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Posted: 03-10-2013 18:20 Post subject:

Escargot, I wonder if it's a good thing that people stay the same once they've gone over? Your post reminds me of similiar dreams.

I had a childhood friend who I was close with for a while, particularly into our early to mid-teens. Heady times we were both besotted with the same girl but she ended up with some rough dude a few years older than us.

Anyway after school we both went different ways and our relationship became very distant to the point when I last saw him, we hardly had a thing to say to each other, we must have been around 20.

Shortly afterwards he was killed and since then I get occasional dreams about him, maybe two or three a year.

He has no real personailty in it and unlike yours Escargot I'm not thinking "you are dead".

I think he represents something, lost youth, unfufilled dreams, maybe guilt and I always wake up feeling a bit sad.

He was heading career-wise, on a much better path than me as I sank into the embrace of the usual demons that plague the young, drugs and booze. I knew he was a bigger "success" at the time than me.

Maybe it is guilt?

Whilst talking about dreams I've had many dreams about a girl, (when younger) and now a women who I'm immediately attracted to, to the point that it is like finding your ultimate soulmate. The women changes appearance, a completely different women everytime, but I always feel the same about her and it's intensisty is greater even than that of your first love.

Someone suggested it is a representation of my female side. This makes sense as I sure my wife would agree that I love myself too much. Laughing

Posted: 04-10-2013 13:29 Post subject:

One of the theories about dreams is that everyone in them is actually oneself. That one about my former friend, though, that was very specific indeed and it's hard to see how it applied to me. Confused

Posted: 04-10-2013 22:56 Post subject:

Posted: 04-10-2013 23:36 Post subject:

Freud believed that dreams were about what we want. We dream about fulfilling our desires because if we didn't, we'd never sleep from worrying about them.

So… what colour was this onesie? Laughing

Posted: 05-10-2013 02:07 Post subject:

Freud also believed that women had penis envy, that cocaine's health benefits outweighed the risks, and that psychoanalysis would be a science if he repeatedly called it that. I'm not letting his thumbprints all over my dreams.

And I am quite certain we don't want to know what he thinks a onesie represented (but I bet we all suddenly are sure that we do).

Posted: 05-10-2013 03:02 Post subject:

Yup and Freud also seemed to consider that the material of a dream was derived from the dream-day ie. the waking life of the subject in the day before the dream.

I can't recall exactly how dogmatic he was about that point. I am taking the Interpretation of Dreams to bed with me tonight to find out.

I am pretty certain that at least nine-tenths of my own dreams are a by-product of the mental filing-system which sorts information into piles. Computer students will be aware of push-and-pop or Last-In-First-Out operations . . .

More fundamentally, I am sure we categorize information in much the same way as a database. That is to say, the categories are laid down early on with our earliest experiences forming Headings. What causes the end of the Headings and the start of the assignment of later experiences to these declared Fields, seems to determine who we are.

So much for the routine dreams.

But a few dreams seem to come from quite another place. In their extreme forms, they cause people to change their lives. In milder forms, they take us to a region which provides solace at times of crisis . . . etc etc.

But it is late at night and I have a big book to re-study. I think I read it last fully when I was a very geeky 15. Smile

Posted: 05-10-2013 11:41 Post subject:

I did not read very much in the event. Just a fairly short chapter in which Freud in Germanic scholarly mode sums up the authorities who line up on either side of the debate as to whether dreams emerge from our daily lives or allow us to escape entirely from our own selves.

He gives an amusing dream from Hildebrandt.

The dreamer goes to St Helena to sell sell Moselle wine to Napoleon, who receives him cordially. But the dreamer has never been a wine-merchant, nor ever wished to be one. He has never been on a sea-voyage and had no interest in visiting St Helena. He has no sympathetic feelings about Napoleon - in fact he detested him. The clincher is that the dreamer was born after the death of Napoleon.

The dream has no connection with the life of the dreamer. Cases such as this seem to have set Freud off on the symbolic route in order to re-establish connections at another level. His dogmatic reduction of wild and varied subject matter to sexual terms is probably why the book has remained unopened for years.

Perhaps it is best treated as a rich storehouse of material and an ideal bedside book.

Posted: 07-10-2013 10:00 Post subject:

I suppose it's a very narrow line between this behaviour and Dreaming of the dead:

Robert Peston: my dead wife still tells me what to do when we talk
Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor, has disclosed that he still seeks advice from his late wife Siân Busby, saying the “conversation” with a loved one continues after death.
By Hannah Furness
6:00AM BST 07 Oct 2013

Peston, whose wife died from lung cancer last year, said the relationship “doesn’t vanish”, as he admits he continues to “have a dialogue” with her in his daily life.
Appearing at the Cheltenham Literature Festival to speak about her last novel, A Commonplace Killing, he said he still finds himself asking her advice in a “challenging situation”.

Peston also spoke of his work transcribing the longhand writing of his “brave, tough, honest, astonishingly scholarly” wife, after she finished her novel quietly before she passed away.

When asked by Huw Edwards, his colleague, why he had felt the need to write out her words so soon after her death, Peston said: “I have a powerful sense of duty. It felt like the right thing to do to honour her.”
He then discussed “what happens to your relationship with a person after they die”, saying in his case he believed “the conversation” carried on.

“If you’re lucky enough, as I was, to have a partnership as rich and important as my one with Siân, you continue in a sense to have a dialogue. Even after physically she’s gone.
“This was the most, I suppose, obvious way in which the conversation was kept going. As the person who was mostly the counsellor in my life, I still find myself asking her in a sense what the right thing to do in a challenging situation [is].
“The answer is that that conversation continues and this was part of it.”

A Commonplace Killing tells the story of a crime in post-war London, and was given a four-star review by The Daily Telegraph for its “rich period detail” and “beautifully drawn characters”.
Busby, who never smoked, died last September, aged 51, leaving two sons.

In an introduction to her novel, Peston wrote that his motive for writing up her final chapters was “selfish”, admitting: “I wanted to keep talking to her. I still do.”

When asked by a member of the audience what Busby would have said if she been at the event herself, Peston joked she would probably have ticked him off.
“She would have given an astonishingly scholarly account of post-war Britain,” he said. “And she would probably say, 'Why are you going on about all this sentimental nonsense?’. Because she was a much tougher person [than me] in that sense.”

He added: “Opening a book, hearing the person you love more than anything in the world, hearing her voice in your head was very, very difficult, but it was something I felt was absolutely the right thing to do.
“She was writing this knowing she was dying. That’s pretty extraordinary.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10359745/Robert-Peston-my-dead-wife-still-tells-me-what-to-do-when-we-talk.html

Posted: 07-10-2013 21:49 Post subject:

Poor Robert.
I had noticed that the Beeb have recently given him more light-hearted work to do, presumably in an effort to cheer him up.