Sam Schick Dream analysis The dream that I'm using is one of my own.

A friend of mine who I have a crush on, but haven't told, is with me in what feels like a videogame a lot like Portal (which I had been playing a lot in the week before the dream.) The space we're in has a large pit, which would normally be uncrossable but is simple to get across with the portal gun. However, on the other side of the pit there's another trap, a wall that rises out of the ground when you get close to it, that I can't figure out how to get past. My friend somehow gets across it, and is urging me to follow her, but I keep either falling into the pit or getting crushed by the wall rising out of the ground. This whole sequence repeats itself over and over more times than I counted; it started feeling like each one was taking less than a second, like life was in fast forward. Because of the videogame feel dying isn't particularly unpleasant, just frustrating. I woke up with the cycle still repeating, not any closer to the end. The environment was clearly displaced from the games I had been playing before I had the dream. The first symbol which seems worth noting for Freudian analysis were the portals and the experience of falling but being brought back to the beginning before I hit bottom. The Freudian method says that down has to do with sexual activity and that up has to do with the brain or thinking. The cycle of almost reaching the bottom but being placed back at the top could then be my subconscious suggesting that by overthinking things I was repressing my sexuality. Similarly, my friend who I can't reach is probably a symbol of the same sort of thing. Because the dream was so repetitive, it seemed to go on for a fairly long time, despite the fact that the scene was so short. This could mean that this is a problem that I've been dealing with for a long time and one that I'm afraid I will have to continue dealing with in the future. According to Freud, dreams usually end well for the dreamer, but this one did not. It wasn't a nightmare, it didn't end particularly badly either, but it did leave me with that sense of frustration. This also seems to say that I can't see a clear way out of the problem, that I don't see it as easy as stepping down from the balcony, like Martha did. This goes back to the portals; normally, in the game, I would control where they were placed, but in the dream no matter where I put them I ended up either falling through them back to the beginning of the level or, even more confusing, falling into the pit and just appearing back at the beginning without any explanation. This suggests I feel helpless to move forward; no matter what I did in the dream, either my own actions or some mysterious outside force put me back where I started. In addition to a goal I can't reach, the friend might represent almost the opposite to all this; a part of myself that feels like things aren't moving fast enough. While this doesn't have as much evidence as the other interpretation, it would still fit; most of my classes are review from AP classes last year. It could even be that both views are true, that I feel unable to move forward in a social sense and forced to go to slowly in a more academic sense. More generally, the dream might also have to do with having issues adjusting to college in general. Portal is about being a labrat in experiments that seem pointless and endless; repeated references are made to the fact that the main character is adopted. In addition to it's more obvious displacement from the games I'd been playing, it might also represent entering a new environment where my parents are far away and the only authority is the vague, looming administration. While Freudian analysis usually seems to focus on more generalized symbols than this, this did seem applicable to my own life, and in the case of Martha the symbolization of the prime minister followed a similar line of reasoning. This fits with the rest of my interpretation nicely; I've never done well with authorities, and often feel

like they're getting in my way. On the other hand, my parents have been supporting me in one way or another for most of my life; losing that might help explain an inability, or at least a fear, of moving forward. Overall Freudian approach seems to suggest that the dream was about my having trouble to adjust to college, both socially and academically. Looking broadly at the dream through the Jungian approach, the feeling of hopelessness or being stuck is what comes to the surface most. My strongest association with portal is losing. I finished the game eventually, but there was a lot of sitting still in a level trying to understand what was going on. On the explanation level, videogames are often treated as pointless and a waste of time and energy by society; this also reinforces the theme of an inability to move forward. The pit has a similar meaning, both in terms of association and explanation; when confronted with a deep hole, people usually stay back, but the portals could mean something new. Doorways would represent to a lot of people an opportunity, a way out; the explanation for the portals might be that I'm looking for a way out of whatever stress I'm experiencing at the moment. Within the game portals are the only tool you have to work with; they are the only thing you directly control. They could be associated to that for me, but in the dream the portals are almost useless; if they do represent an escape or some level of control, it's something that I feel isn't working for me. The strongest contrast to the Freudian approach is how my friend is viewed. While Freudian approach seems almost tuned to suggest sexual repression, the Jungian approach sees things very differently. To Freud, she was a symbol of sexual repression; in the Jungian approach she is instead my feminine side. The fact that she is unreachable becomes a symbol for a division in me, as opposed to sexual frustration. Jungian approach says that dreams are your minds way of trying to find balance; this could be my minds way of telling me that I need to embrace my feminine side more. There is also the exit, the door out of the level that my friend is standing in front of. If the portals represented the control that I have, no matter how useless it may be, the exit represents the control that I feel is beyond me. This could again be because of the move to college, but since Jungian doesn't describe dreams as being resolutions to conflicts, it seems more likely that it's a general feeling of loss of control, not necessarily related to any one external influence. The exit could also represent an escape or a release of stress. While Jung would not attribute any specific cause to the stress, looking at my own life it presumably comes from adjusting to classes and being away from my friends and family for the first large chunk of time. However, it could also be more internal; according to our society I've only just really become an adult. The stress could be a result of that. Jungian approach also talks about amplification, the general story arcs or heroic journeys that are repeated over and over again in literature. Because it is so repetitive and short, my dream doesn't very closely match any conventional story arc, but in some ways it does seem close to the traditional concept of tragedy. This only adds to the feeling of being stuck in the dream. Tragedies traditionally end in death; while it may be harmless, I do die in my dream. Over and over again, in fact. The overarching feeling in the dream is my inability to break that cycle. Jungian analysis seems also to suggest I feel stuck in some way, but unlike Freudian it doesn't suggest that this is sexual frustration. All it describes is that feeling; there is no attribution of a source in Jungian analysis, or any suggestion of how to resolve the tension. The dream is completely a way for my subconscious to tell me that I am off balance, that there is something that needs to be resolved. The most specific it seems to be is about my friend; a seperation of the masculine and feminine in me is a much more internal conflict, the sort of thing that Jungian analysis is perfect for examining.

