Two Dreams

Now here is where I am going to open to you the window to my soul as I would not open it to anyone else, by telling you two dreams that I’ve had about you. The first dream is simple. It is one I had more than thirty years ago, when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old and you were still a baby in your crib. Some time before, I had seen pictures of starving children in Europe taken shortly after world war II—they were emaciated, with arms like sticks, ribs protruding, and guts hanging out. Well, I dreamed that there was a war in America and I saw you as one of these children, emaciated and starving. It affected me strongly and when I woke up I made up my mind that if there was ever a war in America I would do everything I possibly could to protect you. This illustrates the semi–maternal tenderness that I’ve often felt for you.

The other dream is more complex and requires a little preliminary explanation. First of all, I had this dream 2 years ago or so, at a time when I was contemplating making those comments on your psychology (some of which I made in the letter before last), and on your motives for what I consider your self-deception. I had strong hesitations and a certain sense of guilt about what I was planning to say to you because I knew it would hurt your feelings to have my real attitude toward you revealed and also because in attacking your self-deceptions I would be attacking that which, so to speak, gave you hope and preserved your life from being utterly empty. Of course, I figured you would probably retain your self-deceptions no matter what I might say, [CROSSED OUT; like still I felt a certain remourse about attacking you in that place] and moreover, I figure you are tough enough so that even if you were deprived of your illusions you wouldn’t be utterly crushed, even though badly hurt. But still I felt a certain remorse about attacking you in that place. This remorse is clearly mentioned in the dream I am about to recount.

Furthermore, you are trusting, imitative, and suggestible, so that you are easily influenced by persons who come into contact with you from the right psychological angle. At various times you have been heavily influenced by me, by Dale Edwards, and by Neil Dunlap, among others. One of the reasons why I was iritated by your talking against democracy and in favor of a “philosopher-king” on that occasion which you may remember was because you were so slavishly imitating Heidegger. Those ideas weren’t your own. You had borrowed them from Heidegger. And they weren’t ideas that you selected critically from his works while adding something of your own. You were just aping Heidegger — you had fallen under his influence. [CROSSED OUT: {TEXT OBSCURED}]

Also, I suspect that one or two of your friends may take advantage of you, in a sense. Linda Patrick, I suspect, has used you. She has no interest in you as a male, but she knows (knew?) that you were interested in her as a female and she used you as a shoulder to cry on when she had trouble. Has she ever sought you out when she didn’t have some kind of trouble or want a shoulder to cry on? Also, I suspect that Denis Dabbis does not feel anything like the warm and open — heated friendship for you that you feel for him. In some ways I think he is rather like me — self-contained and somewhat cold toward others. For him, friends may be only a source of entertainment. But I may be wrong — I don’t know these people well.

But be that as it may, the charcters in the dream who were dupin gyou and using you represented, in a vague way some of your friends and people under whose influence you have fallen, [CROSSED OUT: normally] especially Dale Edwards, Heidegger, Linda Patrik and Denis Du Bois.

That being said, the dream was as follows. [ADDED LATER: I saw you as you were when you were about 18.]

We were in our old house in Evergreen Park. Our parents were vaguely present but in the background. I was in the living room. You came home and began talking enthusiastically about some people you had just been with and under whose influence you had fallen. They appeared to be some kind of a crackpot cult-group. Soon afterward, 3 members of this cult group came in the door; their object was to tighten their hold on you. They were unmistakeably sinister and sly. As each one came in I confronted him, defied him, and killed him. The last and most sinister of the three I tore to pieces with my bare hands. Then the house was free of these intruders for an interval, but you gave me that the big-shot, the leader of the group, was still to come. And then he did appear at the door. At first he appeared as a short, fat, middle-aged man with a jolly, smiling face, but with something sinsiter about him. He introduced himself as “Lord Daddy Lombrosis.” He came into the house and walked across the living room to the kitchen, and as he did so he turned into a tall, well-built, handsome man with greying hair, age fifty or thereabouts, with a kindly, paternal, dignified expression on his face: and he looked like a man whome one would respect. He walked across the kitchen to the counter where the sink was turned back to the counter and stood facing us. I felt awed by him and thought, “This is God!” Yet in my heart I defied him. I still felt something in the background that was vaguely sinsiter. He wanted to do us good, to be kind to us, but the price he demanded was submission to him. And moreover I had a vague feeling that his tools were deception and psychological manipulation. I stood between you and him, defying him and keeping you from both what was good and what was evil in what he had to offer. Pretty soon he went and sat on a chair between the stove and the kitchen table. He and I were looking each other straight in the eyes, and soon I had the feeling that he was trying to hypnotyze me or gain psychological control over me through some sort of deception. Gradually the room became dark and his face turned into a television screen; the pupils of his eyes became two black dots that flew around on the televsion screen in symmetrical patterns. I felt here that his slyness and deception were fully revealing themselves. But still I defied him and stood between him and you.

Then the room became light again, the television screen disappeared, and Lord Dadddy Lombrosis was again the tall, handsome, kindly man he’d been before. But now he hung his head a little and seemed discouraged — discouraged because we had rejected him and thus prevented him from fulfilling his kindly intentions towards us. With a sigh he walked slowly thorugh the house and to the front door. I had the powerful and awesome feeling that as Lord Daddy Lombrosis walked out of the house — ALL IN THAT HOUSE WERE TO BE LEFT WITHOUT HOPE. As Lord Daddy Lombrosis passed out the front door the quesition passed through my mind — Who will come next? I did not speak the question, but you offered a tentative answer just as if I had spoken it. You said in an awed tone: “Satan?”

Then I ran to the door to catch Lord Daddy Lombrosis. He had just gone out, and I saw that snow had begun to fall. There was a light layer of it on the ground, maybe half an inch. Lord Daddy Lombrosis had become invisible, but as he waled away slowly from the house, leaving it forever and leaving it without hope, his shoes left prints in the snow; the prints appearing one after another making his progress away from the house. I ran after him begging him not to leave like this, not to leave my little brother without hope. Over and over I begged him, but the footprints just kept receding slowly and sadly through the snow. Finally I throew myself at his feed and cried, “No, don’t leave my brother without hope, give him another chance!” and I started to say, “and me too”, but I caught my self and said, “No! Not me! I will never give in! But my poor, weak, innocent little brother! Don’t leave him without hope!” But the footprints just kept going off through the snow. And then I woke up with a terrible sense of fear and foreboding. It was a remarkable and very frightening dream

In addition to the meanings indicated above, it seemed to me that the dream had some more general significance. Besides the other things he represented, Lord Daddy Lombrosis stood for the Technological Society itself. The technological society, as well as demanding submission and using deception, illusion and manipulation, also has other aspects, such as security and morality, and my inner rebellion against that society entails a certain degree of guilt, which was involved in the dream along with my sense of guilt at attacking your illusions. And to a degree you have submitted to the technological society by accepting one of the substitutes that it offers for the real life that it denies us. The substitute in question is the ideology of “Art” and “Philosophy” and all that stuff, which for many people like you serve as an unreal dream-world which enables you to forget the emptiness of life in the technological society and offers you a kind of spurious hope.