Analysis of a Dream
Preamble
My dad and I had an incredibly complicated relationship. We were especially close during my boyhood, but shortly after my twentieth birthday, our relationship became increasingly hostile. Things came to a head in 2021, and after he made some comments that I found deeply hurtful, I stopped talking to him.
He died unexpectedly on January 29, 2024. On the night of March 7, I went to bed feeling sad and wondering if he had stopped loving me during the final years of his life. I fell asleep thinking these thoughts and had the following dream.
The Dream
My dream can be told as a three-act story, although I woke up before the third act began.
Act One
Greta from high school is spending the night in the other house next door. She’s wearing a low-cut gown and looks incredibly sexy and busty, and she invites me over, evidently to have sex.
It’s like I’m a teenager, and the kids who live in the other house next door keep saying that in the middle of the night they’re going to take me out of bed and shove my head in the toilet. The kids aren’t being malicious; this is just part of some hazing ritual, but I still don’t want them to give me a swirly. This creates a problem: If I sleep in my room with the door locked, they won’t be able to give me a swirly, but for some reason locking my door would prevent me from having sex with Greta.
I decide to take action and explain to the kids that they’re being immature and that they should just let me sleep in peace. However, they’re not persuaded by my plea. One of the kids reminds me of Jeff’s brother.
Act Two
I don’t end up sleeping with Greta that night, but she’s staying in town another night. She invites me over the next evening, although she’ll be staying at a different house.
I look at my phone and see that Renee (my ex-girlfriend) has sent me a flurry of text messages and that she wants me back. It feels good that she’s finally choosing me over that other man, the one she originally rejected me to be with. At the same time, I don’t know if I want to get back together, at least not yet. I really want to have sex with Greta, and if I get back with Renee, she’ll again know my whereabouts, thus making it difficult for me to go to Greta.
To make matters worse, I’ve been masturbating so much lately that I’m afraid I’ve given myself erectile dysfunction. So even if I manage to get together with Greta, I don’t know if I’ll be able to perform sexually.
Associations
My first step in analyzing this dream was to note those parts that I found to be emotionally resonant. I then associated from each of those parts, the result sometimes being a single association and sometimes an entire chain of associations.
Greta from high school is spending the night in the other house next door. She’s wearing a low-cut gown and looks incredibly sexy and busty, and she invites me over, evidently to have sex.
Greta, Associative Chain #1. Greta and I starred together in a play our senior year of high school. → There was a blizzard on opening night. → My dad drove through the blizzard to see my performance. → My maternal grandparents did not risk driving through the blizzard, a fact that I initially saw as evidence for the superiority of my dad’s love.
Blizzard. I had lunch with my mom the day of the dream, and she told me about the Blizzard of 1982. She and my dad were already divorced by then, and he was so determined to spend Christmas with me that he drove through the blizzard to get me. The snow was so deep that he was forced to park his van on a main street two blocks away, and I was too short to walk through it. And so my dad put me on his shoulders, piggy-back style, and walked back to the van. My mom cried as she shared this memory, and I took this, both the story and her tears, as evidence that he had truly loved me.
High School Play. Backstage after the play, Tim, my friend and fellow actor, told me that my dad and his dad had almost gotten into a fight at one point during the performance → Tim and I then pretended to get into a fight ourselves to the amusement of our fellow actors → Carmen, the girl who had broken my heart earlier that school year, was also backstage. I had finally gotten over my heartbreak, and I didn’t talk to her that night. → I had not called to wish my dad a happy birthday that fall. I remember talking to him over the phone shortly after his birthday, apologizing but also explaining that I had been sad and thus forgot to call him because I had had my heart broken. My dad said something about the first heartbreak being the worst, a comment I found dismissive.
Tim’s Father. Tim’s father was a gruff man who would never talk to me when I came to Tim’s house. → Tim had announced over Facebook a few years ago that his father had died. I consoled Tim and reminded him of the time on opening night when our dads almost got into a fight. → This reminded me of my dad’s recent death.
Greta, Chain #2. Yes, Greta had big boobs. → I had a crush on Greta throughout high school but was too shy to talk to her much. → I remember a classmate later telling me about her big boobs popping out of her dress during a musical performance.
Big Boobs. I said in therapy on the morning of the dream that the only thing I remember from my dad’s “sex talks” were him talking about big boobs and indicating how much he liked big boobs.
