Long Johns
Dreamed two consecutive nights in 1972 by Ann Faraday
On the night before my book Dream Power was published in New York, I dreamed of a man in long white underwear shooting me down with a machine gun.As I had to appear on a breakfast show at six-thirty the following morning, I had no time to ponder the meaning of my dream. In fact, I totally forgot about it amid the flurry of TV, radio, and press interviews that followed, until I found myself later that evening in the studio of Long John Nebel, who had invited me to be his guest on his four-hour live radio show. As I waited for the show to start, I suddenly realized that the man in my dream had been dressed in "longjohns" and symbolized none other than Long John Nebel himself. I panicked as I now recalled rumors of his critical attacks on guests which had caused many of them to walk out halfway through. My conscious mind had forgotten all this in the excitement of publication events, but my heart remembered every word and threw up a warning in my dream to beware of being "shot down" the following day. |
As I had never met Mr. Nebel previously, my dreaming mind pictured a figure in long johns to make its point. It was too late to cancel my appearance--and in any case, my dream merely reflected a fear that he would shoot me down--so I gritted my teeth and awaited the worst, determined to stick it out to the end, come what may. What happened more than justified the warning, though it was not Mr. Nebel who did the shooting. As he himself did not feel qualified to discuss dreams in depth, he had brought in a psychoanalyst friend as cohost, and I looked forward to a rational, scientific, and stimulating interchange of ideas. To my astonishment, Dr. S. immediately embarked on a virulent attack on my daring to criticize the great master, Freud, whose ideas (according to him) were now firmly established. When I asked for evidence of this, he quoted an out-of-date paper written by a Freudian analyst in the early 1960s, of no scientific validity whatsoever, and when I corroborated my arguments with genuine scientific authority, he called me an ignorant Britisher and penis-envying woman! |
The whole evening continued in this vein, with his opposing all my ideas not with the scientific honesty I had hoped for, but with vicious personal attacks of no relevance whatsoever to the subject of dreams. I left the show at midnight, a sadder but wiser person, little realizing that this was only the first of several such interviews with psychoanalysts of various schools who became quite irrational when confronted with scientific evidence that threatened their pet theories. That night I dreamed I had been invited to take part in a game of cricket, but when I arrived, found myself involved in a very rough game of baseball, presided over by Long John Nebel and Dr. S. dressed in elaborate gilt uniforms.The dream expressed in beautiful picture language how I felt about the evening's events: I had been invited to participate in what I believed would be fair, open, rational discussion of dreams, but my hosts were "guilty" of tricking me into a "base" game of underhand moves, snide remarks, and devious attacks, which to me was definitely "not cricket." People are apt to be incredulous when they first discover the dreaming mind's capacity for playing these kinds of tricks with words, and this is probably the aspect of my own work that has most attracted popular attention, so much so that such dreams are nowadays often called "Faraday dreams," although it was in no sense an original discovery on my part. Freud himself observed it in his work in Vienna at the beginning of the century... ...I think it is worthwhile identifying at least six different kinds of punning in which the dreaming mind is wont to indulge: |
SOURCE: The Dream Game, Ann Faraday, Harper & Row, 1976; pp 92-95. Passage untitled; 'Longjohns' added to aid searches. |
One correction. Faraday says "In all cases, the dream's meaning lies in its reference to an event or thought of the previous day or two..." yet Long Johns hinges on an event in the near future, not the near past. Nor is this her only forward-looking dream; see Hatchet Job.
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