Understanding Your Erotic Dreams

Dream of a 27-year-old man: "I've never flown an airplane in my whole life, but in this dream I have to deputize for Charles Lindbergh and fly this old Thirties twin-engined plane across Iowa. The day's pretty hot and there are all kinds of electric storms around, but I manage to pull the plane over the clouds and put it on automatic pilot. This consists of a motorized pulley arrangement that I have to attach to the joy stick with a row of metal hooks and springs--very complicated, but I'm sure in this dream that this is the way they did it in 1934.

"The plane flies on by itself, wavering around in the air, and I go into the cabin. There are only two passengers, identical twin sisters. They're real people and I know them. They worked for a bookstore I used to visit. They weren't particularly attractive, but in this dream they're dressed very sexy. They have little white blouses on, with tiny print flowers all over, and their breasts are bare underneath the blouses. I can see their pink nipples pressing through the cotton. They cuddle up to me and press their big breasts against me, and all of a sudden I'm really switched on to the idea of making love to twin sisters in an airplane.

"Actually, the airplane disappears sometime during this sequence, but the girls don't. They're wearing red polka-dot panties and red high-heeled shoes now, but otherwise they're naked. They try to cover their breasts with their hands, but not very effectively. I think we're in the bedroom of my grandfather's house in St. Paul, but I can't be sure about that. Anyway, we're on a big bouncy bed, and the sun is coming through the window, and the girls are giggling more than ever and are hot to ball.

"Now they're nude, and they're cooing over me and running their hands down my body. One of them whispers, all hot in my ear: 'I want you to fuck me with all your might': and the other one whispers more or less the same message in the other ear. I lie on my back on the bed. and one of the sisters climbs on top of me, and the other one climbs on top of her. Then, in some magical way, I find that I can make love to both of them at once. I enter one, and then the other, alternately, very fast, so both of them are being screwed at once.

"Soon I'm pounding away and the twins are writhing on top of me, their breasts squashed against me and their hips pushing as hard as they can toward me. Then, with a real shock, I realize that Richard Nixon is standing by the bed, watching us. I stare at him, not knowing what the hell to think. I know he's the President, but all the same I resent the intrusion. But he says: 'Carry on, I'm only watching,' and that seems to make it OK.

"It isn't long before the twins and I are just about over the edge: Our bodies are shaking. Nixon is yelling 'Go! Go! Go!' and we're really pounding away in a sweaty heap.

"But somehow we don't come. Instead, there's a kind of Hollywood ending. The sky is yellow and purple and red and gold and the two girls go sauntering off into the heavens, nude and smiling, and all I get is an exquisite feeling of pleasure. I think the dream went on, but I don't remember any more."

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Interpreting dreams has been a major intellectual pursuit for centuries. There is an Egyptian papyrus in the British Museum, nearly 4000 years old, that was used by ancient Egyptians to read their dreams. A dream of distant crowds signified impending death. A dream of a moving moon meant that the gods were pleased with the dreamer. In the Cairo Museum, there is another ancient Egyptian papyrus of women's sexual dreams. "If a woman kisses her husband, she will have trouble; if a horse couples with her, she will be violent with her husband; if an ass couples with her, she will be punished for great fault; if a goat couples with her, she will die promptly; if a ram couples with her, Pharaoh will be full of kindness to her; if a Syrian couples with her, she will weep, for she will let a slave couple with her; if she gives birth to a cat, she will have many children; if she gives birth to a dog, she will have a boy; if she gives birth to an ass, she will have an idiot child; if she gives birth to a crocodile, she will have many children." And you thought your dreams were weird?

An early Talmudic saying suggests that "a dream that is not understood is like a letter that is not opened." Today's society seems to be in accord: Understand the dream and when you open the letter, you will find a bill from your shrink.

