Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Schneider dream 2

The Schneider dream was:
http://trumbullhs.blogspot.com/2007/08/schneider-dream.html

James Hillman has written provocatively about befriending dreams. A wiki entry on archetypal psychology quotes Hillman: Refer to the subtopic titled Dream Analysis.

Does the dream connect to any other paragraph in the original email?

How effective is the heuristic -- 'all dream persona are aspects of the dreamer's psyche!' ? (This seems difficult to apply here.)

I'll venture--Gary Schneider is the superlative form ... of some emotion, reaction, idea.

2 comments:

Mike said...

I had a psychologist who liked to do dream interpretation and would interpret every dream as my dreaming about aspects of myself. It was akin to squeezing all social phenomena into a Marxist or Freudian framework, i.e., ideology.
It was not usually productive, though I think it applies to certain dreams. I don't see it applying to this one, although certainly I was dreaming of something about my past and myself that I'm still not comfortable with.

It was a dream about Schneider as a superlative ? Sex was his thing, so there's that. He had a lot of athletic potential but wasn't interested in applying it. I sort of admired his frankness and not seeming to care what people thought of him, yet he was a social outcast. I had a long history with him, starting in the 6th grade, I'll tell you more about it. Also the dream reminded me of two specific evenings you and I spent with him, I'll remind you of those.

Mike said...

This will expand upon my previous comment, where I said I had a long history with Schneider, starting in the 6th grade. That was when his family moved to Trumbull. They moved to Westwood Avenue off Park Lane, near the Burkes, who lived on Rose Terrace. The Schneiders lived across the street from a family whose backyard adjoined our backyard. Gary used to make spontaneous visits, which would unnerve me because he was so boisterous and my father was so, well, you know, but nothing untoward ever took place, because Gary would get bored and leave before long.
As the new kid at Jane Ryan School he was a big hit at first. He was good looking, had the great voice, confidence, etc. I remember we had a class trip somewhere and, upon popular demand, on the bus ride back he sang the hit song "Palisades Park" with a lot of cheesy style and a great voice. Even the mothers present thought he was a future pop star. He soon became the boy friend of Celine Pauline, the prettiest and most popular girl of our age in Trumbull in grammar school thru junior high (I had a huge crush on her and still dream about her). From being on top of the world, Schneider alienated everyone in short order. He turned Celine off with obsessive jealousy. By the end of 6th grade, he was a social pariah. I remember Celine running up to me toward the end of the school year, during recess, saying that "boys were ganging up on Gary, would I please help". I was a tough guy then, more on that in a moment. I rounded up some other tough nerds and we chased away the boys, who were the Shapiros and some other jock types. I was a tough guy in the 5th and 6th grades. I was challenged by and easily took both Shapiros (later football stars), Fred Marcontonio (later a champion heavyweight wrestler), Gene McCallighan (a neighbor on Rose Terrace and one of my best friends then, later captain of the wrestling team) and Schneider himself, who jumped me from behind. I'm almost embarrassed at this point to cite one of your ancient quotes again, but when I told you in high school how I once beat up all those tough guys, you remarked: "In 6th grade the winner of a fight is the one who wants to win the most."