I thought, "I'm in a tower, which is a phallic symbol, and we know what Freud had to say about ascending a staircase in a dream . . ." -- at which point I lost lucidity and lapsed into ordinary dreaming, and the scene shifted.
No longer in the tower, I was now sitting at my desk in my study, typing out a highly qualified defense of the intellectual legitimacy of Sigmund Freud. This was a highly verbal dream, and I think this is what I wrote, very nearly verbatim: "Freud may have been a Jew, he may have been inclined to pettiness, and he may have been perversely persistent (and at times even successful) in trying to convince himself of a crudely materialistic view of the world, but none of this changes the fact that he was a thinker of genius and an astute observer of the human condition, and the current fad for dismissing him as a quack is just that, a fad, and is almost entirely wrongly motivated."
Later, I was scrolling through the archives of my own blog, reading something I had written back in 1930. Dr. Freud had just published a new book, called Die Transportphilosophie, with an English version called The Philosophy of Transportation, and I was not writing a review of it. Instead, I was writing an absurdly pompous and longwinded wall of text about why I did not intend to read or review the book. This was too long for me to remember word-for-word, but this is my best approximation of the style and content of what I wrote: "It is with a certain degree of trepidation that one sets out to dismiss without reading it this highly anticipated work from one of the most celebrated pens of our time, and I am well aware of the risk I run of making myself, like the critic who in 1964 opined that the four Liverpudlian songsters with their 'nutty shouts of yeah, yeah, yeah' were destined to fade into well-deserved obscurity, an object of ridicule to future generations who, for ought I can predict, may well end up looking back on The Philosophy of Transportation as Dr. Freud's masterwork. Despite this theoretical possibility, however, I must admit that I feel confident enough in my judgment to rush in where angels fear to tread and to declare boldly and without prevarication that transportation is a subject unworthy of a mind of Dr. Freud's caliber, that there is and can be no soi-disant 'philosophy of transportation,' and that even if there were or could be such a thing, the celebrated founder of the discipline of psychoanalysis would not be the one to write it. I confidently predict that this will prove to be as big a stinker as Moses and Monotheism and that there is a non-negligible chance of the word Transportphilosophie entering the English and other European languages and acquiring for future generations a proverbial sense analogous to that of 'Homer nods.' As a great admirer of much of Dr. Freud's work, I sincerely hope that he will prove me wrong in this regard, but until then my integrity as a writer demands that I express my true opinion, however unwelcome. Here I stand; I can do no other. I trust the reader has enjoyed this note."
1 comment:
Talk about lucid dreaming!
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