We are living in a sexually reticent society; the erotic dream is one of the most underestimated forms of human sexual expression. The sad aspect of this is that it may also be one of the most important forms of sexual expression--at least in a society as restricted and inhibited as ours. When we have erotic dreams, we are thinking about sex with hardly any inhibitions at all--something that rarely happens in our waking life. The sleeping mind knows how to have fun, how to satisfy its curiosity and sexual whims, even when the body doesn't. It's time you invited yourself to the party.

Understanding your erotic dreams can be the means to broadening and enriching your sex life. You can discover desires that your waking brain prefers not to think about and you can seek ways to satisfy them. You can find out just what kind of person you are sexually, fulfill that erotic personality's neglected needs and gain insight into its problems. The first step is to treat your erotic dreams with respect, as the product of important functions of the brain, instead of dismissing them as smutty fantasies from a cobwebby corner.

A dream is a work of art. The brain, as it spins out erotic fantasies, has an immense wealth of brilliant material from which to draw. Stored in it is a hoard of remembered information, impressions and details that during your waking hours you usually can't call to mind. Just one indication of how much is filed away in the brain comes from researcher Warren McCulloch. He was able to make several master bricklayers remember under hypnosis particular bricks they had laid in walls ten years before. They could recall 30 or 40 details of each brick--whether it had a blemish or colored mark on it or a chip on one side. If bricklayers can remember that much about bricks they have laid, just think of what you may learn about your past loves.

Gather your sex dreams in a diary before attempting to make any interpretations. You may want to prime your unconscious before retiring for the night by looking at erotic photographs, reading past entries in your dream journal or just engaging in a bit of sexual fantasy. There are some people who actually program their dreams. Perhaps they are curious about a certain symbol (just what does a recurring image of veal cordon bleu mean?) or maybe they want to take up a previous evening's narrative at the good part (what happened after Brigitte Bardot asked "Where do you keep the toys?"). Take one from column A and one from column B and see what happens. The more material you have at your disposal to work on, the more accurate your readings are likely to be. You are trying to get to know someone--your nocturnal personality--and the more information you have about this someone, the easier it will be to form an opinion. After all, you wouldn't normally vouch for anyone's character on the basis of only one brief meeting.

For example, many people's dreams take place in familiar surroundings with friends and workmates around them. Yet these can't always be taken at face value: They might just be convenient images brought in, like hired props and actors, for the sole purpose of peopling the dream. Their real meaning and behavior may be quite different from that which you would normally expect of them in waking life. The man who dreamed that he was making love to twins while Nixon watched was bothered because he recognized the girls as the two sisters who worked in a local bookstore. He had never thought of them as attractive--did his dream indicate a secret lust? Probably not. Nocturnal Central Casting can be capricious: It will bestow favor on friends, relatives, celebrities and complete strangers, for no reason other than variety. Then again, maybe those sisters deserve a second glance, or a second dream.

A Japanese proverb says, "Dreams and falcons are what you make of them." Erotic dreams are so personal and intimate that they cannot be understood without the analysis of the dreamer himself. No matter what some dream diviners claim, you can't write down a dream, send it to an expert and expect to receive an interpretation that means anything. Interpreting your own dreams is one of the great secrets of success in this art. Nobody can recall the events of your dreams as vividly as you can; nobody can tell what emotions they tug, what responses they conjure up. Try to get at the meaning of the key images. Then go over the nuts and bolts of the dream, each of the images out of which it is formed. Cast through your mind to see if any of the images evoke memories or thoughts with which you're familiar.

There is no such thing as a definitive lexicon in which you can quickly look up what it means if, say, you dream about being sexually assaulted by carrots. What you can do, however, is figure out what various symbols and situations mean to you, then you can compile your own personal dictionary of erotic images. Once you have done this, you will have a key to your nighttime desires and erotic passions that will be uniquely relevant to your own sex life.

To give you an idea of what you can expect to produce when you begin to record your erotic dreams, I've selected themes from real dream diaries collected in my researches. For some of them, with the help of the dreamers themselves, I've offered broad interpretations and suggestions about how they might apply to waking life.