It’s like I’m a teenager, and the kids who live in the other house next door keep saying that in the middle of the night they’re going to take me out of bed and shove my head in the toilet. The kids aren’t being malicious; this is just part of some hazing ritual, but I still don’t want them to give me a swirly. This creates a problem: If I sleep in my room with the door locked, they won’t be able to give me a swirly, but for some reason locking my door would prevent me from having sex with Greta.
I decide to take action and explain to the kids that they’re being immature and that they should just let me sleep in peace. However, they’re not persuaded by my plea. One of the kids reminds me of Jeff’s brother.
Jeff’s Brother. Jeff’s older brother used to tease him when we were younger, but the teasing was never mean, and Jeff would inevitably start laughing. → One Summer afternoon when we were teenagers, Jeff showed his friend Curtis and me his brother’s porn magazines. The magazines showed not just the boobs that my dad would talk about but everything. I mean, everything. Looking at the pictures made me feel somewhat aroused but also overwhelmed, uncomfortable, grossed out.
Jeff and Curtis, Chain #1. That same summer, I went to Water World with Jeff and Curtis. At one point we went to the Lazy River, and Jeff and Curtis kept upending younger kids floating on the inner tubes, thinking this was hilarious. → I went to Water World with my dad a few years earlier. I remember at one point looking down at his bare feet and seeing that two of his toes were webbed together. I felt shocked and wondered if this meant he was “retarded.” I didn’t say anything about it. → Another time I went to Water World with my dad, and a younger woman started flirting with him and asked if he and I were brothers. My dad found this question humorous. → As I entered adolescence (and maybe before), I admired my dad for being so attractive to women.
Jeff and Curtis, Chain #2. I remember going for a walk with them during our adolescence. I think we were walking to the convenience store, and Jeff and Curtis were talking about Jeff’s girlfriend and how she was so dumb. I wished I had a girlfriend, but I was too nervous to even have a meaningful conversation with the girls at school. → I had shared in therapy the week of my dream that my dad didn’t seem to want me to have a girlfriend in high school or even college, although I don’t know if he ever explicitly said this. → During my adolescence, I would sometimes ask my mom what my dad had been like when she met him in high school. She described him as a lady’s man, someone who had a date with a different girl every weekend. At the time, I so badly wished I were like that.
Jeff and Curtis, Chain #3. As we walked to the convenience store, I felt like the odd-man out. They went to a different junior high and kept talking about girls at their school. Jeff walked on the sidewalk, and Curtis walked on the gutter. I tried to walk beside them, but when I did so, I ended up on someone’s lawn, and Jeff joked that in America we don’t walk on people’s lawns. → Years later, I felt similarly excluded by my dad. I felt excluded when he moved to Oklahoma in my early twenties and became devoted to his new family there. And I felt excluded two years before his death when he and two of his brothers felt I had mishandled a legal matter.
Jeff, Chain #1. I saw on Facebook a few years ago that Jeff’s dad had unexpectedly died of cancer. I felt bad for him, and for some reason, I felt surprised that he had been so horribly devastated by his dad’s death. → This reminded me of my dad’s unexpected death.
Jeff, Chain #2. We shared a love for baseball and baseball cards. → My dad used to take me to different baseball card shops and buy me cards. → Jeff and I used to go to minor league baseball games. → My dad also took me to minor league baseball games, and when I got older he took me to some major league games. This felt like more proof that he had truly loved me.
Hazing. That’s what adolescence felt like, all the boys pranking each other.
I don’t end up sleeping with Greta that night, but she’s staying in town another night. She invites me over the next evening, although she’ll be staying at a different house.
I look at my phone and see that Renee (my ex-girlfriend) has sent me a flurry of text messages and that she wants me back. It feels good that she’s finally choosing me over that other man, the one she originally rejected me to be with. At the same time, I don’t know if I want to get back together, at least not yet. I really want to have sex with Greta, and if I get back with Renee, she’ll again know my whereabouts, thus making it difficult for me to go to Greta.
Renee’s Text Messages. For several years, Renee and I had an on again, off again relationship. At one point, she cheated on me with another man. I became absolutely heartbroken, and for several months I tried to win her back, but she kept seeing the other man behind my back. Twice during this period I found the strength to begin to move on, and both times, she sensed this and responded by going into a state of panic and sending me a flurry of text messages begging me to take her back. Knowing that she wanted me back felt good, but I was no longer sure I wanted her anymore. → I have told my therapist that Renee picking the other man hurt so much because this was a repetition of my dad’s rejection of me, him choosing his Oklahoma family and his brothers over me. → I still feel incredibly frustrated that my dad maintained an infantile reverence for his oldest brother.
