Last night: The Paris-Kapalua topless red eye train to nowhere

So, you know how sometimes "your friend" starts telling you all about this dream she had last night? And to her, it is SOOO fascinating, but really, it isn't, and as she drones on, you stop blinking, and then you start daydreaming that you are all alone doing your laundry or anything more interesting than listening to this bizarre fiction of her subconscious?

I mean, NOBODY wants to hear it. Well, nobody but Carl Jung. And Freud. Okay, fine, and Perls and Adler. But the rest of us? No.  

Oh. And by "your friend" I meant, me. 

Cause that's what I'm going to inflict on you today. My dream from last night.

It's my blog, I can bore you if I want to.

So it all started with a dinner reservation in Paris. Which is a good start. But then, I needed to go back to our hotel room and change. (Since I'm not going to bore you with trivial details, I won't tell you I needed to change because I was topless. That I'd heard about all the topless ladies on the French Riviera and decided hey, when in Rome, right?  Well, I don't know about the Roman dress code, it is probably pretty conservative, considering the Pope lives there; but it turns out that in Paris, you wear tops, generally. So there I am, standing in front of Fouquet's, wearing a short pleated kilt, knee socks, and trying to cover my chest with my arms and hands. It was more modest than you might think. My arms are ape-long, my hands are extra-crazy-large, and on my chest, there isn't so much to cover. Anymore.)

I decide to take the Metro to the hotel, but when I get on, I find that it is an express train out of town. I panic. Someone gives me a t-shirt that says "Kiss my grits," and a cell phone, but I can't seem to figure out how to text anybody in french. So I sit on the train for hours, hoping it will make a giant loop and take me back to where I began. Finally, I hear the conductor say the next stop is Kapalua. Which is on Maui. In Hawaii. 

I am hungry. Some nice Polynesian lady gives me poi. It was gross. I wanted my fancy Frenchy dinner. Then I remember that at home it is Thursday, and I forgot to hire a babysitter for Thursday. So my kids are all alone at home. So I am getting more and more stressed out, but still, I stay on the train.

I wake from this dream and start making kids' lunches for school. I am very tired of making sack lunches. Kids must be tired of eating them. I would actually rather clean toilets than make lunches. Then Sam rips the entire backside out of his Scooby-doo underpants while playing Legos (no idea how this happened, or why he is playing Legos when he should be getting ready for school), and wants to know if he should put them in the regular trash or the recycling. TRASH, OKAY! USED UNDERPANTS SHOULD NOT BE RECYCLED! IS NOT SANITARY!

So, I'm still thinking about my dream, and wishing I hadn't bought those three bags of Pecan Sandies Cookies with Dark Chocolate and Almonds, even thought they were super cheap. Even if someone wants to pay me $20 to take them home, I should just say no. Cause I eat them, for breakfast, while I blog about my crazy subconscious. MMM, tasty. But must stop eating. Might be going to New York next month. Need to save up calories for Carnegie Deli.

So, back to the dream. What does it mean? What might the experts say? 

Freud believed that dreams were often dangerous and repressed wishes and fantasies that the patient’s subconscious was trying to repress for the sanity of the patient.

So I secretly want to be topless? My conscious mind does not. It is a huge fan of underwire bras, actually. Or maybe I secretly want to be in Paris? Er, is no secret. Or maybe I secretly wish I was back on the Granada Hills High School Drill team, so I could wear that kilt? No, is nightmare, not secret dream.

Jung disagreed with Siggy. He believed the patient dreamed in order for the subconscious to actively communicate with the conscious mind with helpful archetypes of universal struggles all people need to deal with.

I think my dream dealt with two universal human struggles 

1. Do I vacation in Paris or Maui?, and 

2. What do I wear so I don't look like a tourist?

Alfred Adler agreed with Freud and Jung that dreams were the unconscious way to deal with things we feel powerless over in daily life, and that dreams were driven by our troubles in life, but not a war between the conscious and the subconscious. Dreams should be interpreted to incorporate the findings into helping the person actively deal with the issues during waking hours.

So what is my subconscious trying to fix in my waking life with this dream? In the interest of science, I will disclose that I often have dreams where I am in my favorite places, but can't seem to do anything.  Many times I am lost in London, trying to get to a West End show on the Tube. I end up very frustrated. I have been very busy this week. Maybe it was a little "stop and smell the roses" note from my unconscious mind. Could be. But why, then, was I topless? Is a mystery.

Frederick Perls, the Father of Gestalt therapy, wasn't big on dream symbols, but rather pragmatically sought to integrate rejected parts of the person’s whole which are expressed in dreams.

So according to Gestalt, my inner Parisian exhibitionist isn't getting enough air time. 

He's got a point, there. She is totally repressed. 

Oh, and BTW, I am well-qualified to interpret dreams because I took a psychology class at Pierce College (San Fernando Valley) during my senior year of high school (mostly so I could leave school early every day and get In-n-Out with my friends). I remember I turned in the etiquette paper I'd written in 5th grade. I called it "Psychology of Social Etiquette", and I got an A+. I'm not making up that plus, either. An actual plus, in college, on a paper I'd written at age 10. And I'm not saying my 5th grade paper was college-level. I'm saying maybe the JC system needs to raise the bar a bit. Seriously.

So what do you think? To which theory of dream analysis do you subscribe? Do you have any crazy dreams? This is your chance to share, cause your real-life friends don't want to hear it. 

But I do. I want to hear it.