the dream as a form of condensation is accurate to my experience, and I say to my experience, because really, when we are talking about dreams, we have in many ways, nothing else. Who was the body that held me in my dream? Some part of me, to be sure, a memory of a person, a memory of the psychic and imaginative impact this person had on me in years that straddled the family romance and awakening sexuality. My husband was there. It could be possible to say, my husband was there most of all, the intense love I feel for him reverberating back in time to a person who perhaps had a shade of that certain strain of physical and psychic attraction for me that has changed over time but bears the seed of what, in that gravity bending cosmos of desire, peopled with those I have known and wanted, would become in its most recent manifestation, thank god, that which I “needed.”

Freud said, “the shadow of the object falls on the ego.” For some reason, I have always wanted to shorten that sentence to simply, “the shadow of the object falls.” Because where does it fall, really? Where are we when we imagine its landing? And perhaps most importantly, who or what is an object? Or to put it more precisely, to what extent is the internalized object the person in question? Roughly how much of that is created in the subject’s imagination, and embedded in that question is another question: to what extent can or will we ever come to know another person? 

When I think about Freud’s concept of dream condensation, a concept I aesthetically love, in the context of this boy/man presence and its effect on me both in the dream and in what Freud called the “dream thoughts,” I am compelled to ask the question, what is being condensed? What if the dream is not a condensation, but a fundamentally different approach to the meaningful organization of the internal human being? In a way, the concept of condensation gives too much authority to meaning-making as we have honed it for survival and communication in waking life over the course of millenia. So I am trying to open the idea of a “potential space” in which we can “play” with the jumble of sensation and emotion in its rawest form. I think that the “person” I was held by in the dream not only contains multiple known and remembered people, but is itself a representation of the very slippages upon which our “knowing” both others and ourselves rests on. Who was the “I” in the dream? Isn’t that the most impossible question of all? Who is the “I” writing this essay? And yet in that moment of dreamt human contact, there was a “recognition by the other” that occurred in me that felt as real as a tiger breathing down my neck and showing me how the pursuit of desire and of the other, anchors me. Perhaps Freud’s condensation concept is correct in an important sense: the dream packed in a single moment a series of contacts and transitions which had been enacted over a lifetime, whereby longing was in the processes of finding a safe place to rest, and to dream itself into being.