Naked Dreams

I had quite the strangest dream in quite some time last night, and told my other half about it shortly after waking up. If not for telling her, it would no doubt have ebbed away from my memory.

I was walking through town with a woman on a bright, sunny, warm day. We were both naked. As we walked, I tried to convince her that we would get into trouble – get arrested, locked up. She ignored my fears and walked confidently on through streets filled with people going about their day – who turned, stared, and whispered to each other as we passed.

And that’s when I woke up.

I don’t remember the woman’s face, or even where we were – just the feeling of panic.

I wonder what it all meant? I know some people put a lot of stock in Sigmund Freud’s writing – about his “Interpretation of Dreams”. I’m afraid I his writing causes more questions in my mind than answers – but maybe that’s for the same reason I don’t follow a religion, faith, or anything like that.

Freud categorised it as rather a common dream:

In a dream in which one is naked or scantily clad in the presence of strangers, it sometimes happens that one is not in the least ashamed of one’s condition. But the dream of nakedness demands our attention only when shame and embarrassment are felt in it, when one wishes to escape or to hide, and when one feels the strange inhibition of being unable to stir from the spot, and of being utterly powerless to alter the painful situation.

He wrote at length about the motivations for the dream – the usual recipe of anxiety, fear, and the loss of freedoms we had as children. For some reason Freud always loops back to childhood.

The more I read anything written by psychologists or psychiatrists, the more I wonder about the leaps of interpretation they make.

I’ve long suspected that dreams are nothing more than the contents of the rubbish bin of our mind, pinned together into a ramshackle story, with no requirement for plot, logic, character development, story-arc, or anything else. The part of us that watches, listens, smells, and interprets obviously goes offline as we sleep.

Dreams make sense in-the-moment, from a specific point-of-view – a little like an Escher painting. When you pull at their threads, they collapse rather quickly.

I wonder what I’ll dream about tonight?