A dream and its interpretation- by Juan M.S

I can never remember my dreams. It’s one of my biggest regrets. They are so vivid and so imaginative that, we I able to recall them at will, I’m sure I’d be a better writer. When I was a kid, I used to be able to remember my dreams more frequently and vividly than now. No it seems that my consciousness dismisses them as futile as soon as it takes over. So I have no more access to my subconscious other than a glimpse of it sometimes when I’m waking up. And, sadly enough, it’s a well of images and emotions.

But this time I managed to remember the idea of my dream. I was at my grandmother’s, that’s the only detail I remember. It must have been an important detail since I remember it. Generally when we wake up, we retain the last picture of the dream, that is, the last moment we lived before waking up, the moment when our subconscious life was cut short. The strange thing is that, from there, dreams start to vanish not in chronological order but in order of relevance, that is, we end up remembering only the essence of a dream, if we remember something at all.

So I have this picture of the dream I lived through last night. It’s not a horror dream in the technical sense, but it was horrific in the real sense. Terror may be awaken by dangerous situations, but it’s generally more insidious when it has to do with hidden fears. And that’s what scares me the most about this dream in particular: that it doesn’t look like a horror dream at all, but is it?

Now I must confess I didn’t do any strenuous effort to try to preserve the dream because I immediately started thinking about reality when I woke up. I was in bed with a girl I’m not in love with and her presence distracted me from my dream. I talked to her and started caressing her to wake myself up because I needed to go to work. Arousal proves to be an effective stimulant. So I left aside the inquiry about the meaning of dream I’d just had. But as soon as we departed and I started driving to work, I started thinking of the most plausible interpretation for my dream.

Now the most clear interpretation for me is that, since I’m not in love with my girlfriend, I have remorseful feelings about being halfheartedly with her and fear about the Karmic consequences of breaking up with her in the future.

So no the dream. I was at my grandmother’s house lying in bed with someone. I don’t remember what we were doing, but it must have been something incriminating, I deduce from the guilty feeling I got afterwards, when my girlfriend came. Up to know the dream is very clear, almost trivial, I would say, and I would add that I expected much more from the mind of a writer. But here’s where the artistic trait kicks in, I guess, because there’s a small detail that changes the whole possible interpretation of the dream. This detail consists in the fact that the person who was lying in bed with me was a man. Now, as I said, I don’t remember exactly what we were doing, but I remember the overpowering fear of being discovered when I heard my girlfriend entering my grandmother’s house, so my only guess is that, to my great distress, we were doing something sexual. Now, I can’t imagine why I was just distressed about it just when my girlfriend came, and not before, since the conscious idea of touching another man is simply horrific to me. I therefore surmised that I must have been lying in bed with a girl who then became a man when my girlfriend arrived. That would be the easiest answer, but to be honest there was no feeling of surprise for the man in my bed but rather a pervasive feeling of guilt.

Now, you can imagine the horror a heterosexual male born and raised in a patriarchal society may feel when he realizes he’s had a homosexual dream, and if you can, let me illustrate to you. Imagine you’re in the kitchen eating something with great delight. Now your mother enters and she’s ordered you not to eat anything before meals, so you’re startled and full of remorse at having disobeyed her. Then you happen to look down and there, in the dish, lays the food you were filling your mouth with with so much pleasure. As it happens, it’s shit, I mean feces, poo, excrement. I can’t really emphasize enough the alarm a normal person would feel, but you feel nothing but guilt at having eating between meals; nothing more, not even wonder at being eating something that people don’t even like looking at. Now, if you didn’t get upset when you dreamed about eating crap, I’d say you’re abnormal. So I feel the same about myself now. Mind you, I know that half of the human population eat crap, metaphorically speaking if we follow the analogy, since half of the population are women and they hunger for men. But that’s not a relief since I’m not supposed to be eating crap but to delight in delicious food. The only moment I could feel that eating crap is remotely similar to eating delicious food is when I have indigestion; therefore the best interpretation for my dream: I’m metaphorically eating something hungerless so I get indigestion by it; then my subconscious, with the dark humor that characterizes it, told me that I might as well been eating shit.

Now the last detail, my grandmother’s house. That’s not so strange because it was the place where I used to play around with my older cousin when I was a a small kid. I hadn’t had an erection yet so the only thing I wanted to do to her was to kiss her in the mouth, but she was in full puberty so she made me kiss her in other parts of her body. The general feeling of that experience is one of deceived innocence. I think this detail in my dream means that I realized something I was unaware of, the same as later on in life I realized the meaning of what I’d done with my cousin. This detail of the dream is the most disturbing one because it may be just one thing: I’m afraid one day I’ll realize something I’ve been missing during all these days.

soyjuanma86

I'm a writer born in Argentina, but currently living in Poland. I work as an English and French teacher, translator and copywriter.

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