Issue 75, November 2004
Paint by Number
©Jane Teresa Anderson, November 2004
“I want you to meet the love of my life, not my wife, but the real love of my life,” the hunched old man whispered to Jock, looking around him expectantly. The nurse tenderly placed her hand on his shoulder, “She’s not with us anymore. Remember?” The old man was devastated. Jock caught the nurse’s eye, “How long?” he mouthed. “Four months,” she signalled.
Jock* consulted me about his dream because the old man’s devastation had felt so compelling. Jock was happy, happier than he’d been for a long time and yet there was something about the dream devastation that was nagging at him, demanding his attention.
I thought about the four months. With all their bizarre, surreal symbolism dreams are usually amazingly accurate when it comes to numbers. “What happened four months ago?” I asked Jock. “I stopped drinking,” he replied.
Now this was unusually interesting because, as those of you who read last month’s article, VINTAGE WHINE, will know, I also stopped drinking alcohol a few months ago – for a while, at least. Although my alcohol intake was extremely moderate my dreams had plenty of comment to make, so much so that the “for a while” may be forever.
“Have you missed the drinking, Jock?” I asked. He hadn’t. He had been a big drinker for most of his life and suddenly decided to give it a break for health reasons. At least, that’s what he told his friends, but he confided that there seemed to be a deeper motivation though he couldn’t find words to describe it. It was just something he knew he had to do. “It was easy,” he added. “I knew I wasn’t an alcoholic, but drinking was so much a part of my routine that I thought it would be a hard habit to break, but it wasn’t.”
I thought about his dream. “So who was the love of the old man’s life in your dream, Jock? Was it the alcohol or something else?”
One of the keys to successful dream analysis is asking the right questions. Even when the dreamer knows very little about dream interpretation, the right questions provoke meaningful answers.
“It was the alcohol, but I have the feeling it was also something else,” Jock replied, now choking a little on his words. “It sounds strange, but the real love of my life was something I fought hard to deny and drinking helped me to do that.”
I was eager to hear more but I knew I needed to ask one more question to help Jock over his tongue-tie, to show him his dream was backing up his hunch.
“The old man in your dream had hunched shoulders, didn’t he Jock?” I said. “He had a hunch that a truth was about to surface and I think the clue was in the first part of your dream where you were driven to the old people’s home by the intellectually disabled 18-year-old. How does intellectual disability come into all of this?”
That did it. “I’ve always known that I cheated on myself,” Jock started, “I didn’t go to university. My father wanted me to and, well, I wanted to make choices for myself, not for my father. I settled for less and eventually believed I wasn’t intelligent enough to fulfil my real dreams, so I didn’t even begin them.”
“What were those dreams?” I asked Jock.
“Lots of things but most of all I wanted to write. I dabbled but didn’t put the full effort in. Until the last few months.”
“When you gave up drinking, you mean?”
“I think it started just before then,” Jock mused, “I think I finally reached the point where I realised I didn’t need a university degree and that all I needed was faith in my own intelligence and abilities. I started to do more than dabble. I started to take my writing and myself seriously. And that’s when I felt that strange urge to give up drinking.”
“So you could write with a clearer head?” I prompted.
“No. I didn’t understand it at the time. It’s only making sense to me as we talk,” Jock continued. “I drank to drown my intelligence, to excuse myself from following my dreams, to fritter my evenings enjoyably instead of enjoying my intelligence passionately.”
“Passion. The love of your life, Jock?” I queried.
“It makes more and more sense, doesn’t it?” he bemused. “The real love of my life was my passion to write but I denied it. I replaced it with another love – the drink.”
“So, in your dream,” I offered, “the old man’s devastation was not so much about the death of his drinking habit but about his realisation of what he – you – had really lost for all those years.”
“It’s complicated, but it’s right,” said Jock. “It’s only when I stopped drowning my intelligence that I realised what I had done. But I don’t understand why the old man was still inconsolable in the dream. It’s not too late and I’ve been writing really well in the last few weeks.”
“In your dream perhaps the old man is devastated because of all those lost years. He’s still coming to terms with it, looking back, not forward. He’s still partially in the denial phase, on the verge of feeling the full force of his grief. He’s going through a very healthy grieving process, grieving for all those years so that he can move on.”
The signs were good. The old man in the dream was ready to confide that his wife was not the real love of his life, that all was not as it seemed. Jock’s hunch that he had been denying and drowning a deeper love was gaining ground.
“What happened when you were 18?” I asked, now rattling through the next batch of right questions. The intellectually disabled driver in Jock’s dream was 18.
“I decided not to go to university,” Jock replied.
I remembered that there was more to Jock’s dream. After the scene with the old man Jock had got back into his car, only this time it was a 12-year-old girl who was the driver. “Where to?” she had asked Jock. “We’ll find our own way,” he advised. He looked out the window and read the road sign. They were on route 223, signposted to the place of his birth.
“What happened when you were 12, Jock?”
“Probably had my first drink at 13!” he laughed. “Or maybe that’s when my father first mentioned university and I first felt cornered”.
That made sense. The dream took Jock back to a time before he began to veer off the academic path.
“And ‘find our own way’?”
“Looking back I can see that I didn’t need university at all. I just used that as an excuse, didn’t I? I didn’t lose my innate intelligence by not going. I found my own way, even if I did try to drown it out.”
“So you’ve got your old drive back then, have you?” I asked Jock. “And what about route 223? What happened when you were 22-23?”
Jock counted back the years then flashed a huge smile. “That was the one time I believed in myself and applied for a promotion to suit my intelligence, but I was told I was too young and that was that.”
There was time for one last right question. “So why might route 223 take you back to your birthplace, back to the start?”
“That’s easy,” replied Jock. “It’s time to take the 22-23 year old approach again and believe that my intelligence can take me anywhere and everywhere. I’ve lost nothing. I have my whole life before me.”
There are times when analysing a dream is like painting by numbers. Ask the right questions and the whole picture emerges.
(* Thank you to Jock (not his real name) for offering his dream, its analysis and his insights for this article.)
Jane Teresa Anderson
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