Planning to See Greta. There were times when I started seeing another woman, Silvia, in hopes that this would help me get over Renee. Silvia had big boobs, and I found her to be incredibly sexy. I went to her house one evening but spent the entire night worrying that Renee would find out. Even though part of me wanted to be done with Renee, another part of me desperately wanted to be with her.
To make matters worse, I’ve been masturbating so much lately that I’m afraid I’ve given myself erectile dysfunction. So even if I manage to get together with Greta, I don’t know if I’ll be able to perform sexually.
I remember seeing a guy in a porn video shaking his flaccid dick in hopes of getting erect. → At different points in the past, I had feared that because I’d been masturbating so much I wouldn’t be able to perform sexually with a partner. → That week in therapy I had been talking about masturbating as an adolescent. Masturbation had felt like an addiction, something I tried to stop before I had even become a Christian. My therapist commented that I had been alone in my struggle. → During my sophomore year of college, my dad took me on vacation to San Diego. I was trying to break my masturbation addiction but didn’t know how, and one night after he feel asleep in our hotel room, I masturbated to an X-rated show on HBO.
My Dad and Me
The dream reflects what had been preoccupying me — namely, my dad, his death, our estrangement, my wish that I could know that he never stopped loving me. My preoccupation with my dad is evidenced by the many associations that involve memories of him, and my preoccupation with his death is evidenced by the associations of Tim and Jeff’s deceased fathers.
In the weeks after his death, I had been trying to understand what went wrong in our relationship in hopes that solving this mystery would reveal that he hadn’t stopped loving me. For more context, let me briefly provide a history of our relationship. Told, of course, in three acts.
Act One
When I was a little boy I absolutely loved my dad. I looked up to him and cherished our time together. And my dad loved me too and took an interest in my life.
When I became an adolescent, I naturally started to develop romantic feelings for some of my female classmates, Greta being one of them. It would have been nice to talk about all this with my dad, a bonafide lady’s man. But for some reason I felt like I couldn’t broach this topic.
One day my dad announced that we were going for a car ride to talk about “sex.” I was nervous but also intrigued. It turned out that my dad didn’t actually say anything useful about sex and didn’t inquire about my own thoughts and feelings and fears. Instead, he kept talking about “boobs,” at one point saying how D-cup-sized breasts look different on a woman who’s 5’2” than one who’s 5’8”.
Act Two
During my senior year of high school, I finally got a girlfriend, Carmen. I didn’t tell my dad about her, perhaps because the relationship didn’t last long. Carmen soon dumped me, and I felt absolutely heartbroken. Talking over the phone with my dad one evening, I told him that I’d had my heart broken. He didn’t show any interest in Carmen or my relationship. I remember him making a comment about your first heartbreak always being the worst, and the comment felt dismissive, like he was reducing my very real relationship and feelings to some platitude.
Later that school year, I wanted to ask a girl named Portia to the senior prom. I talked about this with my mom, telling her how much I liked Portia and how scary it felt to even imagine asking her to the dance. But then one afternoon I arrived home from school, found my mom and told her that I’d done it, I’d finally done it, and that Portia had said yes. I remember asking my dad if I could borrow his tuxedo to wear to the dance, and he loaned it to me, but I don’t remember him asking about Portia. When I received my prom pictures, my mom mailed him a picture, and I think that he told me that he received a picture but didn’t say anything else. This seemed like something he didn’t want to talk about.
The following year I got my first steady girlfriend. I would tell my mom about her, but this didn’t feel like something I could share with my dad. He eventually learned about her, perhaps because my mom told him. The following year, my dad took me on a vacation to San Diego. Toward the end of the trip, I picked out a postcard for my girlfriend, and he made some passing comment about it, but I don’t think he ever showed any interest in her. Again, this seemed like something he didn’t want to talk about.
Halfway through college, I got engaged. This was something my dad couldn’t not talk about, and he responded with rage. The man who had loved and protected me my entire life started trying to exert his control over me and ended up making some incredibly hurtful remarks.
Act Three
This is where there’s supposed to be a happy ending, where my dad and I are supposed to be reconciled. But that’s not what happened. What happened was that a few years after I got married, he got married. He then moved to Oklahoma and immersed himself in his life with his new family. We grew more and more distant, and I gradually came to believe that he no longer loved me.
In September 2020, my uncle Bob, dying in his hospital bed, got into a nasty fight with his brothers. Bob proceeded to change his will, disinheriting his brothers, leaving his assets to the employees of the company he had founded, and naming me the personal representative of his estate.
