The Individual Unconscious Collective
Dreams, arranged by Geoffrey G. O’Brien
The Wish: Clinical Conflict IPsychoanalysis seems to have let go of the dream. This is a mistake: in the dream we can glimpse what we want, however distorted or censored. Even if we’re not interpreting, we are still dreaming. In Summer 2023, Parapraxis asked our readership, “what did you dream?”
DREAM: The children were climbing a giant abacus like a jungle gym.
DREAM: I reconciled with Sophie again.
DREAM: My analyst is standing inside of a beached shipwreck. Milk is dripping down the walls and from the wreckage. All around him are tiny kittens drinking it, lapping it up. I am watching, laughing hysterically.
DREAM: I’m on a plane to rescue my cat, who I’ve abandoned at my aunt’s farm. The plane hurtles towards the sea—is this the end? No: it dives in and out of the water like a dolphin.
DREAM: I am slow dancing in an aquarium with a man I was falling in love with. I am still in love. He says he is not.
DREAM: I brought my analyst down to a beach and knowingly made him lie down where the tide would engulf and drown him. I hurried away ashamed and looked back to see him glinting like a smooth stone in a river current. I went to class, and he was there resurrected, as a younger man, lecturing about the country of my birth.
DREAM: At my parents’ house, the garage door and basement door and conjoining wall rip off without cause and plummet down into the basement accompanied by a loud, non-human screaming sound. I’m upstairs and begin to sob, saying that I think I’m schizophrenic.
DREAM: I dream of a house. It’s my house—it’s been for ages—and I’m very fond of it but it keeps changing wildly and I need to learn it again every time I dream.
DREAM: I left the storage unit I’d been living in wherea spirit had been making baby rats throw themselves off a ledge. I came across a yard sale, went through stuff and began finding gold coins and jewelry hidden inside bags, along with photos I assumed to be of the by the now-dead owner of all the yard sale stuff—that reminded me of Leni Riefenstahl’s photos of the Nuba (i.e. fascist NatGeo). While I was putting all the gold and jewelry into a bag to steal it, a TV at the yard sale started playing really freakish gore footage, the police arrived, and in the commotion I walked away with all the gold, went back to the storage unit, and woke up.
DREAM: I dreamt that my husband had his penis surgically removed. I was looking at his penis-less crotch, in a bandage, and trying to keep cool but was very disturbed because, apparently, he had wanted it and went to a surgeon himself to get it done. Trying to find someone I could trust to talk with about it, I say out loud that he must have been out of it, psychotic.
DREAM: I was having sex with a woman in a hotel room, the outside suddenly bathed in a warm light. A voice called out, telling me to wake up. It was my mom.
DREAM: My dog was chopped in half, but the front half went on living as normal.
DREAM: I was pregnant and ordered pills to have anat-home medical abortion. I told my roommates and spent the rest of the dream trying to decide whether to tell the “father,” a man I’ve been casually dating for several months. When I woke up from the dream, I realized that my period had started.
DREAM: I am standing inside of a pig pen, while my mother is standing on the outside holding a baby. She tosses the baby to me; I fumble it and drop the baby on its head. The baby is alive, and with a broken neck tries to stand up to walk but cannot lift its large head and begins to drag it through the mud.
DREAM: There were hundreds of people organizedinto neat sections in Central Park all to see the owl get captured.
DREAM: I keep dreaming that Elon Musk obtains a monopoly on the whole internet, which is run through his satellites, and then one day gets in a mood and shuts it off. My first thought is always:how do I access my bank account now?
DREAM: We’re all living underwater and still can’t breathe underwater but there’s some technological solution where it’s not really a big deal. She lives a few reefs away and the only public transit are enormous men with faces in their chest who walk between settlements with us riding on their shoulders. (My shrink says that bus-men represent him and I’m too embarrassed to say definitely not.)
