So as I mentioned a while back, I went on Paxil about six months ago as part of the whole mind-body thing. Clearly, my gut was not going to calm down until my brain told it to, no matter how much yogurt and bananas I ate. (Yes, after about a month of no substantive posting, I figured I’d jump right into the deep end. Come on, you’re with me, right?)
Going on the Paxil coincided with cutting way back on drinking, and the two together did a real number on my dreams. Drinking alcohol before bed — even a seemingly modest glass or two of wine, if it’s a regular habit — can suppress dream sleep, which means that when you quit, you may get a bounceback effect. Add to that the fact that SSRIs intensify dreams, and things got quite exciting for a while.
After graduate school, I worked for a while with Alan Hobson on the psychology of dreams. As I’ve written about before, one of Alan’s ideas is that we solve problems in our dreams much as we do in real life, we simply don’t question the bizarre. Alan also believed that Freud and psychoanalysis had led people to focus too much on the symbolism of dreams. When you stop trying to figure that out, and instead focus on the story and the emotions, what the dream “means” will usually become quite clear.
The power of a dream lies in its story, and in how that story affects you. The set and props are just whatever your unconscious mind could most quickly grab: images from the day’s business; random memories that floated up in response to this color or that smell; faces or places you watched on television before bed. This is why there’s no point to “dream dictionaries” that purport to tell you what the various symbols in your dreams mean. Dream symbols are at once universal (ever go through a computer training with co-workers, and discover afterward that many of you dreamed of the program you were learning that night?) and idiosyncratic (a cigar may be merely a cigar to Sigmund, but it might symbolize the Cuban embargo to Rosalita, or her father’s cancer to Dora, or even a penis to James).
Anyway, about a month or so after I’d been on the medication, I had a dream that nicely illustrated both the principles above and the effect that Paxil had had on on my problem-solving style.
I’d been over to a friend’s house that night to catch up on some Tivo’ed episodes of “Big Love.” (It’s a fun show to watch in batches — when you watch several episodes back-to-back, you realize that every time someone smiles, something horrible happens within 10 seconds.) Unsurprisingly, that night, I had the classic Actor’s Nightmare: I’d been cast as Bill Henrickson’s fourth wife, but no one had bothered to give me a script.
Was I anxious or worried? Oh, heck no. I have a fair amount I’d like to say to those characters, so until the directors put a script in my hand, I was going to say what I thought. (I recall telling first wife Barb, “Listen to how Bill yells orders at you! My boss doesn’t talk to me that way, and he’s my boss! A person’s spouse certainly shouldn’t bark at them like that.”) And if the director or other actors didn’t like what I had to say, well, give me the script, already, and I’ll stop improvising and say what you want.
Have you ever had a dream that used to make you anxious, but doesn’t anymore? Or a kind of dream you stopped having once certain problems in your waking life got resolved? Or a dream that makes more sense to you now that I’ve talked about the “story, not symbolism” principle?
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