One of the most dramatic examples of the need to consider dream characters literally was given me by Rachel, an adherent of Gestalt therapy, which treats all dream sysmbols as parts of one's own personality and rejects the possibility of dream characters representing themselves. In this case, the dream character was her own unborn child, and Rachel tells the story as follows:

On the night we conceived the baby, I, who rarely recall a dream, had the following experience. In my dream, I felt as if I were being awakened quite urgently, and the lights went out. I was then shown a slide show. There was only one picture in the slide show and that picture was of a fetus. I knew at the time that something was wrong with the fetus. I waited for another slide, but there was none. The lights went on and I slept the rest of the night.

The dream came back to me the next day. As you may imagine, it was not a very pleasant memory.

The dream recurred over the three months of my pregnancy approximately every five or six days. I would be awakened in my sleep, shown the slide and that was all. The dream was vague to me in the morning, but rendered a shadowy feeling to my day.

After close to three months of this experience, which I alternately described as neurotic behavior and believed was an important message, I came to the conclusion one night that "something is basically wrong here, I don't know if I am ready to have a baby. I want to do some work on this."

It was about midnight when we went to close friends (the friends being therapists) and I announced: "I am very upset. I don't think I'm ready to have a baby." My friend, who knows me quite well, said, "Rachel, you are being impatient again, you don't get a baby right away. You don't go downtown and get a baby. You have to wait nine months. There is nothing wrong with you."

I felt very relieved after this brief talk, which ended with a salami sandwich at I AM, and merrily went to bed... to once again have the slide presentation dream.

The next day I started cramping and the following day I had a miscarriage... the results of the D-and-C showed that the fetus had lodged in the wrong place from the beginning.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Ann Faraday emphasizes common sense in dreamwork. Check to see if a dream could be literally true, before you even speculate that characters and situations are repressed Freudian forces, Jungian archetypes, Gestalt top-underdogs, useless memories your brain's erasing, spooks from the land of the dead... whatever dream theory is hot this week! Better to start out naïve. A dream can mean exactly what it seems.

--Wayan

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