I once read a book about creative writing that said a plot is an interesting person with a problem. We then get to see how the person resolves it or doesn't. It could be as simple as a hangnail, or Guy de Maupassant's piece of string.
I've been looking for a dream I wanted to share with you, from Freud's book called in English The Interpretation of Dreams, though Bruno Bettelheim objected to that title, saying it made the humanist Freud sound overly scientific.
In Freud's anecdote, a father is keeping watch over the body of his dead son. As the night wears on, the exhausted father drifts off to sleep. In the dream, the father sees his son standing before him, surrounded by flames. "Father, can't you see I'm burning!"
The father wakes up with a start and finds the room ablaze. A candle has fallen over and set a cloth used to cover the body on fire.
I get out the edition of Die Traumdeutung—Deutung is more like 'divination'—that I picked up in Rostock in 2006. Seven hundred pages and no index. I leave it on the green couch by the window and page through it from time to time. I look under chapter headings that sound likely. Was it near the beginning? Near the end? I have no recollection.
This goes on for days, whenever I happen by the couch. Finally I search on the Web. I find summaries and citations, but the page reference given is not to my edition. I wander back to the couch and pick up the book to flip through it again. Why? All I wanted was a review. Maybe I have a hangnail.
There might be a lesson for me in there.
© Matthew Hammond July 2009