I found myself in an incredibly difficult situation. On the one hand, I felt obligated to honor Bob’s dying wish that his assets go to his employees, but on the other hand, my dad’s two surviving brothers were pressuring me to ignore his will and turn his assets over to them. We went to mediation, and I ended up striking what I thought was a fair balance, giving half of the assets to Bob’s employees and the other half to my dad and his two brothers.
However, my uncles seemed incapable of seeing any perspective other than their own and felt I had betrayed them. I so badly needed my dad’s support. I needed him to tell me that he knew I’d been put in a lose-lose situation and that he knew I was doing my best and that he was proud of me. But he joined his brothers and implied that I had betrayed the family, and not wanting to be attacked by him anymore, I stopped talking to him.
Rejected for Another
My relationship with my dad feels Oedipal in the sense that it’s a story about two people who were very happily in love until a new person entered the picture. My dad was a jealous lover. Once there was the real threat of me loving other people, something in him changed. My mom saw my new love interests as a normal and healthy development, but my dad acted like a spouse whose partner is having an affair. At first he pretended it wasn’t happening, and when he couldn’t deny it anymore, he erupted in fury.
When I started to love others, I’m guessing that he must have felt genuinely abandoned and terrified. Something in his own development had been stunted. And he eventually reacted like many scorned lovers and became fucking awful to me — at first making unreasonable demands, then criticizing, then belittling, then acting like he no longer cared. During the final two decades of his life, he would spend our phone calls talking on and on about himself and his political beliefs and all the wonderful things happening with his Oklahoma family and showing very little interest in me.
And so in time I myself came to feel like the spurned lover. It seemed as though the dad who had once loved me more than life itself had moved on. It seemed like he only loved them, meaning his Oklahoma family and his brothers.
This theme of being rejected for someone else appears again and again in my dream. In the manifest dream, I recall that Renee has rejected me for another man, and I find myself wanting to now reject her for Greta. And the following associations came from the dream: the memory of Renee apologizing for rejecting me for the other man; me hoping that pursuing Silvia would help me get over Renee; the feeling that my former best friend, Jeff, had replaced me with Curtis; my dad rejecting me for his Oklahoma family; and my dad rejecting me for his brothers.
Wanting My Dad’s Love
I had gone to bed that night wishing that my dad had still loved me at the end of his life, and the dream attempted to fulfill this wish by presenting several pieces of evidence that he did in fact truly love me. Evidence #1: He drove through a blizzard to come to my play in high school. Evidence #2: He drove through a blizzard to get me for Christmas when I was a little boy. Evidence #3: He spent all those years driving me to baseball card stores and buying me baseball cards. Evidence #4: He used to take me to baseball games.
These first four pieces of evidence are from my childhood, from Act One, but they show that his love was real, at times self-sacrificial, the implication being that love of this calibre could not go away over time. My dream offered two additional pieces of evidence that he had not stopped loving me.
Evidence #5: Renee never stopped loving me. I have long believed that my relationship with Renee echoed my relationship with my dad, as both once loved me deeply and then picked someone else over me. My dream reminded me that Renee never stopped loving me, even after she picked the other man, the implication here being that my dad also never stopped loving me. In other words, my dream is making the following argument from analogy: (1) Renee and my dad were similar in many important ways — e.g., they both once loved me deeply, both got hurt by me, and both responded by rejecting me for someone else; (2) Renee showed that she had never stopped loving me, as evidenced, for example, by her flurry of text messages; (3) Therefore, my dad, who was like Renee in so many ways, was probably like Renee in this way too.
Evidence #6: Carmen never stopped loving me. Like Renee and my dad, Carmen had once loved me and then rejected me. And like Renee, I later learned that Carmen never stopped loving me, as evidenced by her reappearance in my life the night of the play and by several things she did after that night. And so my dream here is making another argument from analogy that my dad never stopped loving me.
The last part of my dream, the part about masturbating, feels different than the rest of the dream. Another wish is expressed here, but the dream makes no attempt to fulfill this wish. The wish here is not that my dad hadn’t stopped loving me at the end of his life but that he hadn’t stopped being fully a dad when I entered puberty. He seemed incapable of having meaningful conversations with me about my changing desires. He could talk on and on about “boobs” but not about sex or relationships with actual women. This was a confusing time for me, and as my therapist had said the week before, I had to navigate it alone.
