Hollywood's Rating System -or- Nine Dirty Words in Dreams
Vicious Cycle of the Psychohistory of Abuse -or- Streetproofing our Children
The International Institute for Dream Research (IIDR) has received some dreams, that are difficult to rate in terms of the propriety of reporting. Knowing that children may visit the IIDR website or the facebook page, it is difficult to know or say where to draw the line. Said differently, should some dreams be censored from public view and consumption? So for example, the discussion of pedophilic dreams "Calling the RCMP", can be found at the IIDR website. Some may find fault and criticize this posting. I do believe, that children should be made aware of the existence of sexual predators. In a child's terminology of their dreams, they are called monsters. I am not saying anything that cannot already be found about "pedophilia", at Wikipedia's website. Perhaps some Internet and information users do not agree with all the content posted there? How many children are abused every day? How many children are abused and don't report it, because they are afraid to do so. Their parents never spoke or protected them via "street-proofing". Read IIDR interpretation; "STREETPROOFING".
The fairy tales of "Little Red Riding Hood", "Sleeping Beauty" (the more original and untold rape version) and "Hansel and Gretel", symbolically speak of such sexual predators. They speak in a more symbolic form (read disguised). Is this more publically appropriate, or acceptable? Are we saying, because we don't want to feel uncomfortable, so we just don't openly talk about it. If this is the parochial attitude, then our children will remain vulnerable, as they have been pedagogically vulnerable in our past psychohistory, when they went to "Grand-ma's house" has shown us. In this sense, we will continue to perpetuate the problem by consciously or unconsciously aiding and abetting a dark vicious cycle of the so-called "monster", creating future children's nightmares, instead of protecting and nurturing our children's dreams for a brighter future.
Here then is a dream sent to the IIDR, which talks about two "scenes". I will discuss both oneiric "mise en scene", fantasies separately. I have edited all of the explicit parts and substituted a re-worked "PG" rated interpretation for you the reader.
JOE, 59 American
I have always had erotic dreams, more in recent years than in past ones. This dream was very graphic and very erotic imaginary. I will try to explain all of the details as best as I remember them. Please excuse the explicit language, but that is how I remember it. The dream involves my wife and my next to youngest brother, who is her same age. He has been a pursuer, prowler and predator of women for 35 years, but has never been caught.
"The dream starts with me and my wife watching my brother swimming in an icy lake. He is an outdoorsman and is used to cold weather." THE REST OF THIS "SCENE" HAS BEEN DELETED, due to it's XXX rating.
SCENE ONE: XXX -or- Hollywood's Film Rating System
Using the Hollywood Dream Factory production code (Motion Picture of America Rating System) to give dreams as movies, a rating, this scene is X-rated. The "X" rating, is reserved for erotic dream imagery that is pornographically explicit, and whose audience is 17 and older. In fact, this Dantean scene of JOE's dream borders on the "hard core".
Scene TWO: Nine Dirty Words-or-The Nine Dirty Circles of Hell by Lenny Bruce
"The next scene I have is without me, but I had the sense that I was watching what was happening though not physically present. My wife is in my brother's house and she is busy cleaning things. He is following her around and using sex talk with her. He is telling his sex jokes and teasing with her as he usually does." NOTE, I HAVE DELETED THE REST OF the TEXT, although it is more tame and deals with crude verbal sexual humor. The fact that the wife in the dream "is busy cleaning things" provides a clue to the type of sex jokes he will tell, namely "dirty jokes".
Such humor was part of the 60's movement for more "freedom of expression", and Lenny Bruce was on the leading edge in America by transgressing "obscenity" laws of the "Establishment". All of Bruce's nine "dirty" words (an allusion and re-working of Dante's nine circles of hell in Inferno?) are found in JOE's text of "Scene Two". Serialized in "Playboy", Bruce would later write his autobiography "How to Talk Dirty and Influence People". Lenny Bruce died in 1966 of a drug overdose.
George Carlin would take up Bruce's fight with his monologue, "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television" (here is a link to the "Seven Words"). Later Carlin and all that followed received a clear legal message as to where the speech boundaries of obscenity were, and where the lines in the sand were drawn. We still find people who every day push the socially appropriate envelope of speech, such as evidenced in the dream Table Talk: Anatomy of Hate which involves "hate speech".
From a popular culture perspective Dustin Hoffman played Lenny Bruce in the film "Lenny". I often think when watching "Seinfeld", that his is a watered down vitrolic sarcasm (Bruce was worthy of the tradition of Aristophanes, Rabalais and Swift) and a socially more palatable and acceptable version of Bruce. As a show "about nothing", most likely the "stand-up" of "Seinfeld" and his code worded "Seinlanguage" could not exist without Bruce and Carlin paving the way. "Not that there's anything wrong with that."
While I am loath to give him play time at this website, I must acknowledge that the satellite radio "shock jock" Howard Stern has gained an audience and a living in the global village using vitriolic humor. I wonder if his favorite movie is The Fisher King?
Perhaps on a final note, profanity is not new to the Western world, ancient "vulgar Latin" and Latin profanity was largely sexual and scatological. The "writting on the wall", has been inherited from the ancient past and reworked into what we see and hear above. The IIDR dream interpretation Off Color Humor provides another modern perspective.