Jerry Friedman: "Freud stated that
"dreams of flying, so familiar and often so delightful, have to be interpreted
as dreams of general sexual excitement, as erection-dreams". I think what
Nabokov is talking about with those umbrellas and balloons is this simplistic
"have to be", with its implication that everyone's mind is so similar that Freud
knows every individual's (that is, Nabokov's) psyche better than the
individual."
JM: I forgot to add a comment to Friedman's interesting
post (thanks, JF, for your comments about Pale Fire and
Russia, posts, poles and polls).
Jerry's example about "dreams of flying," invites a clarification on
"everyone's mind is so similar..."
As a starter, this kind of example doesn't imply that women
cannot dream of flying because their erections
aren't exactly like a males's. So, what can we deduce after realizing that
we've heard about a dream of "general sexual excitement" -
except that it's "general"? These basic features (flying=sexual
excitement-erection) are scarcely revelatory about the dreamer. This is why the
analyst has to wait for the patient's associations, his links
to umbrellas, balloons, plane-crashes, parachutes, red kites,
aso. In his later years Freud prodded the patient on so that the
patient himself arrived to an interpretation, a unique
interpretation...
I'll expand on this a little: most people are familiar with how the
obnoxious sound of an alarm clock or bell are visually transformed by a dream so
that the sleeper may continue to sleep a while longer. An uncomfortably
heavy bladder may stimulate all sorts of dreams, too. In one, the
dreamer may find himself peeing in the middle of a stream, and
even experience an exhibitionistic pleasure thereby, until the
physiological reality prevails and he either wakes up to actually take a
leak or suffers from a disastrous deviation from "le plaisir
anglais.". In another, the dreamer may find himself following a long
corridor towards a toilet, which in turn will lead him onto another
corridor, and up and down stairs, closed doors, other corridors. In
the end, he'll have to wake up but, somehow, his waking up was postponed,
just like in the other example.
Here we find at least three different kinds of dreamers: the hysteric-type
( in which the person pees on and on), the voyerist-exhibitionist or the
undinistic kind (peeing in public, peeing in a river ) and, finally, the
obsessive-type (corridors leading onto other corridors, etc). However,
there's still a long way to go before the simplest dream (like the
one in this example) can be interpreted.
btw: I lost the reference, in one of the N-L postings, about Nabokov and a
dream with orchids and allother sorts of botanical paraphernalia.At the
time it reminded me of Freud's famous report about his "botannical
dream," to which I thought VN might be alluding directly. Can anyone rescue this
nabokovian dream here?