I'LL BE THE ACTRESS STARRING IN YOUR BAD DREAMS
The Hypnotic Investigation of Dreams – C Scott Moss
I just flipped to a random page of this book to see if I could muster the words to capture its insane pointlessness. Instead, I find myself staring at a complex diagram mapping adjectives like ‘angular’, ‘kind’, ‘far’, and ‘cruel’ against phallic and vaginal ‘dream concept’ data and something to do with neckties. The adjacent page psychoanalyses some sort of hotdog themed dream, where the hotdog is a penis and a vag and might also get you pregnant.
“The whiteness of the onion indicates purity to me,” the woman patient comments.
I become intrigued, like the Rachel Weisz voice in The Lobster, and flip back a few pages to find out more about her. She seems tremendously concerned about men’s neckties... And, honestly, who can blame her? I’ve been wondering when men will quit that whole necktie-capitalist-patriarchy habit myself. This woman’s too-chaotic mental thread-scape at the myriad male/female/menstrual/sexual intonations she sees in neck décor is palpable, chaps! So please think carefully next time you choose between the paisley or the stripes as this book is clear that you are wearing a metaphorical vagina on your chest for all to see.
“She further volunteered that later she had experienced several nightmares in which she was choking on a hotdog, and that in the past six months for reasons until now unknown to her, hotdogs had become completely unappetising.”
Yes, it’s another vintage academic work, Cosmic Pancakes! people. Our author, C Scott Moss, was a US psychologist working in academia and public health, with a special focus on hypnosis. The Hypnotic Investigation of Dreams was published in 1967 and comprises Moss’s review of the literature followed by overviews of 12 contemporary clinical and experimental studies.
I couldn’t read past the first couple of chapters because this book is fundamentally flawed. Firstly, how do you distinguish between ‘hypnosis’ and ‘dreams’..? Moss writes reams about HIS definitions, methods, and (glaring) biases, but none of them are convincing – certainly not by modern standards. He seems to see dreams as static, flat, certain, and codifiable; it’s as if he’s seeking a one-sized-American-Dream-fits-all ‘hypnosis’ intervention he can flog to The Fantasy Vintage CIA Appreciation Club League or something snappier*, frankly. A lot of the book is just throwing shade at Theodore X Barber for being correct about everything Moss is arguing against.
An interesting question for psychology academics is: at what point can we excise now unethical, misguidedly weird, and wholly perverted studies from what we, as modern and progressive humans, claim to know about our minds and behaviours? This book is packed with icky Freudian and Jungian dream interpretation amplified via a white Western male perspective, as well as all sorts of ‘scientific’ spit-balling about the sexual or malevolent ‘meaning’ of otherwise mundane midnight memory flickers. It's no wonder women get stuck in never-ended hotdog nightmares whilst these necktie-wearing Gentlemen Scientists continue with this incessantly unbalanced questioning!
Sometimes I dream of finding my own male somnambule guineapigs to recreate these vintage experiments with... What are you up to in there, gents?! Let’s put the lot of you in a Salpêtrière hypnosis hospital and refract YOUR plodding nightly dream-spurts through MY perverted mind, for a change! Necktie analysis shall become the new Rorschach Test. The businessmen of Great Britain shall be committed to The Low-Context Beyoncé Astral Projection Club like the hysterics of Bedlam. And anyone caught flirting or doing PUA shall be subjected to a full clockwork-orange hour of Jake Gyllenhaal STILL not paying sufficient heed to my and Taylor Swift's Lady Problems while Megan Thee Stallion eats popcorn as this new kind of bestseller mystery unfolds.
Because all I’ve ever wanted to know about hypnosis and dreams I’ve learned from Taylor, hypno-fans**! Whatever your dreams – your wildest ones, your bad ones, your daydreams, or your painterly dreamscapes – she’ll see you there. She’ll be there, mofos. ME, TOO. Waiting. A Smurf in a 1970s purple haze fur coat of whatever Ormond McGill and his wife got up to in their spare time. And the Smurf knows that you know that she knows. Including when he/they/whatever and Jake Gyllenhaal and a whole mess of global music PR professionals are awake and working, too. Where’s her scarf? The Smurf in a vintage cocktail party couple’s clothing shall suggest themselves into the dreams of every person here on Planet Earth until it is found.
It’s just basic marketing-communications message discipline..? But perhaps that’s something only Lady Hypnotists can so easily see.
*Who’s on lapel-pin badge duty?
**Imagine: having to boil everything down into 101 metaphors just for HER to be vaguely heard and heeded by British necktie-wearers! Team #ProjectMayhem wins and DOWN WITH The Coup.
