Yume Nikki

Bystander

I am looking at you.

You stand there, fazed, in your adorably decorated room.

“Well…”

I place my hand on my chest, regulating my breathing patterns.

I tell myself to calm down.

This is a situation I have never imagined that would happen.

You and I must be having the same dream that allowed your presence. Therefore, I have thought about and rehearsed over how I should react to you when I confront you.

But I am so nervous I stutter, as if I suddenly came across a television star on the street.

“Wel-Welcome. No, wait, this isn’t a shop. Well…”

I stand in front you, who are looking back at me. Unable to articulate myself clearly, I am left helpless.

No one can really act according to his or her wishes in a dream.

“It’s cold outside, I guess. There isn’t anything here, but let’s just take a break.”

I point at the sitting mat in the corner of the room.

You remain still, uneasy, perhaps. You might be thinking of something, but it couldn’t be seen on your face. You stagger to the bookshelf beside the wall and commence your investigation.

For someone else to touch things in my room is bothering, for such intrusion is impolite, yet I reckon that your act is an expression of intimacy for an old friend.

“The books here don’t mean anything. What is placed here…”

I have come behind you, looking over your shoulder. On the bookshelf are books with same cover. Beside the bookshelf is a framed picture of a large creature drawn adorably, resembling a whale or an elephant. Both evoke the assuring sense of being large and reliable.

To you, this place I have is a place you can unwind and rest.

You must have gotten tired from having walked around so long, with nothing to cure your fatigue.

This is why I have to tell you.

“Do you know that all of them are the dream diaries you wrote?”

Unreasonably pacing back and forth the bookshelf has turned you irascible. I take one of the books and flip it open, only to see numerous words on it conveying sophisticated connotations.

A small red umbrella, traffic lights—these are what you have originally written.

But there are other wrecked words that were written as if they were embodiments of the search for darkness—frogs, witches, traffic lights. I incline to tell myself I know the connotations of these words, yet there are also words that I could not make sense of and that I also hate—cleaver, caput, ‘eyeball-hand’.

“You record memorable words that are important to you, for dreams are extensions of the unconscious, forgotten soon after you awake from them. In such instances, only the bygones that have engraved in your psyche can be imprinted in the depths of your brain like a screen projected by a computer.”

I lay out the book to you.

And I say to you, panting, “I’ve thought about a lot of issues, for time allowed me, and rendered me bored enough to wonder why I am lost in this nightmare, and whether I can escape from it, which, I believe, is the same thing you have in mind.”

I pick up another book, a professional-based book, which has so much missing information it seems it is written deliberately not to contain what we know. Reading it feels like going through the vague memories left by the books we have once read, so whether the information in the book is correct or wrong, our fabrication or even our distortion—we could never know.

I say, pointing at that book for awhile, and pointing back at the dream diary for awhile, “For example, street lamps have never appeared. Be it the straight road along the trees, the corpse, or even the monsters in the depths, I think they can be analyzed by Freud’s psychoanalysis of dreams.”

I sound like a child showing off to his friend the knowledge she has acquired.

My words carry passion that not even I can stand.

“The founder of psychology is its father—Freud. He said dreams are the product of the suppressed unconscious. The unconscious is the pressure, the desire, the dispute in our reality that has been suppressed and shoved and amassed into the depths of our psyche. It is the soup boiling in a pan.”

You are the monster at the end of the straight road.

You breed in your psyche the hate, the desire, and the malice that cannot be realized or dealt with. They form in the depths of your psyche the disputing monster, that is, you yourself.

When you are dreaming, you are confronting your unconscious—the monster in yourself.

When you escape and awaken from it, you only need to distract yourself. A person with no weapon of psychology would only be murdered, gobbled, and digested by the monster, eventually becoming one with it.

“Rationality is the state of suppressing our nature. Mental or psychological disorders are the result of failure to suppress that monster. It is when rationality the hero loses to the monster; it is when this wall is crushed and the monster infiltrates into reality—this is what Freud proposed. It is of course a reductionist approach, but it merits itself for being easy to understand.”

Dreams are monsters, the desires and nature we suppress. Our lives are the incessant battles of the blade, the chains, and the shield of rationality against these monsters, forcing them to subjugation.

But this is an overly sloppy proposition. It is contradictory to use a mere opposition between rationality and nature, good against evil, to explain our sophisticated psyche.

Freud generalized the monster being suppressed as lust. He believes every dream is a symbol of the penis or the sexual act, which obviously sounds far-fetched and obscene. It may prove itself true for some circumstances, but the issue here is no less simple.

For there are more than monsters in dreams.

If we explain everything with his purport, people with psychological disorders will have to be pitiable weaklings lost to monsters. And the natural solution, as vulgar as a teenager’s manga, will be to cheer him up or to make him feel stronger.

Not everyone can be cheered up or made stronger. There are always undefeatable monsters. But if we follow Freud’s theories, we would only see ourselves as cowards.