Dream

Several years agoI became interested in dreams because of a peculuar dream that I had. I would up writing two books about dreams, Demystifying dreams, and Sleep and dreaming)and giving a dream lecture at Bryn Mawr Hospital. My understanding of dreams is that there are not merely noise in the nervous system (maybe sometimes) but represent meaning (not purpose expressed poorly by a sleeping, but not dead, brain. As Freud pointed, it is one's personal associations that can be used to interpret dreams and there are no universal symbols. I collected about 200 of my own dreams before writing my books and found that the same themes kept repeating in different ways. My dreams were mostly boring. My novel, Shrink, started out being called Nightmnare, and involved a great deal of dream interpretation by my therapist hero and alter ego, Morrie. I have since gone on to other interests and writing, and only occasionally write down a rare dream that I find interesting. This is such an occasion.

The other night I had a dream I had difficulty interpreting. The dream was in two parts. The first part found me in college. I had to complete a ridiculous assignment--to classify something in major and minor categiories and to arrange the objects using a set of different colored hooks to hang each level of the organizational chart. I did not have the required hooks. Someone advises me that the man selling the hooks was just next door and may still be outside. I am in my underwear but I go out anyway and purchase the hooks. I am thinking, "What a racket. The instructor must be getting a kickback from the vendor."

The second part of the dream finds me at a railroad station. I am going to Boston. My brother-in-law, Marty, in driving me. I take out my wallet to pay for the tickets and cannot find my credit cards. Marty offers to lend me his credit card. However, I find one card (two are still missing) and decline his offer. I look at my wallet and realize it is not mine. Somehow I have switched wallets with another Marvin. There is a name in the wallet and an address. I read the name and remember it clearly upon awakening. I write it down as well as an outline of the dream because it is most unusual that I would see a name spelled out in a dream. The loss of a wallet is not hard to interpret. It is an anxiety dream. Usually I dream I cannot find my car. Here I am worried about not receiving some money due me from a patient as well as needing to spend some money to have the house painted. (I also had to spend money in the first part of the dream on silly colored hooks.) The name that I wrote down is Marvin Dauber. I know of no one by that name and have no associations to it. I Googled the name and find a listing on a geneological site. Someone is trying to locate a Marvin Dauber who lived around 1920. It was his grandfather's father whom he is researching. I have never seen that website before. I look up daub in the dictionary. It means splashing on paint or plaster poorly. Is this the meaning of my dream? I am upset about spending money poorly on someone who is only a paint dauber. I had mentioned painting that day to a man who is going to do some odd jobs for me at home. He tells me he doesn't like to paint. So he might, indeed, be a dauber. Painting is my wife's idea and I have resisted it for two years. Daub is not a word I ordinarily would use. Dreams do the strangest things.