|
"My
earliest memory is of my father
holding me
before the firebox door of a wood stove
and almost
throwing me into the fire. What do I mean by 'almost'?
Was he making teasing motions? Did the thought that
he could do that flash
through his mind, perhaps
subconsciously even, and then, expelled from his mind
in horror, dive telepathically into my consciousness?
No. In fact, what I have recalled is a very early dream.
"I didn't realize that my memory
was of a dream and
not of an actual incident until I was about eleven years
old. I asked my parents, as casually as I could,
if they
could remember teasing me in that
way. They were
horrified and possibly hurt as wellthat's
not their
kind of joke. Even as I asked,
I knew that it hadn't
really happened. Indeed, only when
I knew that it
hadn't happened could I risk
asking. But for all those
years that dream/memory nested in my consciousness,
doing its work.
"What work? In college,
studying Freud, I said, 'Ah
ha! The Oedipal conflict." Now I
am convinced that
though the Oedipal conflict is there,
it's not what is
interesting about the dream.
'Discovering' that a
dream contains the Oedipal
conflict is somewhat
analogous to 'discovering' that
a Shakespearean
sonnet has four parts within its fourteen lines.
"The time when I began
to explore the significance
of the dream, at age eleven, was the
beginning of a
period of growing alone, not
lonely, but growing
myselfindependent of my family. The
memory had
been disturbing but even at the
tender age of 5-11,
more interesting than frightening.
I was always
pleased to encounter the memory.
"You are perhaps
thinking that I must have been
an awfully morbid child to enjoy such a grim
fantasy.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. My childhood
was extraordinarily free, happy and full of adventure.
So what was the work
of the dream disturbing,
potentially horrifying, but in the long run more
good
than evil?
"The incident
that precipitated the dream
was
probably something like my father holding me in
his
arms while feeding a stick of wood into the fire. A vivid
detail of the dream is the flash of color and heat
from
238
|
|