Airplane: On the surface, an airplane seems like nothing more than a flying penis. A stewardess told me she constantly dreamed of airplanes actually flying into her vagina. (Perhaps her dream was an accurate comment on the flying ability of certain pilots.) "I was always lying with my legs apart and the nose of the plane forced its way into me. It was all grease and shiny metal, and somehow the whole nose of the plane achieved penetration. I can remember seeing myself stretched wide apart and the cold metal sliding into me. They were frightening, these dreams, but they always turned me on." But there is more to the airplane than phallic symbolism. Airplanes contain people, in a female, womblike way. The ancient Arabs saw the boat as a symbol of sexual adventures with women--that is, as a symbol of the male sexual organ--but they also recognized that the idea of people sitting within the boat gave the female aspect as well. In other words, vessels like airplanes and boats can be seen as images of bisexuality, depending on how they appear in the dream. The stewardess, for example, dreamed of the outside of the plane. She saw it only as a male object. But if you dream about both the outside (continued on page 116)Your Erotic Dreams(continued from page 106) and the inside, it's possible that you are dreaming of sexual activity with both sexes. An airplane that makes a background appearance in an erotic dream, flying past in the distance, can represent impatience with your current sex life and a restless need to rush on and seek other experiences in new places. If you dream about having sex inside an airplane, it's possible that you are aware of the precariousness and the short duration of a current relationship. Airplanes can fall from the sky and flights always end in landings.

Adultery: Dreaming of adultery need not mean that you have any real urge to commit it. But if you find the adultery attractive and exciting in your dream and you wake up feeling aroused by it, then you should consider the possibility that you are not getting enough variety in your married sex life to satisfy your tastes. Did you do anything in the dream that you normally don't do with your marriage partner? Or was it simply the idea of a fresh penis or a different vagina that you found arousing? It's easy to laugh off dreams of adultery, especially the ones in which you are having sex with people who seem to be preposterous partners. But your mind is trying to tell you something and it ought to be heeded. Pay particular regard to the surroundings and environment of your adulterous dream, because they may contain clues to the seriousness of your desires and to what form they might be taking. One woman said: "I had dream after dream in which I was having sex with all kinds of ridiculous people--the TV repairman, the little Jewish man from the corner store. But even though the people were ridiculous, the dreams were incredibly sexy--I used to wake up with come running down my thighs. And they were also sinister. There was a lot of darkness in them. They seemed important and forbidding, if you know what I mean. One weekend, Frank went away to see his mother in Tampa and I held a party for some people in the neighborhood. We all got high and I ended up in the bedroom with one of the guys. Before I knew what was going on, I was sucking him off and begging him to fuck me. In the middle of our lovemaking, I suddenly thought: 'This is the dream coming true.'"

Cars: Cars appear in erotic dreams with great frequency--and since they are marketed as objects of personal achievement and sexual aggression, this is hardly surprising. In Freudian terms, they are externally phallic but internally womblike. Inside a car, the driver feels safe and warm and protected from the buffets of the external environment. From that position of security, he can push his long metal hood aggressively forward down the highway, challenging and vanquishing other cars by overtaking them. But erotic dreams that involve cars can have many different meanings. Sex in the back seat, for instance, can indicate that the dreamer is reliving both the teenage thrill and the insecurity that he felt when he was first dating. To dream of back-seat sex could indicate a lack of self-confidence about your sexual technique and a fear of having your shortcomings discovered. If you suffer at all from premature ejaculation, this dream is highlighting your anxiety about it. Erotic dreams about picking up sexy hitchhikers, male or female, could show that you are looking for a new erotic experience--but only if someone else is prepared to take the initiative. With the hitchhiker, there are no strings attached. No names need be asked for or given. It is the same sexual situation as in Last Tango in Paris, with the car as the catalyst instead of the apartment. If you dream about running girls over, you are possibly dreaming about violent sexual conquests. But don't feel too proud of them, because you don't seem to have the confidence to make these conquests naked and alone, unaided by the potent image that your car lends you. If you dream about driving at high speed along an endless highway, you could be having a dream of frustrated sexual energy. Sexual satisfaction or accomplishment is only indicated by arrival, by the insertion of the penis/car into a vagina/town. A collision may indicate an orgasm, but it depends on how you feel about it. If there are fear and pain, the crash is likely to be indicative of sexual failure or a violent end to a relationship. It would be a sensible idea, if you have persistent car-sex dreams, to try to analyze what you get out of driving your car and whether or not you're using it to mask a lack of self-confidence and assertiveness. Then buy a motorcycle.

