What about the interpretation Sam?

Let’s try to look at the dream.

As the dream unfolds the subject is with two friends.

These friends vanish towards the end of a dream and he doesn’t seem to find it worrisome.

He says I didn’t know what became of the friends I was with.

But there’s no distress in the text.

This is a strange way to treat one’s friends.

It seems that we are dealing not with three dimensional full blown flesh and blood friends but with friendly mental functions.

Indeed, the other ones will encourage the subject to react to the old woman’s antiques.

They say to him, “How much more are you going to take before you stand up for yourself?”

They ask him, cunning him.

All the other people present at the bar, at the bar restaurant, do not even bother to tell the woman to stop, to be civil, to be nice, in the subject’s words.

This eerie silence contributes to the subject’s reaction of disbelief, mushrooms throughout the nightmare.

At first the subject tries to emulate their behavior and to ignore the woman himself.

She says negative things about him. She goes louder and more derogatory, horribly rude and jabbing and he still tries to ignore her.

When his friends push him to react, I felt sick to my stomach and did not want to confront her.

But he finally does confront her because everyone was noticing as she was almost screaming at him.

The subject emerges as the plaything of other people.

A woman screams at him and debases him.

Friends prompt him to react.

And then motivated by everyone, he does react.

His reactions are determined by input from the outside.

He expects other people to do for him the things that he finds unpleasant to do by himself, for example, to tell the woman to stop.

His feeling of entitlement, I’m quoting, “I deserve this special treatment. Others should take care of my affairs.”

In his magical thinking, I quote, “If I want something to happen, it surely will.”

They’re so strong that he is stunned when people do not do his silent bidding.

This dependence on others is multifaceted.

They mirror the subject to himself.

He modifies his behaviors.

He forms expectations.

He gets disbelievingly disappointed.

He punishes and rewards himself and he takes behavioral cues from other people.

For example, the guys with me laughed and I laughed with them.

When confronted with someone who does not notice him, he describes him as robot-like and he’s frightened by him.

The word “look” disproportionately recurs throughout the text.

In one of the main scenes, his confrontation with the rude, ugly woman, both parties do not do anything without first looking at each other.

He looks at her before he raises his voice and tells her to shut up.

She looks at him and then gets angry.

The dream opens in a run-down restaurant bar with the wrong kind of music and of customers, smokey atmosphere and greasy food.

The subject and his friends were traveling and hungry and the restaurant was the only open place.

The subject takes great pains to justify his lack of choice.

He doesn’t want us to believe that he is the type of person to willingly patronize such a restaurant.

What we think about him is very important to him.

Our look still tends to define him.

Throughout the text, the subject goes on to explain, justify, excuse, reason and persuade us.

Then he suddenly stops and this is a crucial turning point.

I’ll drink to it.

It is reasonable to assume that the subject is relating to his personal odyssey.

At the end of his dream, he continues his troubles.

He continues his life ashamed and elated at the same time as he puts it.

We are ashamed when our sense of propriety is offended and we are elated when it is reaffirmed.

How can these contradictory feelings coexist?

How can we be ashamed any later?

This is what the dream is about.

The battle between what the subject has been taught to regard as true and proper, the shoulds and the odds of his life, usually the result of overly strict upbringing and what he feels is good for him.

What he feels he should do, how he should behave, is not good for him.

These two do not overlap and they foster in the subject a sense of escalating conflict and acted before our very eyes.

The first domain is embedded in his superego to Boris Freud’s quasi-literary metaphor.

Critical voices constantly resound in his mind.

An uproarious, opprobrium, sadistic criticism, destructive chastising and even an unfair comparisons to unattainable ideals and goals.

On the other hand, the powers of life are reawakening in him with a ripening and maturation of his personality.

He vaguely realizes that what he missed and what he misses, he regrets it and he wants out of his virtual prison.

In response, his disorder feels threatened.

His disorder flexes its tormented muscles, a giant awakened atlas shrugged.

The subject wants to be less rigid, more spontaneous, more vivacious, less sad, less defined by the gaze of others and more hopeful.

But his disorder begs to disagree.

His disorder dictates rigidity, emotional absence, automatism, fear and loathing, self-flagellation, dependence on narcissistic supply and a forced self.

The subject does not like his current locus in life.