DREAM: I am having sex with the person who, in waking life, I am in the early process of dating. I am sucking on their testicles, which are tiny (in waking life they do not have testicles).
DREAM: Nancy Fraser treated her long covid by smoking crack. She also kept weird long-legged golden-haired chimpanzees in her home/cult when I visited. Lots of people sat cross-legged on the floor while they clambered all over and she gave a talk about how crack was working out really well for her.
A voice called out, telling me to wake up. It was my mom.
DREAM: My brother and I were in the desert, runningfrom police. We would feel safe but then would come upon these big, tall machines stuck in the sand with long metal arms that rotated around a center pole. At the end of the arms were metal panels with eyes painted on them and the eyes could see us and the police would find us.
DREAM: Walking around a large body of water, looking for Antonia so we can have lunch. Joss drives by with a giraffe and an owl in his car, says he’s on his way to Brooklyn to see the literary fortune-teller.
DREAM: I left an infant in a storage compartment in the headboard of my bed. It didn’t seem very happy in there, which was mortifying to me. But I didn’t do anything about it, which was also mortifying to me.
DREAM: My therapist flies me to a luscious green paradise. We land and I think I’m escaping my problems but feel unsettled by a deeper knowing that my problems will not be resolved by flying away.
DREAM: I was in love with a girl with red hair. She reached inside my spine and removed a clump of nerves. The nerves writhed like snakes and she told me that she forgave me.
DREAM: I’m in a skyscraper when my friend tosses my dream journal to me, only for it to somehow go out the window. After a frantic search, I come to a desert where I see my two younger brothers as children, as they were around 15 years ago, when we would see each other most. They do not recognise me and do not speak English . . . I manage to barter info from them re: the location of my dream journal by handing them £10, and they hand my dream journal to me. . . . I am relieved, but now suddenly mortified and ask, (hoping) if they do actually recognize me, to which they turn to me in unison and say, smiling: ‘We love you Connor’ (my name)
DREAM: I was trying to cover up a murder I committed while flirting with my yoga instructor by telling her about my father’s English springer spaniels.
DREAM: There are ornate wood burning stoves in all the therapy rooms. I’m going into each room, looking for the right one. I’m trying to turn the fires down but the handles are hot to touch and I don’t know which way is up or down to turn the dials.
DREAM: My “enemy” was sitting on the couch with her partner, laughing. She asked if she could use my pedometer. I was jealous/bitter and said no, use the health app on your phone to count your steps.
DREAM: I had a crab’s pincer stuck in my foot like a splinter and when I pulled it away a large chunk of my heel came away too. I could see the heel bone amidst the flesh but did not feel overly concerned. I was concerned however about the tide, which was coming in, as we (me and my twin brother) were on a big sandy expanse and the tide had been out, but the water was starting to trickle back. There were people driving cars about on the sand and some were doing doughnuts, with other people standing around watching with their arms crossed, so I thought it was sensible to ask someone for a lift because of my heel.
The clock said 1:70 a.m. That’s not a time, I thought.
DREAM: I have had the repeated dream on Christmas Eve of Big Bird from Sesame Street jumping out of the loft and chasing me down the stairs towards the presents.
DREAM: My Mum announces she is pregnant at 61 years old. I am anxious about the probability of her dying in the next 18 years and having the responsibility of raising her kid. Suddenly I’m in a van of strangers who feel familiar and safe to me, we drive up green pastures towards a cliff and the ocean. I slide the door of the van open and run onto the beach and into the sea.
DREAM: I am a child standing along the boards of a skating rink, staring at the empty ice in front of me. I look down and a pair of red and yellow mittens are dangling from my sleeves by mitten clips. I turn around and see my mother and sister through a window above the rink, then the dream cuts and I am in a long hallway with them, but I’m being pulled away by a stranger who has grabbed my arm.