House: As far as Freud was concerned, the house is a female symbol. The front door is distinctly vaginal, the interior womblike, and to be chased in your dreams from room to room is supposed to be a dream of brothels. The facades of houses, though, are something else. They are men with erect penises. Or, according to another theory, they symbolize man's social exterior, his persona, the face he presents to the outside world. When a house appears in an erotic dream, however, it may be a serious mistake to assume that it simply represents a woman or that its facade, with its windows for eyes and door for a mouth, is a symbol of somebody's persona. First of all, is it a house that you know? If it is, and if it plays a neutral part in your dream, then your dreaming mind is probably using it as nothing more than a backdrop for the sexual events that you are going through. Even in dreams, everything has to take place somewhere. But if the house is strange, or if it has a potent atmosphere of its own, then it is possible that your subconscious mind is using it to convey some meaning to you. Look around and take note of the furniture and the decorations. Try to re-create in your mind the ambience that you felt when you entered the house in your dream. Do you feel comfortable or uncomfortable? Is it open and airy or claustrophobic? Usually, houses seem to represent the structure of your sexual relationship as a whole, and you can learn some interesting things about your attitude toward the people you're loving from the appearance of your dream domain.

Here's one fascinating example from a 27-year-old horseback-riding instructor. There was a powerful physical attraction in her relationship with her boyfriend, but mentally they had very little in common: "I walked into the house. It was quiet, I remember that--quiet in a very warm and soothing way. There was a thick fur carpet on the floor of the living room and the place seemed to be electric with sexy feelings. There were color photographs or portraits of Dennis on the walls. In most of them, he was naked. Some of the pictures showed nothing but his penis, in various states of erection--you know, some hanging down and some sticking up. The room turned me on and I took off my clothes and rolled naked on the fur carpet. But then I found myself in the kitchen. There was a meal laid out--just the kind of things that Dennis likes; you know, junk food like hot dogs and stuff like that. There was a nasty smell of onions. I found myself upstairs. I was still naked, but it seemed to be colder up there. I saw a frowzy unmade bed and a shelf with some tatty paperbacks on it, Mickey Spillane and some others. There was an attic and that was freezing and uncomfortable. I felt completely out of place up there. I just wanted to go back to the sexy warm room with the fur carpet and I was back there just as soon as I wanted to be. But I couldn't forget the rest of the house, and somehow the warm room didn't seem as sexy anymore." After reflection, this girl realized that in her dream, she had actually entered the character of her boyfriend and her relationship with him. It was a classic dream in which various parts of the house correspond with various parts of the body and mind. The house is a social object, and therefore it usually represents social emotions. "After that dream," she said, "I was clearer in my own mind about what I felt about Dennis than I ever had been before." She was mature enough to continue the relationship and try to take his less sophisticated intellectual tastes into account.