It is dingy. It is downtrodden. It is shabby and inhabited by vulgar ugly people.

The music is wrong. It is fogged by smoke. It’s polluted.

Yet even while there, the subject knows that there are alternatives, that there is hope.

A young, attractive lady, mutual signaling, and she is closer to him, 10 feet, than the old ugly woman of his past, 30 feet.

His dream will not bring them together, but he feels no sorrow.

He leaves the place, laughing with the guise, to revisit the previous haunt.

He owes it to himself.

And then he continues his life.

The subject finds himself in the middle of the road of life, in the ugly place that is his soul, his psyche.

The young woman is nothing but a promise.

And there is another woman.

As he describes her, old, with heavy makeup, poorly dyed hair, loud, obnoxious, drunk.

And this is his mental disorder. This is his narcissism.

It can scarcely sustain the deception. Its makeup is heavy. Its hair dyed poorly. Its mood a result of intoxication. It could well be the false self of the superego.

But I rather think it is the whole, the totality of the sick personality.

And this ugly woman notices him. She berates him with derogatory remarks. She screams at him.

The subject realizes that his disorder is not friendly. That his disorder seeks to humiliate him. It is out to degrade him and destroy him.

His disorder gets violent. It hurls food at him. It buries him under a dish of popcorn. Popcorn is a cinema metaphor, a theater metaphor. The war is out in the open. The fake coalition, which glued the shaky structures of the fragile personality together, this fake coalition exists no longer.

Notice that the subject does not recall what insults and pejorative remarks were directed at him. Or at the very least, he doesn’t recount them. He deletes all the expletives because they really do not matter. The enemy is vile and ignoble and will make use and excuse of any weakness, vulnerability, mistake and doubt to crack the defenses set up by the subject’s budding, healthier mental structures.

The young woman. It’s a war. It’s a civil war.

There is mental disorder in the healing process. There is no self-hate more insidious and pernicious than the narcissist.

The end justifies all the means and it is the subject’s end that his disorder seeks.

But to fight his illness, the subject still resorts to all solutions, to all the habits and to all behavior patterns.

He calls the police because they represent the law and what is right. It is through the rigid unflinching framework of a legal system that he hopes to suppress what he regards as the unruly behavior of his disorder.

Only at the end of his dream, he comes to realize his mistake.

I’m quoting.

He said that just because I had the law on my side and I wasn’t the right didn’t mean that anyone would like me.

The police who appear instantly because they were always present there arrest the woman but their sympathy is with the woman, not with him.

His true aids, his true help can be found only among the customers of the restaurant bar whom he found not to his liking.

I did not like the other customers, he says.

It is someone in the next table who tells him about the dam.

The way to health is through enemy territory.

Information about healing can be gotten only from the sickness itself.

The subject must leverage his own disorder to disown it.

The dam is a potent symbol in this dream. It represents all the repressed emotions, the now forgotten traumas, the suppressed drives and wishes, fears and hopes. It is a natural element, primordial and powerful and it is damned by the disorder.

The vulgar now imprisoned lady. It is up to him to open the dam. No one will do it for him.

Now you can open the dam gate, they tell him.

The powerful woman is no more. She used to own the dam and she guarded its gates for many years.

This is a sad passage about the subject’s inability to communicate within or with himself.

To experience his feelings and mediate, to let go.

When the subject does finally encounter the water, his emotions, they are safely contained behind glass. Visible but described in a kind of scientific manner as if he were just an observer.

The level on the glass rose higher and the more I turned the wheel.

He says.

And it is absolutely controlled by the subject using a valve.

So the subject is not dysregulated or overwhelmed by the emotions because he is one step removed from them.

The glass.

The language chosen is detached and called protective.

The subject must have been emotionally overwhelmed but his sentences are borrowed from the texts of laboratory reports and travel guides, myagreful.

The very existence of the dam comes as a surprise to him.

I said, what?

And he explained.

Still, with all these caveats, this is nothing short of a revolution, an internal revolution.

It is the first time that the subject acknowledges that there is something hidden behind the dam in his brain, cavernous room, and that it is entirely up to him to release it.

I was told that I could turn it whenever I wanted, he reports.

Instead of turning around and running in panic, the subject chooses to turn the wheel.

It is a control valve, he hurries to explain to us.