My dad and I had an incredibly complicated relationship. We were especially close during my boyhood, but shortly after my twentieth birthday, our relationship became increasingly hostile. Things came to a head in 2021, and after he made some comments that I found deeply hurtful, I stopped talking to him.
He died unexpectedly on January 29, 2024. On the night of March 7, I went to bed feeling sad and wondering if he had stopped loving me during the final years of his life. I fell asleep thinking these thoughts and had the following dream.
The Dream
My dream can be told as a three-act story, although I woke up before the third act began.
Act One
Greta from high school is spending the night in the other house next door. She’s wearing a low-cut gown and looks incredibly sexy and busty, and she invites me over, evidently to have sex.
It’s like I’m a teenager, and the kids who live in the other house next door keep saying that in the middle of the night they’re going to take me out of bed and shove my head in the toilet. The kids aren’t being malicious; this is just part of some hazing ritual, but I still don’t want them to give me a swirly. This creates a problem: If I sleep in my room with the door locked, they won’t be able to give me a swirly, but for some reason locking my door would prevent me from having sex with Greta.
I decide to take action and explain to the kids that they’re being immature and that they should just let me sleep in peace. However, they’re not persuaded by my plea. One of the kids reminds me of Jeff’s brother.
Act Two
I don’t end up sleeping with Greta that night, but she’s staying in town another night. She invites me over the next evening, although she’ll be staying at a different house.
I look at my phone and see that Renee (my ex-girlfriend) has sent me a flurry of text messages and that she wants me back. It feels good that she’s finally choosing me over that other man, the one she originally rejected me to be with. At the same time, I don’t know if I want to get back together, at least not yet. I really want to have sex with Greta, and if I get back with Renee, she’ll again know my whereabouts, thus making it difficult for me to go to Greta.
To make matters worse, I’ve been masturbating so much lately that I’m afraid I’ve given myself erectile dysfunction. So even if I manage to get together with Greta, I don’t know if I’ll be able to perform sexually.
Associations
My first step in analyzing this dream was to note those parts that I found to be emotionally resonant. I then associated from each of those parts, the result sometimes being a single association and sometimes an entire chain of associations.
Greta from high school is spending the night in the other house next door. She’s wearing a low-cut gown and looks incredibly sexy and busty, and she invites me over, evidently to have sex.
Greta, Associative Chain #1. Greta and I starred together in a play our senior year of high school. → There was a blizzard on opening night. → My dad drove through the blizzard to see my performance. → My maternal grandparents did not risk driving through the blizzard, a fact that I initially saw as evidence for the superiority of my dad’s love.
Blizzard. I had lunch with my mom the day of the dream, and she told me about the Blizzard of 1982. She and my dad were already divorced by then, and he was so determined to spend Christmas with me that he drove through the blizzard to get me. The snow was so deep that he was forced to park his van on a main street two blocks away, and I was too short to walk through it. And so my dad put me on his shoulders, piggy-back style, and walked back to the van. My mom cried as she shared this memory, and I took this, both the story and her tears, as evidence that he had truly loved me.
High School Play. Backstage after the play, Tim, my friend and fellow actor, told me that my dad and his dad had almost gotten into a fight at one point during the performance → Tim and I then pretended to get into a fight ourselves to the amusement of our fellow actors → Carmen, the girl who had broken my heart earlier that school year, was also backstage. I had finally gotten over my heartbreak, and I didn’t talk to her that night. → I had not called to wish my dad a happy birthday that fall. I remember talking to him over the phone shortly after his birthday, apologizing but also explaining that I had been sad and thus forgot to call him because I had had my heart broken. My dad said something about the first heartbreak being the worst, a comment I found dismissive.
Tim’s Father. Tim’s father was a gruff man who would never talk to me when I came to Tim’s house. → Tim had announced over Facebook a few years ago that his father had died. I consoled Tim and reminded him of the time on opening night when our dads almost got into a fight. → This reminded me of my dad’s recent death.
Greta, Chain #2. Yes, Greta had big boobs. → I had a crush on Greta throughout high school but was too shy to talk to her much. → I remember a classmate later telling me about her big boobs popping out of her dress during a musical performance.
Big Boobs. I said in therapy on the morning of the dream that the only thing I remember from my dad’s “sex talks” were him talking about big boobs and indicating how much he liked big boobs.
It’s like I’m a teenager, and the kids who live in the other house next door keep saying that in the middle of the night they’re going to take me out of bed and shove my head in the toilet. The kids aren’t being malicious; this is just part of some hazing ritual, but I still don’t want them to give me a swirly. This creates a problem: If I sleep in my room with the door locked, they won’t be able to give me a swirly, but for some reason locking my door would prevent me from having sex with Greta.