Incest: Julius Caesar, before he crossed the Rubicon and invaded Rome, dreamed that he was sleeping with his mother. His advisors considered that the dream was a good omen. His mother symbolized Rome, his mother city, and the dream meant that he would penetrate its defenses. Perhaps life is more complex for most of us these days, but we would rarely accept the fact that an incestuous dream signified anything as straightforward as this. There are quite respectable theories that to dream of sex with your father or mother, brother or sister may reveal how you feel about your position in the family--whether you feel threatened by your father's maleness, suffocated by your mother's maternity or rivaled by your sibling's competitiveness. It is important to consider this when you are trying to interpret erotic dreams about incestuous sex. But more often, it appears that dreams of incest are simply what they appear to be and little more. It is not unusual to be aware of the sexuality of other members of your family, and all your dream is doing is spinning sex fantasies about them--hypothesizing on what it would be like if you actually did have sex with them.

Homosexuality: It is not at all unusual for heterosexual people to dream of homosexuality, from a brief kiss to full anal lovemaking. It need not indicate anything more than the presence of quite normal responsiveness to your own sex. But if the dreams are persistent and you seem to be constantly seeking erotic pleasure from the company of homosexuals, then you might need to consider your sexual attitudes and orientation more deeply. This is particularly urgent if your dreams are full of stress and conflict--a sure indication that your subconscious is struggling to make its homosexual emotions felt. Remember that some dreams that appear on the surface to be homosexual are really dreams of self-love. Look carefully at the face of your dream lover, because he may be you in disguise.

Journey: Erotic dreams that involve traveling (by car, bus, ship or plane) do not often seem to signify that you are bitten by wanderlust. Mostly, they appear to be associated with the progression of the act of intercourse itself. Some dream diviners suggest that journeys mean you want to escape, and in medieval times, this may have been so. But these days, journeys are so organized and routed that, even though there may be temporary escape while you are actually traveling, there is always a sense that you have to arrive. Our perception of the sexual act is almost always linear--that is, we see it as a journey with a beginning, a middle and an end--and often, when it's over, we have a sense of surprise that we are still exactly where we were when we started. For a man to dream of going on a journey with a girl he knows and feels affection for is usually a subtle dream of sexual desire. It depends on where they're going and on how the journey itself progresses. They need not have sex during the journey: In fact, in a dream in which the attraction is deeply repressed, they may not even kiss or openly show any feelings. The clue is only in the feelings of sexual pleasure or satisfaction that the journey gives to the dreamer. If the journey goes well and the ship or bus or car arrives safely, then that is a clear indication of a settled and satisfying sex life. But if the journey does not seem to end or the vehicle cannot land, or dock, or stop, then there is hidden conflict and frustration. If you dream that you are riding a vehicle and you have no money to pay your fare, it is possible that you are dreaming that you cannot cope with the demands that your sex life is making on you. You're afraid that you will be thrown off the bus and the relationship will end because of your inadequacies. If you dream that you are on a journey and you lose your traveling companion, then you are anxious that your sexual relationship will go out of your control and will finish against your will. Many dream journeys are romantic and take place in periods of history that appeal to the dreamer because of their glamor--on the Cunards of the Thirties, or white-painted trains or Zeppelins or quinqueremes or horse-drawn carriages. This is because an erotic dream of travel is frequently a wish to have sexual intercourse with someone you're not already intimate with. You regard him in a glamorous light because you have never had to get down to the nuts and bolts of actually forming a sex relationship with him.