The dream must be seen to obey the rules of logic and nature and physics and engineering.

The subject describes the result of his first encounter with his long-repressed emotions as thrilling, incredible, roaring, torrential.

It did frighten him, this encounter, but he wisely learned to make use of the valve and to regulate the flow of his emotions to accord with his emotional capacity.

And what were his reactions?

Whooped, whooped, laughed, excited.

Eventually the flow became steady and independent of the valve.

There was no need to regulate the water anymore, no need to regulate his emotions anymore. There was no threat.

The subject learned to live with his emotions, even diverted his attention back to the attractive young woman who reappeared and seemed to be looking for someone, and he had hoped that she is looking for him.

But the woman belonged to another time, to another place, and there was no turning back.

The subject had yet to learn this final lesson.

His past was dead.

The old defense mechanisms are unable to provide him with the comfort and illusory protection that he either too enjoyed.

The subject had to move on to another plane of existence.

But it is hard to beat farewell to a part of you, to metamorphosize, to disappear in one sense and reappear in another.

A break in one’s consciousness and existence is traumatic no matter how well controlled, well-intentioned and how beneficial.

So our hero goes back to visit his former self.

He is warned.

It is not with clean hands that he proceeds.

They get grisier the more he tries to clean them.

Even his clothes are affected.

Rags, wet, useless spark plugs, the ephemeral images of a former engine, all star in this episode.

Those are passages worth quoting and in parentheses my comments.

He says, “I noticed a pretty woman from the grave, from my past, way across the huge area, in his brain, and she seemed to be looking for someone.

I had hoped it was me.

I opened the door and I went out to go meet her.

I went back to my past.

He went back to his past.

“All the way out I got gris on my hand, dirt, this kind of warning, and picked up a rag on the table to wipe it off.

The rag had even more gris on it.

The subject is telling himself there is no way to disguise the wrong move, the potentially disastrous decision to revisit the past.

It’s dirty. It’s wrong.

The subject continued, “I picked up another rag on top of a box and there were wet dead spark plugs stuck with globs of gris to the underside of the rag, lined up in order as if they used to be in an engine.

It’s an image of something long gone.

Someone stuck them in this order on purpose and some of it got on my clothes.

The guys with me laughed and I laughed with them.

He laughed because of peer pressure, not because he really felt like it.

I left without going to meet the woman and we went back to the grill, in other words, to the scene of his battle with his mental disorder, the ugly woman.

Butthe subject, the subject, goes on to the grill where it all started, this undefined and untitled chain of events that changes life.

This time he’s not allowed to enter, only to observe from a tiny room.

Actually he doesn’t exist there anymore.

The man that enters his observation post does not even see him or notice him.

He is no longer in his past, he is no longer in his mental illness, he is no longer.

The grounds to believe that the man who entered was the previous sick version of the subject himself.

The subject was frightened and backed up.

The robot-like person looked through the window, stared blandly at the people having fun.

The subject then proceeded to commit the error of revisiting his past, the restaurant.

Inevitably the very people that he debunked and deserted and abandoned, the elements of his mental disorder, the disease, occupants and components of his mind, they were hostile.

The policeman, this time off duty, not representing the law, assaults him, advises him to leave.

Others spit on him.

This is reminiscent of a religious ritual of excommunication.

Spinoza was spat on in a synagogue, judged to have committed heresy.

And this reveals the religious or ideological dimension of mental disorders.

I keep saying that narcissism is a private religion.

Not unlike religion, mental disorders have their own catechism, compulsive rituals, set of rigid beliefs and adherence, mental constructs motivated by fear and prejudice.

Mental disorders are churches.

They employ institutions of inquisition. They punish heretical views with a severity, defeating the inquisition and the darkest ages.

But these people, this setting exert no more power over him.

He is free to go.

There is no turning back now. All bridges burned, all doors shut firmly.

He is a persona non grata in his own former disordered psyche.

The traveler resumes his troubles not knowing where to go and what he’s doing, but he’s laughing and crying and ashamed and elated all at the same time.

In other words, he finally, after many years, experiences emotions.

On his way to the horizon, the dream leaves the subject with a promise veiled as a threat.

If you were smart, you would leave.

If you know what is good for you, you will get healthy.

And the subject seems to be doing just that.

Point of interpretation of the dream.