DREAM: I walked into my old school building (the set-ting of several anxiety dreams) without the correct uniform. Inside the classroom a classmate shows me her new bag, she asks if I liked it, I said “is this Coach or Tory Burch?” The teacher never arrives . . . the room is noisy and suddenly I need to teach an improvised class on Freud’s “On Narcissism.” I speak of a baby coming into the world and wake up.
DREAM: I was buying him a cheesecake and begging him to kiss me, but he wouldn’t, and a girl I used to bully when I was 11 watched it all happen.
DREAM: Met a woman my shape and size. I asked how much she weighed and she said 256 lbs, and I said there’s no way: I weigh about 130. She pulled out a manual scale and showed me, but I noticed she was leaning forward too much. Then she leaned back and it went down to 80 lbs, and I saw this was also wrong. Then she stood up straight and the bar on the manual scale balanced and I said “there: that’s your actual weight” and she said “no, now it’s not working.” And then I woke up.
DREAM: I was trying and failing to fuck my ex (his dick wouldn’t go in). My apartment had golden walls, and he left me there feeling anxious and desperate. When I got in the car, a deli cup of milk he’d given me cracked open from the bottom and poured onto the floor—some got in my hair.
DREAM: Now I am a father taking my son to the penny theater where fat orange cats dance to Bizet.
DREAM: We were running out of time and my father figured out a way to train sea creatures to extract blue crystals from the bottom of the ocean. Then I told my high school love about it while we were in bed together and he reminded me that we are both married with children. A dog was trying to cross the street and had his paw run over by a car.
DREAM: I dreamt I was being recruited by UC Irvine for a job, but when I got there for the campus visit, it turned out to be UC Davis.
DREAM: My Bank of America debit card is bent, curving along its middle. I am trying to swipe it at a subway turnstile and the cashier standing there takes it in her hand and tries to straighten it out. She tries swiping it but it still doesn’t work. I keep trying after her, both of us insistent.
DREAM: Was playing soccer and I brought the ball down in the box for a volley but as I was doing it I thought damn I don’t have the skills to do this and got tangled up in my feet and the ball rolled behind the goal. Moved to a staff meeting where Lana Del Rey and Felix from Chapo Trap House were being briefed on how to take over for me as manager of Arsenal and I was like that’s weird because I really don’t think I was manager of Arsenal. Forgot I was on zoom and accidentally changed my position so only my bare leg was visible in the frame and had to turn the camera off in a panic and pretend I got disconnected.
DREAM: I decide on the spur of the moment to leave for Paris. I haphazardly pack six bags of various shapes and sizes, including a flimsy backpack with my wallet and passport in its center. When the taxi arrives to take me to the airport, the wallet and passport are gone.
DREAM: We wuz fuckin and then her husband found us but we kept fuckin anyway.
DREAM: I stole a mummy from a built-in closet like a sarcophagus and brought it home as a souvenir, but realized I should never have taken it and now needed to donate it to someone who would use it for science. We brought it to a woman who collected them, and as it laid there waiting, I lifted thin layers to examine what was underneath, each one a page where I saw a man’s face, mummified but handsome, silver hair draping from his skull. The woman, a doctor, arrived and, thinking what she had there was a patient, tried to give the mummy an injection—the face looked perfectly alive and could look around and speak and looked like Emma Thompson. The doctor realized something was wrong when she lifted her mummified arm and saw it was dead.
DREAM: The clock said 1:70 a.m. That’s not a time, I thought.
DREAM: I dreamed that I was driving through the suburbs at night and everything was dark, until the full moon, bigger and brighter than I had ever seen it, lit up the sky. I kept trying to take photos of it but I could only photograph the dark sky or a roof or a tree, sometimes a part of the moon but blurry, and I thought“some things are too big to capture.”
DREAM: I woke up with one phrase in my head:“Friday matchup for a Saturday game.” I remember nothing else.
[1] Footnote proin pharetra enim eu massa ultrices, ut molestie odio gravida. Pellentesque ut libero mollis, aliquam lectus sit amet, gravida tellus. Duis