Dreams: Mental Masturbation or Wish Fulfillment?

There are so many fascinating theories as to why we dream and what our dreams mean. In Jungian thought, dreams are the psyche's way of trying to communicate with us. To let us know what's going on. He believed they're also an important part of the development of the personality, that they openly tell us about ourselves.

“They do not deceive, they do not lie, they do not distort or disguise … They are invariably seeking to express something that the ego does not know and does not understand.” Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)

Freud, not too far off from Jung, believed that dreams tell us our forbidden wishes. There's the manifest content of the dream made up of bits and pieces of what happened that day or what we've been thinking about. Then there's the latent content which is the symbolic meaning of the dream. The underlying wish or desire.

I'm fascinated by dreams because I have the kind that stays with me for days afterward. People glaze over when you say, "I had this dream last night where..." But I understand the need to tell someone. Sometimes the feeling lingers and it feels like you've just experienced something extraordinary. Dreams are deeply personal so I also understand the glaze over. Not everyone wants to hear about the huge mansion that I owned and the beautiful grounds with an outdoor glass shower where Kanye was washing my hair and whispering nasty things in my ear. That was an old dream, a pre-Trump dream but... damn.

Last night I dreamt that I was driving in the country with a friend of mine that I'm extremely attracted to in real life, mentally and physically. And very confused by. He's the first man in years that seems to just like to hang out with me. He's never hit on me or said anything that could be taken that way. Maybe he's gay or in love, I don't know. In my dream, he told me he wants a relationship with me. He yelled it out of the window of the car as I was dragging sheets of plywood to cover a trench so we could drive over it. I was imagining what it would be like to be with him as I dragged the plywood. I was excited and sure that I wanted him and thrilled that he'd asked me. When I think about it, the symbolism is very obvious.

These days I avoid relationships like certain death. A month in I start to feel trapped and frustrated, two months in I'm ready to chew my own leg off to get out of it. Are relationships the trench? In my dream I was fixing it, covering it up so we could drive over it. He wasn't doing it, I was. It's my trench to fix. He was just there, ready and willing to drive over it.

I can't stop thinking about the dream. The feeling of surrendering to him and being sure has been with me all day. The dream felt like him and that's the worst part. It's hard to separate when you see someone you've had a dream like this about. It was so them but they weren't there, only the essence of them that lives in your memory was there. The last time I had a dream like this about a friend we ended up being together for 12 years so next time I see him I'm going to say "yes." No context, no explanation, just yes.