In Which I Have Two Dreams

I have always been a vivid, narrative dreamer. By which I mean that I can wake up with a great deal of detail about what I’ve dreamed. I once dreamed a whole musical comedy, with fragments of lyrics still in mind when I awoke laughing. Earlier on, I would tell Sam about a dream and we would use the whole hour for my telling of it, that’s how much detail and plot there was. She’d take copious notes and we would end a session with the intention to go back and try to dive into analyzing it the next week. Sometimes we would, often we wouldn’t. Here’s a page of her notes from a dream just to give you an example.

That was the middle of three pages of notes she took that day. (I blacked out a couple of real names.) The II in the margin indicates where the first part of the dream ended and the second part, in a different location, began. Doesn’t matter, all you need to get from this is that I dreamed in detail and she wrote it all down in detail.

So, after months of her pushing me to talk about our relationship, I had two dreams that touched on our relationship. I’ll type the salient points here since these two dreams she chose to withhold from the notes she sent after my lawyer demanded she provide them.

Dream #1

In the first, I was finishing up an appointment with a female medical doctor (not Sam) in White Plains, NY. I was in the waiting room speaking to the receptionist. And I realized I’d forgotten something in the exam room, so I knocked on the door. The doctor asked me for a ride home. We drove and I realized I was in my home town and decided to show the doctor around. We drove around and I pointed out some grand houses that I’d always admired.

Somehow, the road led to Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills. I was confused about where we were, so I pulled into the parking garage of a big office building. The doctor and I got separated and I saw that my parents were in the lobby, wanting to take me to a restaurant for dinner. I greeted them, but I didn’t stay at the restaurant, because I thought there was something else I was supposed to be doing.

I went to the elevator and it let me off in a big co-working space. No desks, but sofas everywhere, a game room, everyone’s fantasy of what a big startup tech office is like, with lots of lifestyle elements and no clear way to get work done. I found the doctor lying on a big round sofa that was almost like a bed, and we talked for a bit. I gave her a chaste little kiss and she warned me that “relationships are complicated” for her. Whereupon she sprouted a big Hellboy-like horn in her forehead.

We decided to leave and went back to the car. In all of the ramps of the garage, we got turned around and were trying to exit out of an entry ramp. I got out of the car to try to show someone my ticket and pay and ask if they could open the gate to let us out.

Dream #2

This time, the female character was definitely Sam. The two of us were FBI agents with a Mulder and Scully vibe and we were surveilling a house, on a stakeout. (I know, obvious metaphor for therapy.) There was something going on in the house that we were supposed to figure out. People were coming and going, it was confusing.

To cut to the chase, at some point I gave Sam a kiss. Not so chaste. Shortly after that, the stakeout was over and we went back to Sam’s home. She went to the kitchen or somewhere to have a seat and Sam’s husband came doddering down the stairs. He was quite old. He greeted me. I wasn’t a surprise person to him and he knew that Sam and I were partners and was fine with it.

Anyway…

I told these dreams to Sam. “Now,” she asked, “are you ready to talk about our relationship?”

I wasn’t actually. These were dreams and I wanted to analyze them. In some ways they were clearly about Sam and me, but my belief (and her expressed belief at the time) was that dreams are metaphors rather than direct lines to reality. My feelings about Sam were wrapped up in them (or maybe the constant conversation about our relationship was wrapped up in them), but in my conscious life I had not formulated feelings about her other than that we had a very good therapist-patient connection, that I trusted her, that we had a good banter going on a parallel track to the work I thought I was there to do. But, on the other hand, since she was in Dream #2, with a kiss no less, and she was—arguably at least—in Dream #1 as a totem, I guess my feelings bore a deeper look from myself.