December dreams

What’s something every college student wants more than an A grade come December? Besides a free education and I’ll-do-your-laundry-for-you tokens, I’d guess sleep. So in honor of sleep and as a thinly-veiled ploy to get more of it, or at least to feel productive when I succumbed to it, I pledged to try documenting my dreams and analyzing them. Maybe I’d find my innermost soul, delineate my innermost desires or sleep twice as much as I usually do.

The project started successfully. On my first night of recording, I dreamed that I was inexplicably running up a tower, empty except for a spiral staircase. I was probably being chased by something rather formidable (because I know I’m not trying to catch the Joey, and why else would I ever run?) but this dream had a porous plot at best, so I couldn’t have been sure.

When I got to the top, there was a locked door I couldn’t seem to open. I didn’t have the key. Next I found myself dangling from the banister of the spiral staircase, unable to pull myself over its edge and moments away from my imaginary death. I wasn’t off to a great start with this dream stuff.

Although I’m still a dream-interpreting amateur, the “concealed” content of this dream seemed disturbingly lucid. At the risk of sounding obscene, it was clear that the phallus, ejaculation and sexual impotency are written all over this lazily hidden piece of my subconscious. It’s like my clumsy psyche tripped and broke my tools of repression.

As sure as I was of this rather sobering interpretation, I made sure to consult the gurus, the Trelawneys and the Freuds of the bowels of the internet to corroborate my findings. In effect, I consulted dreammoods.com.

This seductive website, complete with live psychics and alphabetized indices, reassured me that a dream in which you find yourself climbing a tower does not always denote the phallus -- although it does most of the time. Phew. Instead, I was told it may signify my quest for spirituality and “subconscious ideas that may be surfacing.” Intriguing.

To unlock what these subconscious ideas are, I next searched for what the inability to unlock a door means. Here dreammoods.com was a little too literal, dry and mundane for my outlandish taste in dreams. But besides the obvious truth that I’m being “kept out of something,” I noticed this golden nugget: “Perhaps an aspect of yourself is locked up inside and it needs to be expressed.” I bet it’s my burgeoning ideas! They must be really important, so I continued.

The interpretation of the last clue, my unexplainable fall -- I soon learned -- depends on my emotional state during the incident. This begged for an unreasonable assumption. I remembered my fall distinctly, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember if I sobbed or scoffed at the prospect of my own death. Assuming the latter I’m an indefatigable champion. Assuming the former I’m an insecure outcast.

I chose the latter.

So the legitimized analysis goes something like this: There’s this guy (me) who has ideas but can’t find them and doesn’t really care. I’m not sure whether or not this is more depressing than my sex-centric analysis I began with.

As exciting and elucidating as this one dream was, its presence in my column is a fairly accurate representation of my subconscious week. I did not have, or remember, many dreams, and the ones that I could recount usually involved hats and bodies of water (and there’s no way I’m sharing anything as personal as a wet dream).

Nevertheless, dream interpretation is a great way to procrastinate from studying and validate sleeping.