Coming of Age in the Global Village -or- A Clockwork Orange

Coming of Age in Film, Literature and Dreams -or- Adolescent Confusion 

To those adults reading this Field Note, you might remember your own coming of age story. For those adolescents, hopefully as you read, you will begin to understand that you as well as all past generations of children have been thrown into an ontological world of existential conflicts. Parts of my own coming of age story are found in these Field Notes and talk about my student days at the University of Zurich. As an adolescent, I was part of a student peer group as most North American adolescents are. I went to high school from grade 10 to grade13 at Sir Sandford Fleming in Toronto, Ontario (Canada). As a group we would often go to see films together, one of those films was "A Clockwork Orange". The film provides a portrayal of youth rebellion, sexuality and violence. 

The article "McMaster's secret stash: A Clockwork Orange" (in the "Hamilton Spectator", November 13, 2012, by Mark McNeil), talks about the original "doodled" manuscript of Anthony Burgess which has had its home at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) since 1967. McNeil tells his readers that; "Most significant is a sketch by Burgess on the first page of an orange with a wedge cut out and the moving parts of a clock shown inside. Clockwork orange is a British expression (read idiom) that means a person might seem outwardly normal but inside has some strange workings." 

Two of the modern literary protagonists of the dystopian coming of age nightmare of human maturation presented in IIDR dream interpretations, are J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield and Sigmund Freud's "Dora" (aka Ida Bauer). Holden and Dora show the reader the dark ontological vision caused by the dysfunctional social relationships of the urban society they lived in. Said differently, in terms of "clockwork orange", Holden and Dora show us the modern psychologically deleterious psychopathological effects of the "strange workings" of society on the inner ontological workings of dreams, consciousness, and being. 

From a Hollywood dream factory perspective, coming of age films bring into focus a person's personal growth social, moral, emotional and psychological. The story is often told from the visual perspective of an adult whose narrative flashes back to their younger self and the experiences they encountered. We (adults) all carry a "bildungsroman" (story of maturation) with us, where we developed a social philosophy, a social psychological identity, a sexual identity. 

One such experiential film is "Cider House Rules". If this personal growth and development has been featured in film, literature and in our dreams, then in our dreams, our thoughts, feelings and motives are seen completely "unadulterated". Here then, are some of the "unadulterated" International Institute for Dream Research (IIDR) dream interpretations of those thrown into the confusing existential world driven by social conflicts; 

 

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