I decide to take action and explain to the kids that they’re being immature and that they should just let me sleep in peace. However, they’re not persuaded by my plea. One of the kids reminds me of Jeff’s brother.
Jeff’s Brother. Jeff’s older brother used to tease him when we were younger, but the teasing was never mean, and Jeff would inevitably start laughing. → One Summer afternoon when we were teenagers, Jeff showed his friend Curtis and me his brother’s porn magazines. The magazines showed not just the boobs that my dad would talk about but everything. I mean, everything. Looking at the pictures made me feel somewhat aroused but also overwhelmed, uncomfortable, grossed out.
Jeff and Curtis, Chain #1. That same summer, I went to Water World with Jeff and Curtis. At one point we went to the Lazy River, and Jeff and Curtis kept upending younger kids floating on the inner tubes, thinking this was hilarious. → I went to Water World with my dad a few years earlier. I remember at one point looking down at his bare feet and seeing that two of his toes were webbed together. I felt shocked and wondered if this meant he was “retarded.” I didn’t say anything about it. → Another time I went to Water World with my dad, and a younger woman started flirting with him and asked if he and I were brothers. My dad found this question humorous. → As I entered adolescence (and maybe before), I admired my dad for being so attractive to women.
Jeff and Curtis, Chain #2. I remember going for a walk with them during our adolescence. I think we were walking to the convenience store, and Jeff and Curtis were talking about Jeff’s girlfriend and how she was so dumb. I wished I had a girlfriend, but I was too nervous to even have a meaningful conversation with the girls at school. → I had shared in therapy the week of my dream that my dad didn’t seem to want me to have a girlfriend in high school or even college, although I don’t know if he ever explicitly said this. → During my adolescence, I would sometimes ask my mom what my dad had been like when she met him in high school. She described him as a lady’s man, someone who had a date with a different girl every weekend. At the time, I so badly wished I were like that.
Jeff and Curtis, Chain #3. As we walked to the convenience store, I felt like the odd-man out. They went to a different junior high and kept talking about girls at their school. Jeff walked on the sidewalk, and Curtis walked on the gutter. I tried to walk beside them, but when I did so, I ended up on someone’s lawn, and Jeff joked that in America we don’t walk on people’s lawns. → Years later, I felt similarly excluded by my dad. I felt excluded when he moved to Oklahoma in my early twenties and became devoted to his new family there. And I felt excluded two years before his death when he and two of his brothers felt I had mishandled a legal matter.
Jeff, Chain #1. I saw on Facebook a few years ago that Jeff’s dad had unexpectedly died of cancer. I felt bad for him, and for some reason, I felt surprised that he had been so horribly devastated by his dad’s death. → This reminded me of my dad’s unexpected death.
Jeff, Chain #2. We shared a love for baseball and baseball cards. → My dad used to take me to different baseball card shops and buy me cards. → Jeff and I used to go to minor league baseball games. → My dad also took me to minor league baseball games, and when I got older he took me to some major league games. This felt like more proof that he had truly loved me.
Hazing. That’s what adolescence felt like, all the boys pranking each other.
I don’t end up sleeping with Greta that night, but she’s staying in town another night. She invites me over the next evening, although she’ll be staying at a different house.
I look at my phone and see that Renee (my ex-girlfriend) has sent me a flurry of text messages and that she wants me back. It feels good that she’s finally choosing me over that other man, the one she originally rejected me to be with. At the same time, I don’t know if I want to get back together, at least not yet. I really want to have sex with Greta, and if I get back with Renee, she’ll again know my whereabouts, thus making it difficult for me to go to Greta.
Renee’s Text Messages. For several years, Renee and I had an on again, off again relationship. At one point, she cheated on me with another man. I became absolutely heartbroken, and for several months I tried to win her back, but she kept seeing the other man behind my back. Twice during this period I found the strength to begin to move on, and both times, she sensed this and responded by going into a state of panic and sending me a flurry of text messages begging me to take her back. Knowing that she wanted me back felt good, but I was no longer sure I wanted her anymore. → I have told my therapist that Renee picking the other man hurt so much because this was a repetition of my dad’s rejection of me, him choosing his Oklahoma family and his brothers over me. → I still feel incredibly frustrated that my dad maintained an infantile reverence for his oldest brother.
