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A patient dreams:
I am walking in this dark, cold place and I come across a DeLorean car that is covered in ice. The ice was melting. I feel excited to be able to use the car. He explains: “The DeLorean car is a futurist car, a ‘Back to the Future’ car, with doors opening up rather than out, a time-machine. As well as the two dimensions of the ground it can move in time, backwards and forwards. It's a vehicle of freedom.”
At the start of that week the patient had said: “I feel stuck in a well”; I took up the double meaning of ‘well’. This seemed to ‘unstick’ the session and melt the ice. I knew this patient became worried whenever he felt more normal and I thought he feared no longer relying on his grievances as the better, safer food. He then brought in the idea that ‘being well’ led to expectations that he will ‘do well’, ‘be good’, repay his analyst's investment of time, make reparation for his meanness, live up to expectations; he started to think of harpies circling around ready to attack and tear bits of his flesh, and of his mother with a scolding look. He then thought of the danger of being ‘too well’, a flight into mania. He now had the idea, which he had not voiced before, that being too well had preceded his depressive breakdown.
And so he dreams of walking in a dark, cold place and finding a DeLorean car. The dream, like all dreams, is a vehicle of freedom. Freedom to do, without actually doing. Being where you want,
when you want. Inventing solutions which do not conform to the reality of time and space. In the film Back to the Future Marty is flung 30 years back in time and stuck there unless Doc Brown can help him. Marty's own mother, now a teenager, falls for him instead of for his father. Manic solution to the Oedipal scenario.
The dream always has a dreamer. The dream is inserted into the temporality of the analysis with its own strange ways of moving, like the DeLorean car, back and forth in time, one does not always know why or how. My patient's