Pillow Talk: The Gaieties-Lorax situationship shift

Hello! My name is Levi Lebovitz and welcome to Pillow Talk, the one and only column where we analyze DREAMS. 

Everybody dreams. But we rarely talk about what our dreams might mean! They just happen — and are often super weird — but we are inclined to dismiss them as nonsense. However (!), many psychoanalysts (like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung) have empirically studied dreams and arrived at fascinating conclusions about why they happen and what they mean.

Dream analysis is a paid profession. There are licensed psychotherapists who make a living off of interpreting dreams. Is this simply a bunch of gobbledygook, akin to palm readings and horoscopes? Or is there a real value in “reading” dreams like a text, and extrapolating some sort of meaning? This column will argue for the latter, and will do so by investigating real dreams brought by real Stanford students. 

Before you ask – no, I did not take Stanford’s “Sleep and Dreams” class. To say something controversial, I am actually quite averse to taking it because I think the class title is misleading. Their Spring 2024 syllabus dedicated only two lectures to “Dreams in Psychotherapy” and the rest was about other irrelevant (quantitative) aspects of sleeping. If the class were honest, it would really be called “Sleep and Dreams… but Mostly Sleep.” 

I will be drawing from the theoretical framework of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (d. 1961; a former student of Freud), whose works I have studied for the past two years. I have been to the Jung archives in his hometown of Küsnacht, I am currently a volunteer at the library of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, and from time to time, I’ve even been able to have my own dreams analyzed by Jungian analysts. All this to say: I AM NOT A LICENSED PROFESSIONAL. I am just a student, somewhat familiar with a tradition, who sometimes analyzes dreams, amateurly. 

So, let us begin! Here’s a dream from my (anonymous) friend Lisa:

I was with my family and we were watching some type of crossover between “The Lorax” and Gaieties (it was a Stanford production comprised of all freshmen, but it was “The Lorax”?). The show had two parts, one part in one movie theater but then you had to get in a cab and drive 10 minutes to the next part, which was in another movie theater (that’s how the movie worked). Both Steven [a recent love interest of Lisa’s] and Andrew [Lisa’s longtime ex-boyfriend] were there, and the order of the seating was Steven, my mom, me, Andrew, my dad and my brother. At one point, Andrew walked away, and everyone reorganized so that Steven and I could sit next to each other. But when Andrew came back, we had to pretend like nothing happened because I was worried Andrew would find out that I am seeing someone else. Andrew was being annoying and it reminded me of earlier in our relationship when he’d annoy me when we’d travel together. 

I love this dream personally because there’s so much drama — an unrequited love, feelings of guilt and scorn and Gaieties! What more could you ask for? But in all seriousness, there is a lot happening here. I wonder why Lisa had this dream, and what all these symbols might mean to her.

If I were to try to answer these questions, I’d probably begin with the big boys: Andrew and Steven. For context, in real life, Andrew and Lisa had been broken up (somewhat messily) for the better part of a year; but at the time of dreaming, Lisa had recently begun a spicy new situationship with Steven. In the dream, at first Lisa sat next to Andrew. But when Andrew momentarily left, the entire family rearranged themselves so that Lisa could sit next to Steven. It seems like the dream is hinting at some big shift in Lisa’s life. Some rearrangement of who is close to her.

Next, I’d look at the setting. Lisa is in a theater — a place where you watch and listen to stories. The movie is split into two parts and requires that Lisa and her entire family must move to an entirely different theatre to see the conclusion of the movie. Lisa is literally traversing from one point of observation to the next. There is movement required of Lisa. There is another shift, perhaps in Lisa’s viewpoint as a whole.  

Finally, it might benefit us to look at the content of the movie itself. A movie is a message, a moral, a story. The movie which appears in Lisa’s dream, if we are willing to make a bit of a stretch, may perhaps relate to a moral relevant to her mind. What is that story? It is “The Lorax” — a hopeful tale about cultivating a formerly existing environment that had been destroyed by greed. We could say that this plot could be analogized to Lisa’s life experience. In real life, Lisa was recultivating her own “romantic environment,” one which was left in ruins by Andrew, who was inhibiting personal growth and didn’t understand Lisa’s needs towards the end of the relationship. “The Lorax” ends on a hopeful note, ushering in a new beginning for the world. Perhaps this signals a new beginning for Lisa as well: a romantic environment that has healed from the wake of Andrew. Is it a coincidence that this movie, in the dream, features only freshmen — people who have just begun college? Sounds like a new beginning to me. 

Like a piece of classical music, there is a theme that runs throughout the entirety of the dream: a shift. A shift in who Lisa sits next to (who she loves), a shift in where Lisa watches her movie (how she sees things) and a shift urged from the moral of the movie (changing her environment). Thus, one may infer from this dream that Lisa was going through some pretty meaningful changes at the time, probably relating to the main conflict of the dream (shifting away from Andrew without upsetting him). 

After this dream was dreamt, Lisa went on to have a totally platonic coffee meet-up with Andrew and began to feel less and less of an emotional obligation towards him. Soon after, Lisa also began dating Steven, and they are still dating to this day. To me, it seems that the dream wasn’t just nonsense; it was actually a quite poetic reflection of a necessary psychic shift that Lisa needed to undergo in order to get over her ex and begin a healthy new relationship. 

So, are dreams random? Is it “not that deep”? I think this dream serves as an example that it is perhaps otherwise…

So, that’s it for the first article of Pillow Talk! If you – yes, you! –  have any of your own wild, crazy, or raunchy dreams that you want analyzed, feel free to send them over at levilebo@stanford.edu and they might just make a feature.

Until next time… thank you for reading!

The post Pillow Talk: The Gaieties-Lorax situationship shift appeared first on The Stanford Daily.