I’ve been enjoying the podcast ‘Ordinary unhappiness’ hosted by Abby Kluchin and Patrick Blanchfield, an exploration of psychoanalysis and much more. In their latest episode, they discuss dreams and dream interpretation, but also raise a more basic question: why do we dream at all?
Sigmund Freud’s classic work, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, introduces a central idea: we dream in order to keep sleeping. Psychoanalytic theory is about conflict and the different sides of ourselves, and here too, in the area of dreams, there is a duality at play.
On the one hand, there is our adult self: we navigate the demands of daily life, handle responsibilities, and conform to social expectations. We work, pay our bills, socialise, behave ourselves, and manage as best we can. But in the background lies another side of ourselves, slightly hidden but plain to see if we pay attention: this is our primitive, childlike, needy self, crying out for unrestrained fun and freedom from adult responsibilities. This self patiently stands aside and waits for its turn, while our adult self manages the day. Dreams, as a Freudian reading would say, serve as one of the ways for this ‘primitive side’ to make itself heard.
Blanchfield offers a striking metaphor for all this in the podcast. He says:
…during your waking life imagine you’re always driving a car. You as an adult person have to drive around constantly and in the back seat is a little baby that’s also you. The little baby is doing stuff like throwing things, or saying I want to go to Disneyland …or I want to go to Wally world, or when do we get there, or are we there yet? I have to get to the bathroom. In other words, you have this mewling whelp full of need, desire, demand, effluence all this stuff, throwing a fit in the back. And you have to drive, you have to drive safely, you have to ignore it, you have to repress its needs. But then what happens when you dream basically, is you stop the car, put your keys in the pocket, pick up the little baby version of yourself, the id, the unconscious, whatever, put it in the driver seat, lay out on the back yourself and say, ok, I’m going to take a nap now, you can drive wherever. And of course because the kid doesn’t have the keys, sure they can play with the wheel … now the kid can … pretend it’s driving for a little bit while you get the rest you deserve.
I thought he put it brilliantly.
This image of the car journey, with the driver and the back seat passenger, brought several questions to my mind. Beyond sleeping and dreaming, how else do we typically make room for our impulsive, pleasure-seeking, emotional selves? And – are there specific life stages where the voice of the back seat passenger is amplified by design, demanding more attention? Think of times when there are hormonal fluctuations, such as adolescence or menopause. Or consider phases marked by rapid physical and intellectual growth, like the first year of life, the toddler years, and pregnancy. This could also be true during times of physical decline, say in emerging dementia, or during an illness. At those times, our responses lean closer to our ‘back seat passenger’ self.
Some of these ideas were outlined in Freud’s 1925 paper ‘On narcissism: an introduction’. Beyond the ‘egoism of dreams’ Freud discusses there, he identifies other scenarios where our primitive, narcissistic self takes centre stage. One is physical illness; another the early stages of falling in love. The self-centredness that emerges then is ordinary and expected, until things settle, laying the foundation for a theory of normal narcissism.
Acknowledging that adolescence, with its intense changes, amplifies the voice of the back seat passenger, helps us consider how to provide enough opportunities for expression, play, and a sense of control. We can easily push aside or underestimate the space needed for this, not only in adolescents but in all of us. Sometimes this looks like pottering around aimlessly, while other times it involves taking risks, wandering off the path for a bit, or being distracted without guilt. We can forget the need for this because of what Josh Cohen has called ‘the tyranny of doing’. But the need remains, especially during periods of heightened vulnerability, when the pressure cooker approaches boiling point.
Going back to the role of dreams in our lives, we can think of them as one, amongst other, ‘mad’ and irrational voices within ourselves. We aspire to be rational and responsible, but we are also unformed, reactive, impulsive and occasionally (thank goodness) unpredictable. Those parts of ourselves deserve their time and space too, allowing the exhausted driver to more easily get back into the driver seat and continue the journey.
This feels relevant to me when it comes to the context of schoolchildren and adolescents in today’s United Kingdom, with a long ‘list of absurd rules around how [they] should look’, as André Spicer recently pointed out in the Guardian. To that we can add a long list too of how they should behave. We seem to be experts in what we want teenagers to do, but we increasingly forget who they are or how they need to be. Consequently, young people are faced with an increasing number of rigid, sometimes nonsensical rules, coupled with a problematic lack of meaningful opportunities to work and be helpful in everyday life. It’s worth pausing to note, as well, the sweeping societal changes in just a few decades, affecting children and adolescents’ capacity to explore, play and roam freely, going hand in hand with their gradual infantilisation, when so little is required of them, aside from academic work. This gloomy picture persists into young adulthood, with fewer job opportunities for inexperienced young people and many hurdles on the way to a reasonable life.
Returning to the question of ‘why we dream in the first place’. All this makes me think that allowing the back seat passenger space to not only exist but to flourish allows us then to set higher expectations for young people, so they can get in the driver’s seat more fully themselves.