Planning to See Greta. There were times when I started seeing another woman, Silvia, in hopes that this would help me get over Renee. Silvia had big boobs, and I found her to be incredibly sexy. I went to her house one evening but spent the entire night worrying that Renee would find out. Even though part of me wanted to be done with Renee, another part of me desperately wanted to be with her.
To make matters worse, I’ve been masturbating so much lately that I’m afraid I’ve given myself erectile dysfunction. So even if I manage to get together with Greta, I don’t know if I’ll be able to perform sexually.
I remember seeing a guy in a porn video shaking his flaccid dick in hopes of getting erect. → At different points in the past, I had feared that because I’d been masturbating so much I wouldn’t be able to perform sexually with a partner. → That week in therapy I had been talking about masturbating as an adolescent. Masturbation had felt like an addiction, something I tried to stop before I had even become a Christian. My therapist commented that I had been alone in my struggle. → During my sophomore year of college, my dad took me on vacation to San Diego. I was trying to break my masturbation addiction but didn’t know how, and one night after he feel asleep in our hotel room, I masturbated to an X-rated show on HBO.
My Dad and Me
The dream reflects what had been preoccupying me — namely, my dad, his death, our estrangement, my wish that I could know that he never stopped loving me. My preoccupation with my dad is evidenced by the many associations that involve memories of him, and my preoccupation with his death is evidenced by the associations of Tim and Jeff’s deceased fathers.
In the weeks after his death, I had been trying to understand what went wrong in our relationship in hopes that solving this mystery would reveal that he hadn’t stopped loving me. For more context, let me briefly provide a history of our relationship. Told, of course, in three acts.
Act One
When I was a little boy I absolutely loved my dad. I looked up to him and cherished our time together. And my dad loved me too and took an interest in my life.
When I became an adolescent, I naturally started to develop romantic feelings for some of my female classmates, Greta being one of them. It would have been nice to talk about all this with my dad, a bonafide lady’s man. But for some reason I felt like I couldn’t broach this topic.
One day my dad announced that we were going for a car ride to talk about “sex.” I was nervous but also intrigued. It turned out that my dad didn’t actually say anything useful about sex and didn’t inquire about my own thoughts and feelings and fears. Instead, he kept talking about “boobs,” at one point saying how D-cup-sized breasts look different on a woman who’s 5’2” than one who’s 5’8”.
Act Two
During my senior year of high school, I finally got a girlfriend, Carmen. I didn’t tell my dad about her, perhaps because the relationship didn’t last long. Carmen soon dumped me, and I felt absolutely heartbroken. Talking over the phone with my dad one evening, I told him that I’d had my heart broken. He didn’t show any interest in Carmen or my relationship. I remember him making a comment about your first heartbreak always being the worst, and the comment felt dismissive, like he was reducing my very real relationship and feelings to some platitude.
Later that school year, I wanted to ask a girl named Portia to the senior prom. I talked about this with my mom, telling her how much I liked Portia and how scary it felt to even imagine asking her to the dance. But then one afternoon I arrived home from school, found my mom and told her that I’d done it, I’d finally done it, and that Portia had said yes. I remember asking my dad if I could borrow his tuxedo to wear to the dance, and he loaned it to me, but I don’t remember him asking about Portia. When I received my prom pictures, my mom mailed him a picture, and I think that he told me that he received a picture but didn’t say anything else. This seemed like something he didn’t want to talk about.
The following year I got my first steady girlfriend. I would tell my mom about her, but this didn’t feel like something I could share with my dad. He eventually learned about her, perhaps because my mom told him. The following year, my dad took me on a vacation to San Diego. Toward the end of the trip, I picked out a postcard for my girlfriend, and he made some passing comment about it, but I don’t think he ever showed any interest in her. Again, this seemed like something he didn’t want to talk about.
Halfway through college, I got engaged. This was something my dad couldn’t not talk about, and he responded with rage. The man who had loved and protected me my entire life started trying to exert his control over me and ended up making some incredibly hurtful remarks.
Act Three
This is where there’s supposed to be a happy ending, where my dad and I are supposed to be reconciled. But that’s not what happened. What happened was that a few years after I got married, he got married. He then moved to Oklahoma and immersed himself in his life with his new family. We grew more and more distant, and I gradually came to believe that he no longer loved me.
In September 2020, my uncle Bob, dying in his hospital bed, got into a nasty fight with his brothers. Bob proceeded to change his will, disinheriting his brothers, leaving his assets to the employees of the company he had founded, and naming me the personal representative of his estate.