Labia: In civilized Western society, the female labia have long since ceased to become objects of primary sexual display--unlike the Hottentots of South Africa, for example, whose womenfolk hang weights on their vaginal lips until they form the famous Hottentot apron, which can dangle as low as five inches from the vulva. Our girls hide their labia in jeans and underwear, and also by making love in positions that do little to show off their sexual organs. We have become so discreet about the female vulva, in fact, that even girls themselves are frequently confused about the exact geography of their private parts. (Did they leave them in Des Moines?) Detailed apparitions of the vaginal lips often appear in erotic dreams. I was told by one girl that she had a dream in which she was the object of a long lecture, sitting back with her legs apart while a college professor showed her sexual organs to a classroom full of male students. Sexual dreams about female labia are not particularly significant unless the labia are unusual or are doing something unusual. One man dreamed that he was having a conversation with his girlfriend's vagina and that it kept licking its lips with a tonguelike clitoris as it spoke. Another man dreamed that his wife's labia opened up like a huge flower and that there were bees inside, clustering around her sexual juices. Dreams like these may indicate that a man feels marginally afraid of his partner's vagina (many men subconsciously are) or that he is fantasizing about his attitude toward her sexual organs and intercourse with her. The flower dream, for instance, turned out to have associations with the man's childhood. His father had grown prize chrysanthemums, which were very beautiful and colorful but which he had been forbidden to touch. He was overly awed by his wife's vulva and saw it, in his dream, in the same terms as one of his father's flowers. It is interesting, by the way, how often the female labia are likened to a flower, or symbolized by flowers, and dreams of petals and roses may well have a vaginal significance. Sheilah Graham once wrote: "I have never met a truthful woman who admitted to liking sex in the morning, although men do. After a long sleep, men are ready and raring to go. But a woman is cold in the morning, the vagina tight like a sleeping flower."

Nudity: Nudity is a staple ingredient in most erotic dreams and it can symbolize many things, according to the attitudes of the dreamer and the context of the dream. Public nudity is almost always the most interesting of nude manifestations in dreams. It can show that you have a hidden streak of carefree exhibitionism or (more usually) that you feel exposed and embarrassed about your sexual conduct. In some dreams, to be nude can represent innocence and guilelessness, but these dreams tend to be Elysian and sexless. A 12-year-old girl told me she often dreamed about a beautiful garden, where she picked flowers and talked to animals and trees. When I asked her to draw it, she drew herself standing in the grass with no clothes on. She seemed quite surprised that anybody should think she ought to be wearing clothes in a dream like that. Sometimes our dreaming minds cannot seriously imagine what a friend of ours looks like in the nude and plays the old nursery game of "heads, bodies and legs," substituting a standard dream-issue naked body for the naked body we have never seen and do not know. If you persistently dream that you are naked and ashamed in front of other people, then you probably have a guilt complex about something that you are doing sexually. Try to examine what it is that you are feeling guilty about and see it for what it really is. If you have constant exhibitionist dreams, then you may be sexually frustrated or you may have a simple desire to show more of yourself to more people.

Penis: Dream diviners spend a great deal of time trying to see penises in every pointed or protruding object, but it is often even more fruitful to try to see what the penis itself represents. Both men and women can learn a great deal about their sexual personality from studying the appearance of the penis in their sex dreams. Is it exceptionally long and hard (in a man's dream, erotic self-confidence (continued on page 146)Your Erotic Dreams(continued from page 118) and vanity; in a woman's, a desire for obvious and assertive sexual treatment from men)? Is it so thick that insertion is difficult (in a man's dream, some degree of sadism and chauvinism; in a woman's, fear of being hurt, physically and emotionally, by aggressive male sexuality)? Is it too short (for a man, a dream of sexual inadequacy; for a woman, anxiety about not being satisfied)? Is it a strong or strange color (for a man, exhibitionism and display; for a woman, fear of unusual sex technique or strange erotic behavior)? The penis often appears in erotic dreams to have a mind of its own--as, to a certain extent, it seems to have in real life. Men who dream that their penis is operating independently of their wishes are dreaming that they are losing control of their sexual technique and possibly of their sexual situation. Women who dream that the penis has a life of its own (its own eye, perhaps, or its own mouth) are usually anxious about their sex relationships and may be feeling an irrational guilt that, while their lover may understand their sexual shortcomings, his penis is an independent being who needs to be satisfied and will not forgive her if she doesn't manage to do so. It is not surprising that the penis was made a god by early civilizations. To both men and women, it often appears in sexual dreams as willful and uncontrollable.

