James A. Hall, M.D., "Jungian Dream Interpretation � A Handbook of Theory and Practice"
I�m pretty sure I had boring dreams for the majority of my life. There were only a few instances of waking up thinking, �Wow, THAT was weird.� Eventually, I was turned onto Jung and put more effort into attempting analysis. After some initial stumbling I found it was getting easier, and I started to relate the subconscious with the real world. Soon after, I had a really weird dream, about a week before the reading of �East of Eden� that I described in the entry for Stephen King�s �Rose Madder.�
I was on �The Price Is Right� as a contestant. I don�t remember if I was really going for A NEW CAR!!! but I do know I wasn�t particularly excited with whatever the prize was. I was thrilled just to be there, and I was even more excited to be in the presence of Bob Barker. But Bob was being a jerk. No, scratch that � he was being an ASSHOLE. He was friendly with everybody else on stage and in the audience, but he was being downright mean to me. Finally, after some acerbic comments directed toward my person, he showed me my contest.
He handed me an object that was like a football, only it had the texture of a wet sponge and had various holes cut throughout it. It also had random placement of different-sized pieces of plastic. In other words, it was completely non-aerodynamic. He then explained that I needed to toss it in a basketball hoop and as soon as he pointed to it, the hoop shot backward in a reverse zoom until it was hundreds of feet away, only a tiny speck on the horizon.
�Aren�t I supposed to try and guess the prices on various household beauty aids?� I asked.
�No,� Bob answered. �Now hurry up and throw the fucking ball, moron.�
I never got to throw the ball, as I woke up soon after that. I do remember, however, being very stressed out. All I really wanted was to be friends with Bob.
So what the hell do you do with that in terms of analysis? This is the problem with dream dictionaries, even though we go through a butt-load at the store. First off, there are no entries explaining what Bob Barker is supposed to represent. There aren�t entries for �The Price Is Right� or even game shows in general. I checked.
Second, the characters or symbols that you see, according to Jung, are almost always manifestations of what you are experiencing in the waking world. After nearly two months of trying to figure out what my dream meant, I came to a pretty likely conclusion: As I said, this was the same time as the "East of Eden" salvation, and the problems I was experiencing with trying to work out a friendship with my ex-girlfriend. Bob Barker symbolized my ex. The new car was a regained friendship. Bob was making the prize nearly impossible to achieve, and it was something I didn�t care much about anyway. The question the dream posed is, do I really want to play the game?
Pretty neat, huh? But there seems to be a problem with dream analysis: it�s like the game �Space Invaders.� As you get better, shooting down the easier levels, the game moves faster and faster making it harder and harder to beat them. I�ve had some seriously strange dreams lately, and they�ve all been things that I have no idea what my subconscious is trying to say. If anybody has an idea why my dream last night involved terrorists shooting at my host families house in England, random friends being killed by gunfire, and more random friends showing up the next day to help me look through the rubble for the books I had just finished entering in this journal, let me know.
I'm asking you because Hall's book is an interesting and at the same time infuriating case study. Sometimes Hall�s ideas are coherent, other times he delves into psychobabble that a layman such as myself can�t understand.
Warning - I start school next week, so I thought I�d tackle some of the longer books in my collection. Next up is an omnibus that consists of three novels in one volume, so it may take a while to finish. Wow, listen to that crowd cheer! Maybe I�ll do individual entries after each novel, even though I counted it as a single book. (197 to go!) We�ll see.
