Blue Velvet: the surface of suffering

The Hole in the Dream

I would like to open with a clinical story — a dream, to be exact:

‘I am lying in a pasture, a field of some sort. The ground is cold and muddy. Suddenly, a scarecrow is next to me. Not upright, scaring the crows, but prone, lying next to me. A turn of my head and the scarecrow becomes a naked women — my mother. I become aware of feeling something, some sort of liquid against my skin. Slowly at first, then swiftly the liquid begins to envelop me. Frantically, I look for the source … until I realize — IT is coming from me!

‘… From some orifice near my genitals. And this oozing, gooey substance is drowning me. I turn to my mother — she is asleep and dry. I try to shout, but no sound emerges. Embalmed in this swelling substance, my face begins changing. The features distorting out of proportion, as if something inside is bursting through. As I silently scream, my body begins to shrink, getting smaller and smaller. The flow of the liquid and

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the changes in my body quicken. I am filled with a terrible, overwhelming fear … until I awake in a cold sweat, my bed soaked.’

During our third meeting, Mr K greeted me with this dream. Beyond the confines of the night, the dream's strange liquid seemed to ooze forth, filling the consulting room. With an involuntary shudder, I felt myself pushing against the dream — an impulse to evade the dream-fluid, to force it back across the room. A moment's reflection stilled my anxiety — this was someone else's dream, after all. Still, the dream had left a residue — like a retreating wave — a froth of confusing feelings and bothersome questions.

In the unsettled atmosphere following the dream, Mr K offered some associations. The liquid struck him as ‘vaginal… milky and sticky’. The bodily changes reminded him of certain werewolf movies. He offered a confusing theory that the dream represented a backwards picture of his life, a kind of ‘devolution’. I stepped into the muddle with a comment: perhaps the dre