One woman of 28 told me: "I dreamed I was making love to my boyfriend, Mike, and I was sitting on top of him. But I knew something was going to go wrong. His penis started to grow. It grew so thick and tight that it was wedged in me and was swelling me up. Then it grew longer as well and lifted me clear off the bed into the air. The feeling was extremely erotic, having this giant penis stuck up in me, but I was also panicky as well. I didn't know what was going to happen next. I was lifted clear up to the ceiling and I shouted down to Mike. 'Come! Come! If you come, it'll go soft and let me down!' But I never did find out what happened, because I woke up." The penis is often out of true proportion in sex dreams, and one analyst suggested that a good way to measure the libido of female patients was to ask them to measure the male organs they dreamed about. The longer the penis, the greater the woman's sexuality.

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An erotic dream is so full of surrealistic visions and extraordinary insights that it can take a long time for the dreamer to analyze. But, applying our general classifications, it is possible to discover the underlying themes that run through it. Consider the following:

Dream of a 32-year-old woman: "I know, without having any reason to doubt it, that I am Wilma Deering from Buck Rogers. I have blonde curly hair, even though my real hair is dark and straight, and I am wearing a kind of gnome's hat made of felt. I am flying through the upper atmosphere of a strange planet in a small womblike spacecraft. I have no clothes on, except for some thin nylon wire that crisscrosses my entire skin surface.

"The controls of the spacecraft are two big handles, which feel like hard cocks to the touch, even though they're a kind of metallic-gray color. The sky is a wonderful pink and I have a feeling of immense pleasure that I am alive to see such strange sights, even though in the back of my mind I'm frightened that I'm so far away from earth.

"Then somehow I go downstairs in my spacecraft and I'm on board a liner that's just about to dock in New York Harbor. It's a beautiful sunny day and the sea is pale blue. All the buildings of Manhattan look white and glittering and fantastic. I have to find Jimmy--my boyfriend--to warn him about the sea dragons.

"He is standing outside the ship's dining room. I take him onto the deck and we start kissing and caressing each other. I am so aroused that I forget to tell him about the sea dragons. He lifts me onto the ship's rails and twists my legs around him so I am doing a split, unable to close my thighs. He takes out his cock, and there are a lot of people standing around clapping and saying, 'He's the greatest fuck in the world.'

"He stands there with one hand on his ass and the other holding his cock and rubs his cock's head against my clitoris, and it makes a sawing, violinlike sound, incredibly erotic, that vibrates right through me. I can hardly bear it and I'm shrieking with pleasure. The whole crowd standing around have taken out their cocks and they're beating away with big smiles, and the ship's whistle blows, because we're coming into New York, and it's only 1934, which means we haven't been at war yet.

"Manhattan is sliding past. 'But.' I say, 'this is cardboard Manhattan.' It's like a bad set for West Side Story. Passengers are downstairs arguing with the purser because they bought tickets for the real New York City, not this cardboard imitation. Now they don't know where they are or what's happening. But a voice says: 'It's all right, you're in Chicago.'"

There's no rape in this dream. All the sex, though occasionally violent, is done with the dreamer's participation and approval. There is a touch of masochism but nothing serious. There's no sadism. There are no celebrities or figures of authority in the dream. No incest. No homosexuality.

There is public nudity, although not of a potent and embarrassing kind. In fact, this girl's nudity and public sex seem to win nothing but applause. There is some evidence of sexual prowess, although, again, this is not a prime theme. There is some strange technique (the ship's rails).

No, the major atmosphere of the dream is romantic sexual fantasy. The mood is set right from the beginning (or what the girl remembers as the beginning). She is Wilma Deering, romantic heroine of the spaceways, a figure whose idealistic WASP-ness is, today, almost a joke. Throughout the dream, everything that takes place works out as it should. There are almost no snags. The war hasn't started. The day is sunny and bright. It might be scary on Planet X, but you can always go downstairs and find yourself docking in New York. There is plenty of arousing, fucking, with no strings attached.

