Interpret a dream by feeling

I do not analyze my clients’ dreams. Or rather, I don’t think I do a great job of it and offer more humility than answers. I accept the theory that the feelings in a dream are entirely true, are splinters of the sun, epiphanic fires of meaning often embedded in childhood. The scenarios are legitimate in ways that the brain uses our countless experiences and bends them to the feelings. For example, I’ve learned, from one dream, that far below my conscious feeling of pride about my work, there is a sense of being a human failure, behind all of humanity, a person who never really became an adult. In the dream, I am in my mid-forties (I’m 71), wandering along the downtown street of an unknown city, desperately begging strangers to help me find a job or a career. I am always an extinct typographer – my former profession that was replaced by desktop publishing in the 1980’s – never a therapist. It’s as if my solid present and future life never existed.

 

Here I wanted to describe one dream from my childhood. At most, it appeared four or five times, scattered about the years prior to my leaving for college. In the dream I am a child, no older than seven or eight, driving an automobile across a bridge over water, possibly an ocean. The bridge is nearly as high as the clouds, an empyrean arc. The far end of it can’t be seen or is barely visible. The primary feature of the dream is that the bridge is thin, fantastically narrow, exactly the width of the car. I am driving tensely, deliberately, but with helpless speed, and cannot afford to veer even a half-inch to the right or to the left. I am alone, a child in the driver's seat. The feeling I have is the most recondite chemistry. In quiet terror, holding the steering wheel tightly, I succeed, do not plunge over the bridge into the water. Yet the dream has always ended before I reach the other side. Each time, I negotiate the thin arc but not to any endpoint. There is a part of the feeling that must be described as perverse confidence: dread fused with, completely identical with, an odd certainty that I will survive by luck, not skill, by some uncaring fate that is nevertheless on my side.

 

This dream, which I had never thought to interpret, had remained asleep for decades. Only when a client recently related two dreams of his own that mirrored his mother's craziness did it suddenly appear, and with it, its meaning. I had never had an emotional bond with my mother, no feeling for her and possibly none from her. But she was "there," never rejecting, never holding, never cold, never warm. It was secure, but in the emptiest most meaningless way. I was made to ride along in my life, on no ground, an infant with the earth lovelessly out of reach, child's undesired adventure and terror in one, an impossible journey, with luck sadly preventing death.

A therapist trying to interpret the dream, without benefit of its complex biochemistry of feeling, might have construed the terrible narrowness of the bridge as my parents' control, the straitjacket of my upbringing. But there was no such control. There was only lonely freedom, emptiness and anxious security.

 

I don't doubt that dream could return, just as the lost man without a job could.