Bad Friends: A Dream Analysis

It’s easy to be simple-minded and insensible about shallow friends, largely due to the fact that we are so blind to our own shallowness. This is one of the most valuable lessons I learned from losing a child. 

I wrote before about realizing, within three days after my daughter’s death, that

it was for damn sure that I was surrounded by silly, self-absorbed women who hadn’t the grace to extend a simple condolence while returning a book, much less the grace to offer a steadying or comforting hand.

It is a psychological paradox that wherever our Selves are undeveloped, we compensate for our shortcomings by giving away what we most need or want. As might be expected, this produces hollow people with hollow relationships. It’s an unfortunate part of being a psychologist that I not only know these things, but catch myself being underdeveloped at the worst possible times. This is what happened while Olivia died and I broke down; I noticed that I was underdeveloped because the self-absorption and ridiculousness of some of my friends and acquaintances was thrown into sharp relief by my grief and need.

Rend Your Hearts

From the Office of Readings: A Commentary on Joel, by St. Jerome 

Return to me with all your heart and show a spirit of repentance with fasting, weeping and mourning; so that while you fast now, later you may be satisfied, while you weep now, later you may laugh, while you mourn now, you may some day enjoy consolation.

It is customary for those in sorrow or adversity to tear their garments. The gospel records that the high priest did this to exaggerate the charge against our Lord and Saviour; and we read that Paul and Barnabas did so when they heard words of blasphemy. I bid you not to tear your garments but rather to rend your hearts which are laden with sin. Like wine skins, unless they have been cut open, they will burst of their own accord. After you have done this, return to the Lord your God, from whom you had been alienated by your sins. Do not despair of his mercy, no matter how great your sins, for great mercy will take away great sins.

For the Lord is gracious and merciful and prefers the conversion of a sinner rather than his death. Patient and generous in his mercy, he does not give in to human impatience but is willing to wait a long time for our repentance. So extraordinary is the Lord’s mercy in the face of evil, that if we do penance for our sins, he regrets his own threat and does not carry out against us the sanctions he had threatened. So by the changing of our attitude, he himself is changed. But in this passage we should interpret “evil” to mean, not the opposite of virtue, but affliction, as we read in another place: Sufficient for the day are its own evils. And, again: If there is evil in the city, God did not create it.

Jungian Dream Interpretation

Carl Jung taught that the structure of a dream is similar to that of a drama, comprised of four different stages:

1. Exposition: The opening scene, which introduces the place, characters, and situation that the dreamer will face–the issue or problem as expressed through metaphor.
2. Development: The emergence of the plot.
3. Culmination: Something significant occurs, and the main character responds.
4. Lysis: The result or solution of the dream’s action. The lysis signifies how the dreamer might deal with the problem or issue that was expressed during the exposition stage. In effect, the work of the dream has produced a solution or result for the dreamer.

Jung considered the lysis the most important part of the dream because it showed where the dreamer’s energy wanted to go. Daryl Sharp writes, “Where there is no lysis, no solution is in sight” (Jungian Psychology Unplugged).

While some dreams are too short or fragmented to lend themselves to interpretation, the manifest (or remembered) dream can be important. Such a dream contains within itself the actual meaning of the dream; one needn’t understand its esoteric symbols in order to glean the meaning. The dream is a message from the unconscious, spoken through symbols meaningful and peculiar to the dreamer.