Having generally classified the dream, let's see how the individual images slot into that theme. Ideally, each dreamer should record such images in a diary or a dream dictionary, so that any future appearances can be checked. No image will have the same meaning in every dream, but usually, if it appears several times. there will be some common denominator.

As nearly as our subject could tell, Wilma Deering was a character who just happened to suit the purposes of the dream. The heroine could as easily have been Lana Lang or Lois Lane or Wonder Woman. Her spacecraft is interesting. She describes it as "womblike." Did she feel that in the dream itself or was it a description she added after she had waken up? All she could say was that, in the dream, the craft seemed "small and cozy."

And what about the nylon wire? Was it painfully tight or simply decorative? She thinks decorative. She could feel it, but it did not seem to have any masochistic undertones. The cocklike controls are Freud's old friend, the phallic symbol. But what about the pink sky? Was it flesh pink? Possibly. And the "feeling of immense pleasure that I am alive to see such strange sights"--what about that?

Could the whole opening space sequence be symbolic of birth?

Well, it could be. There might certainly be a desire to return to the idealized comforts of early infancy. But as far as regarding the dream as part of her present sexual personality is concerned, there is really no immediate need to press the interpretation any further. It is enough for the moment to see the opening sequence simply as a dreamlike space odyssey.

She could remember clearly where the sea dragons came from. They were Chinese dragons on the paper napkins of a Chinese restaurant where she had eaten the same evening. Out of the same thought the ship's dining room probably materialized.

Next comes the dream's first bout of intercourse, with her boyfriend publicly twisting her on the ship's rails and having her off. There is nothing sinister about any of this. It is all good clean exhibitionistic fun. But is there a hint, in the rails technique, that she feels sexually trapped with Jimmy? "I don't think so. I enjoy sex more if I feel I'm being dominated."

The actual sex act, with its odd violin-like motion, has all kinds of interesting ramifications. She admitted that the sensation was like having sex with a vibrator, which in some ways she enjoyed more than intercourse, although ultimately she did not find it as satisfying. So what she seems to have been dreaming about is the perfect male sex organ--attached to a man, and therefore satisfying, but with a built-in electric buzz.

The ship's whistle could have been police whistles in the street below her apartment. (It was midmorning when she had this dream.)

The concept of "cardboard Manhattan" is worth further exploration. Does she feel that city life is all hollow and sham? Or, particularly since Chicago is mentioned, could she somewhere have heard the story of how unscrupulous British shipowners took would-be emigrants from London to Wales (for the full fare, of course) instead of to Chicago? When the emigrants remarked on the shortness of the "Atlantic crossing," the shipowners proudly patted their steamers and said, "Fast ship, y' know."

What practical knowledge can this girl gain from her erotic dream? Well, although she isn't openly frustrated, it could be that she is seeking something more out of her sex life than she is getting. She is a romantic (as her other dreams show, as well) and she will never achieve a sex relationship as perfect as the one she seeks. It would probably do her good to reconcile herself to working harder at the relationship she has, rather than continue to fantasize about what might be. After all, Chicago is not that bad.

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We all have a stake in knowing more about erotic dreams. G. Bachelard, in his book La Terre et les Revêries de la Volonté, writes, "The most productive decisions are associated with nocturnal dreams. The man who sleeps badly cannot have confidence in himself. In fact, sleep, which is held to be an interruption of the consciousness, links us to ourselves. The normal dream, the true dream, is thus often the prelude and by no means the sequel to our active life." Many people suppress their real desires and continue with highly conformist, unadventurous sex relationships, just because they are afraid to broach their true feelings to their lovers. They are afraid that their husband or wife will find their lusts disgusting and that, consequently, they will be humiliated. In many cases, these fears may be justified, but it is only by experiment and risk that any sexual relationship can progress and flourish. Sex was never meant to be safe and cozy.