Oedipal indigestion

 

May 7, 1982

 

We interrupt this current thought for a message from a dream: my mother is a go go dancer.

Yeah, that’s right folks; you too can smash glass and dishes while dreaming of your mother making the grand attempt to stop her from stepping out onto the stage.

It all connects as I lay sleeping with sweet and wonderful Doreen.

My mother is a stripper.

Anyway, the other great love of my life in Scranton is.

What a terrible connection for my unconscious to make.

But Freud’s been on my brain lately. And there is it, a single dream, meaning everything he said it should mean.

For me personally, it was a nightmare.

I dreamed I was standing in the kitchen of the old Crooks Avenue house with my uncles and my mother. I was smashing dishes at my mother’s occupation.

“It isn’t decent!” I heard myself say.

My gallant uncles did nothing.

But I sensed their approval, just as sensed their disapproval at everything bad I did in my life.

They just wouldn’t voice their judgments.

The dream had several terrifying interpretations.

First there is the obvious oedipal complex issue.

Secondly, there is Louise, who really is a stripper and more, and my frustration at trying to keep her out of porno flicks in LA, and my joining her to keep tabs on her, growing hurt over every explicit act.

Now, more than a decade later, she keeping appointments, I dare not object to, though feel as if each is the lash of a whip, aching for her to be something else, perhaps as pure as my mother is, and in my twisted dreams, my unconscious gets it wrong, and I wake up in a sweat wondering where I went wrong.