Freaky Dreams
I was recently asked for an interview about dreams and dreaming by someone writing an article for a large medical website. One of the questions is;
How would you define a freaky dream? What are its components/typical scenarios?
Mr Hagen's Replay
I am a bread and butter dream researcher, with a serious bent to understand the creative and destructive dynamics of dreaming as the process operates in the Global Village. My website is dedicated to making the mythological process of dreaming transparent for everyone. My e-book Mysteries of the Dream in the Global Village calls for a mythic sea change in dreaming.
From a popular culture point of view the word "freaky" can be understood in a number of ways;
The 1981 song "Superfreak" (video clip) by Rick James uses the metaphor of a freak as meaning a woman who is sexually adventurous, perhaps even permisquous. The next allusions that enter my mind are Alfred Hitchcock films, especially his visceral masterpiece Psycho (video clip). Many of Hitchcock's film are poetically disguised "freak shows". In the USA an authentic freak show began traveling across America in 2005 using as it's traveling brand name 999 Eyes of Endless Dream Carnival Museum & Sideshow. In an episode of the popular TV medical drama House (note the dream sequences in this video clip), we hear House telling a dwarf, the mother of a patient he is treating, that they (House and the dwarf) are both "freaks". Hormonal treatments will help her child to grow to be "normal". There is some debate whether the daughter wants to take the treatments. House asks the mother if she wants her daughter to also grow up to be a freak. Many people at the end of their dream narratives state that the dream "seemed so real". In the film The Matrix (video clip) when Neo is first confronted with the truth that he has been living in a dream world, he continues to disbelieve and "freaks out". Cypher tells us "he's going to pop". The epitome of freaks found in literature is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (video trailer) a product of science and a character that Shelley found in her dreams.
Freaky as a way to label the landscape of such dreams as falling, loosing teeth or being naked in public might be termed unusual, however these types of dream landscapes show up very frequently. It is in this sense in-fact that the primal hallucinatory language and landscape of dreams is freaky, bizarre, unusual and scary. The dream is a vestige of primitive thinking, a language that humanity forgot once the tools of verbal languages were invented. Each child must learn this lesson aknew. We no longer commune with the dream and therefore we get lost in the translation, perennially asking about our dreams, "what does it mean?"