A Pilgrim’s Digression

Last night I dreamed that I was taking Brendan to explore the abandoned subway tunnels beneath New York City. We live in a fine home in the middle of an upscale New York neighborhood, but one day I take Brendan by the hand and we set off to see the underworld.

This is one facet of the dream.

In the other facet, another “me” learns that I have done this crazy thing and sets off to find myself and Brendan and bring us back safely. Most of the remainder of the dream is concerned with my near misses as I pursue myself and my son through the city and down into the subway.

I’ve seen enough episodes of Law and Order to know that the kind of people who live in abandoned subway tunnels beneath New York CIty are not the kind of people one wants to meet in the dark, but in the dream, my adventurous self seems unconcerned by any danger. My cautious self is well aware of what could happen, however; indeed, this self is sick with fear for what could happen, but he can never quite catch up to me. The dream ends with me despairingly missing the subway train which Brendan and I have just boarded.

Oddly, neither “me” ever detects any cognitive dissonance in there being two of my self in the same dream. This makes sense from a Freudian perspective. In Freudian theory, our personalities are split between three distinct selfs, an Id, an Ego, and a SuperEgo, a split we do not really perceive as such. The Id is pretty clearly defined as impulsive, instinctual, totally centered on seeking pleasure and happiness.

The Ego and SuperEgo have always been less distinct to me. The SuperEgo is the portion of our self that restrains impulse and harnasses it to serve a higher purpose. The Ego is kind of an in-between mode of being. The Ego understands and wishes to fulfill the needs of the Id, but it also understands that other people have needs and desires as well. Ego tries to balance between self-indulgence and self-abnegation and thus, in a healthy person, Ego ought to be the strongest.

On one level, the me who takes my child into the underground world of New York is Id; the me who pursues is SuperEgo.

OK, so that interpretation tells me nothing. To understand dreams, one must look at what is happening in one’s day to day life (and one’s mental life, perhaps most important of all) at the moment the dream occurs. This is the hardest part: seeing clearly the context of the dream.

During my first year of college, I went to about five therapy sessions with my Professor of psychology. My insurance would not pay for psychoanalysis, so I had to pay for the sessions out of my own pocket, which is why I only went to five sessions. I was depressed, as I have been off and on throughout my life. Looking back, it is easy to see why I was depressed at that time. My parents were divorcing, for one thing. There were other reasons as well.

I never really got around to talking about what was really disturbing me. Perhaps if I could have stayed in therapy longer, I would eventually have opened up. As it was, my sessions seemed mostly without value to me because I was too self-conscious, too intent on crafting the sessions to fit my preconceived notions. For example, I wanted to talk about the fact that I felt blocked as a writer, which wasn’t the real issue, or at least it was not the root of my depression.

Anyway, the one thing I remember from my therapy was the day I said I just wanted to talk about a dream I had been having. I can’t remember all the specifics of it, though I am sure I wrote it down at the time in one of my journals. The gist of the dream was that I was trying to cross a bridge over a wide chasm. The bridge was a normal suspension bridge such as cars drive on, but I was crossing it by foot. The bridge was collapsed in places, and often I had to crawl across beams on my hands and knees and risk falling into the bottomless pit below. It was a frightening dream, and I had had the dream for several nights consecutively. I could not determine what this dream meant.

This marked the only time I remember my therapist/Professor offering real advice. He said in dreams, bridges are pretty obvious symbols of transition. To cross a bridge is to move from one place to a different place. This was a remarkable revelation to me, as elementary as it sounds today. Of course! The dream represented my transition from a secure home life to an unsettled future. I was in college and I was discovering that I was not a particularly remarkable writer—there were smart people and good writers all around me; and because it seemed like my dream of becoming a writer was now just a childish pipedream, I was not as confident in my own future as I once thought; and on top of that, my parents were divorcing. All these elements found their way into that one symbol of the crumbling bridge I had to cross.

Even though in the dream I never made it across, I never had the dream again after that. I stopped going to therapy soon after—perhaps that was even my last session—but just the simple fact of discovering the meaning of my dream seemed to help me get over my depression and move on. The dream I had last night feels as significant as that dream I had long ago. And also like that dream, I cannot quite see the meaning of this one.

Superficially, it may relate to something I wrote about yesterday, a feeling that in my moving ideologically to the left that I am being impulsive, following a certain internal drive or dictate which will lead me astray.

On the other hand, the dream may be as simple as this: last night I stopped to get gas at a Sheetz and I bought a pack of Camel Lights. It has been at least two years since I smoked, but for some reason lately the urge has just been nearly overpowering. It’s the psychological addiction, not the physical addiction that really keeps people coming back. I don’t know if anti-smoking advocates understand that or not. It’s not as easy as getting over the physical addiction to nicotine; the physical addiction dissipates within days, though psychologically people are still addicted. There are a whole host of psychological factors that prevent people from ever really breaking the habit.

Before lighting up, I said to myself, “It’s a Light, it’s going to taste like burning paper.” I said, “It’s been so long you’ll probably get sick.” I said, “You know you’ll probably get a cold within a week; cigarette smoking increases the likelihood of upper respiratory infection.”

But I lit up anyway, and oh God, was it good. Better than I remembered.

So I smoked a quick cigarette in the car, and then another, and I had to restrain myself from smoking another. I said to myself, “The third will be too much. Two is just right.”

How could this relate to my dream? Obviously there is some conflict here between Id and Ego/SuperEgo. One of the restraining influences on me has been my son; I’ve said repeatedly, as the urge to smoke has recurred and grown stronger these past few weeks, that I would not smoke for his sake. Then that became, last night, “I won’t let him see me smoke,” which is an entirely different thing.

But why should this urge recur now, and then grow so strong that I cannot resist it? Perhaps it is related to the feeling that time has slipped away from me. I just turned thirty-one, and though I don’t think of myself as inclined to age-induced depression, I do associate smoking with my youth. Smoking reminds me of all those nights in smoky bars and clubs when I was in school. It reminds me of the dark hours spent at my computer, writing my papers for school. Cigarettes remind me of late nights spent loafing about my little dive of an apartment listening to music and smoking away my loneliness and depression.

Incidentally, the reason patients in mental hospitals are allowed to smoke is that nicotine is a mood enhancer. Doctors use it unofficially to combat depression.

I’m still not convinced I’ve reached the bottom of this dream. I do a much better job interpreting the dreams of others, I think. Dreams reveal through symbol and allegory some unpleasant truth about our self which we are unwilling to face in our waking life. If the truth of this dream were easy or acceptable to divine in my waking life, I would not have dreamed about it.