Little Casino

Mechanics of the dream world

IN THE STRANGELY UNBALANCED YET PER fect mechanics of the dream world, he’s stroking the girl’s breasts through the smooth material of a blouse or dress, while she licks a Charlotte Russe which he holds rather carelessly. Then he’s inside of her, but with no appreciable change in their positions, and he is mildly surprised to find that she’s Ruth, after all. Her young breasts fall easily out of her creamy-white, frothy slip. He smiles at her serious face, which seems to be receding into the suddenly dim room, and he realizes that she doesn’t know who he is. She’s sweet and kind, though, and her mouth is wet and cool and sweet, filled, as it is, with whipped cream. He decides that he’s probably going to have an orgasm in a bed that he seems to be lying in, and as he begins to ejaculate, she waves and walks down 14th Street, toward S. Klein’s. He wakes up, more or less, and begins to substitute for her face the face of somebody else, he begins, that is, to arrange the dream. Slowly, it is compromised and written, that is, of course, faked.

In “The Dream-Work,” Freud says, quite clearly, that a dream is a picture puzzle, a rebus, and that the dream contents’ hieroglyphics, or symbols, must be translated, one by one, into the language of the dream-thoughts. It is, then, incorrect to read the symbols as to their values as pictures. A rebus, that is, may not be judged as an artistic composition.

It has been smugly fashionable and acceptable for some years now to denigrate Freud as a kind of bourgeois homophobic misogynistic charlatan, wholly insensitive to the needs of This, and wholly dishonest in his writings on That. Many of those who so denigrate him have advanced degrees from excellent universities, at which latter they also teach, drive, for, doubtlessly, some intellectual reason, expensive cars, have friends with whom they — you’ll pardon the expression—“play tennis”—and care not a whit for conventional thought. They are, for the most part, a credit to American education. At last count, they numbered 47,109. They dress very badly and read third-rate fiction.

In the thirties and early forties in New York, there was a Charlotte Russe “season,” during which period (it was, I believe, in late spring) Charlotte Russe purveyors rented empty stores to sell their delectable confection. They remained for, perhaps, two or three weeks, then they would disappear until the following year. A mysterious hieroglyphic, or symbol. For, perhaps, the Depression.

The dreamer sometimes says, with little attention paid to accuracy, “My dreams are getting better all the time.”

[“Creamy-white, frothy slip” is, if you’ll permit me, somewhat tired, yet I see how it “rhymes” with the Charlotte Russe motif.

“Uh-huh.”]