I found myself in an incredibly difficult situation. On the one hand, I felt obligated to honor Bob’s dying wish that his assets go to his employees, but on the other hand, my dad’s two surviving brothers were pressuring me to ignore his will and turn his assets over to them. We went to mediation, and I ended up striking what I thought was a fair balance, giving half of the assets to Bob’s employees and the other half to my dad and his two brothers.
However, my uncles seemed incapable of seeing any perspective other than their own and felt I had betrayed them. I so badly needed my dad’s support. I needed him to tell me that he knew I’d been put in a lose-lose situation and that he knew I was doing my best and that he was proud of me. But he joined his brothers and implied that I had betrayed the family, and not wanting to be attacked by him anymore, I stopped talking to him.
Rejected for Another
My relationship with my dad feels Oedipal in the sense that it’s a story about two people who were very happily in love until a new person entered the picture. My dad was a jealous lover. Once there was the real threat of me loving other people, something in him changed. My mom saw my new love interests as a normal and healthy development, but my dad acted like a spouse whose partner is having an affair. At first he pretended it wasn’t happening, and when he couldn’t deny it anymore, he erupted in fury.
When I started to love others, I’m guessing that he must have felt genuinely abandoned and terrified. Something in his own development had been stunted. And he eventually reacted like many scorned lovers and became fucking awful to me — at first making unreasonable demands, then criticizing, then belittling, then acting like he no longer cared. During the final two decades of his life, he would spend our phone calls talking on and on about himself and his political beliefs and all the wonderful things happening with his Oklahoma family and showing very little interest in me.
And so in time I myself came to feel like the spurned lover. It seemed as though the dad who had once loved me more than life itself had moved on. It seemed like he only loved them, meaning his Oklahoma family and his brothers.
This theme of being rejected for someone else appears again and again in my dream. In the manifest dream, I recall that Renee has rejected me for another man, and I find myself wanting to now reject her for Greta. And the following associations came from the dream: the memory of Renee apologizing for rejecting me for the other man; me hoping that pursuing Silvia would help me get over Renee; the feeling that my former best friend, Jeff, had replaced me with Curtis; my dad rejecting me for his Oklahoma family; and my dad rejecting me for his brothers.
Wanting My Dad’s Love
I had gone to bed that night wishing that my dad had still loved me at the end of his life, and the dream attempted to fulfill this wish by presenting several pieces of evidence that he did in fact truly love me. Evidence #1: He drove through a blizzard to come to my play in high school. Evidence #2: He drove through a blizzard to get me for Christmas when I was a little boy. Evidence #3: He spent all those years driving me to baseball card stores and buying me baseball cards. Evidence #4: He used to take me to baseball games.
These first four pieces of evidence are from my childhood, from Act One, but they show that his love was real, at times self-sacrificial, the implication being that love of this calibre could not go away over time. My dream offered two additional pieces of evidence that he had not stopped loving me.
Evidence #5: Renee never stopped loving me. I have long believed that my relationship with Renee echoed my relationship with my dad, as both once loved me deeply and then picked someone else over me. My dream reminded me that Renee never stopped loving me, even after she picked the other man, the implication here being that my dad also never stopped loving me. In other words, my dream is making the following argument from analogy: (1) Renee and my dad were similar in many important ways — e.g., they both once loved me deeply, both got hurt by me, and both responded by rejecting me for someone else; (2) Renee showed that she had never stopped loving me, as evidenced, for example, by her flurry of text messages; (3) Therefore, my dad, who was like Renee in so many ways, was probably like Renee in this way too.
Evidence #6: Carmen never stopped loving me. Like Renee and my dad, Carmen had once loved me and then rejected me. And like Renee, I later learned that Carmen never stopped loving me, as evidenced by her reappearance in my life the night of the play and by several things she did after that night. And so my dream here is making another argument from analogy that my dad never stopped loving me.
The last part of my dream, the part about masturbating, feels different than the rest of the dream. Another wish is expressed here, but the dream makes no attempt to fulfill this wish. The wish here is not that my dad hadn’t stopped loving me at the end of his life but that he hadn’t stopped being fully a dad when I entered puberty. He seemed incapable of having meaningful conversations with me about my changing desires. He could talk on and on about “boobs” but not about sex or relationships with actual women. This was a confusing time for me, and as my therapist had said the week before, I had to navigate it alone.
I wish he had been there with me. And I wish that, as I grew to be a man and began to fall in love with others, he would have been able to grow with me.
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