The Gestalt approach is very focused on flow. According to this method, my dreams help me fit together problems in such a way that they can be solved more easily. It looks for opposing forces, and then tries to find some solution in compromise between them. Most importantly, it views everything in the dream as an extension of myself; there are no external forces within the dream. Specific to my dream, this seems to provide a much more directly applicable interpretation than the other methods. In terms of literal opposing forces, we have the pit and the wall rising out of the ground. Separately they are both impassable barriers, but if I take a step back and stop treating the pit as a barrier, it becomes a solution to the wall, a place that the wall could fit into without getting in my way. While the dream still has a feeling of being stuck, this suggests that that feeling is more rooted in myself than in actual obstacles. Even more generally, this still applies; if everything in the dream is an element of myself, then all barriers must be from something that I am doing. This still doesn't give me any good way to discover what it is that I am doing to cause this inability to move forward. Interpreting my friend as an extension of myself gives me a way to look at the problem more directly. As my friend, I am impatient, I am irritated by how slowly the other me is moving, but I also feel obligated to wait for him. As myself, I understand some of how she feels, and it makes me nervous; I'm afraid she will leave without me, or that I won't be able to find a way to catch up to her. On both sides of this there is a tension that comes from the separation, and both sides eventually want the same goal. However, neither side feels like they know how to make that happen. Outside of the dream, I'm a fairly cocky person; I usually assume that I can learn anything I need to as quickly as possible. Feeling that I'm not able to move through material in class fast enough might give me that sort of feeling of annoyance at myself. I can certainly see how that conflict arose, especially with the start of the school year right near by. Gestalt approach goes further than just looking from the point of view of each person in the dream, however. Everything in the dream is an extension of me, and therefore it's point of view might provide insight. As the pit, I am a barrier, but not necessarily an impassable one; I can be climbed out of, or built over, or, in the case of the dream, portaled across. More generally, I am a void; an empty space, something is missing. My only real purpose at an essential level is to be filled. Gestalt approach talks specifically about holes in the sense of voids, saying that they refer to holes in the dreamer's personality. This almost seems to be related to some of what I found with the Freudian approach, with problems in my social life. The context of the dream (the videogame feel) suggests that the void may be from my habit of staying introverted; not that that is inherently a flaw, but using it to avoid interacting with people is. The crushing wall's point of view goes back to that feeling of opposing forces; I fill space that is empty, to prevent people from getting past. Usually I am harmless, but if you get to close I will hurt you. Unlike the pit, there is no obvious way to work around me. Obviously it's almost the exact negative of the pit, but it also is trying to push people away. As an aspect of myself, that goes back to my introvertion, and possibly also suggests that the feeling of being stuck is directly from an inability to connect with people socially. All three of these approaches seemed to get at the same general conflict within the dream, this feeling of being unable to move forward. While the Freudian approach also seemed to suggest that I was struggling with sexual repression, it's hard to imagine a dream that Freudian analysis wouldn't suggest that. In my mind, the Gestalt approach had the most useful information, in that it gave me a fairly specific internal problem that I might be able to work on. While Jungian suggested that I should attempt to fit together my feminine and

masculine sides, at least for me that seems unlikely to be a problem. I'm fairly comfortable with my feminine side; it seems much more likely that any internal conflict I have springs from issues connecting with people, as the Gestalt approach suggested.