I was at this old bookstore that couldn't have been more badly organized without it being intentional. Books stacked on top of each other making it impossible to browse one without upsetting entire shelves worth and somehow I stumbled upon the fifty cent paperback section. Here was the worst of the worst, the stuff libraries wouldn't even accept as donations. Trashy romance novels, astrology predictions from five years ago, hints and tips for Atari games, biographies of first wives. Then I found it, a slim dusty paperback with a non-descript cover and a spine in perfect condition which was probably an indicator of its unreadability. It was called "The Dictionary of Dream Interpretations" and I knew I had hit the jackpot.
See, I had been planning to drop my psychologist for a while. I'd decided that I didn't need him. Not because I was mentally sound, far from it, but because I had found a better replacement. My fiction writing class. I had written a not even thinly veiled short story about my life, photocopied it twenty times, and listened to the peer review of it. In this particular class, they decided not to critique my writing style but my character. They went into depth about what they thought his problems were and how they perceived him based on his actions. One girl called him "a total asshole redeemed only by the fact that he's amusing at times". And since the character was me, they were telling me what my problems were and since they didn't know me, they told me honestly and candidly. Few people can get non-sugar coated psychoanalysis from their peers, for free and anonymously to boot. So I decided I didn't need my student health assigned psychologist.
I hadn't told many people I had been seeing a psychologist. I told one of my roommates that I had an appointment with one because he asked where I was going at eight in the morning and I couldn't think of a good lie. He said, "Yeah, my parents made me go to a psychologist in high school. That was before we realized my mom was the one that was crazy."
I had this vivid memory of an episode of Columbo where Peter "just one more thing..." Falk figures out the murderer by the dreams of the victim recorded onto tapes. The victim dreams of a monacle, which interprets to "mon uncle", which is French for "my uncle". So when I saw that book, I remembered the episode and it all came together what I could do.
I decided to specifically formulate my dreams for my psychologist to analyze and decode. I wrote out long scenarios beforehand and rewrote the telling of the dream so it would sound as natural as possible. I also decided there would be a few elements that were recurring to develop a subconscious fixation and obsession. The ones I tried to get in every dream were the monacle which I thought was a nice throwback, Frank Jack - the conjoined siamese twins of Frank Black and Jack Black, and an alarm clock that only displayed the time if it was a prime number. I made all of my dreams questionably homoerotic but in a way that you could never really lean towards one or the other.
Raymond, my psychologist, told me that we were spending too much time on my dreams and he wanted to go back to what I had, according to him, falsely diagnosed myself with - a social anxiety disorder.
"I just think I need to meet some new people. I feel like my classes are non-condusive towards that, though. It seems like everyone in my classes goes to them to learn and I just can't identify with that."
"Well, Bertrand, I lead this Asian student organization on campus, I think you could come to the meetings and..."
"Yeah, that's not going to work."
"Why not?"
"We haven't really touched upon this but I can't go to an all Asian event. Well, maybe if the pot stickers were free. No, scratch that, I can't do it."
"And why is that?"
"Well, it's mainly because I dislike Asian people. And I realize that you're Asian well before I said that, but I think since you're a psychologist you can probably look past that."
"You don't identify with your Asian heritage?"
"Well, it depends what you mean by identify. Sometimes I think that if I were born as a Jew in Brooklyn, I would have turned out exactly the same as I did. Except I could probably drive better. And I wouldn't have to tell my boss I have a sunburn when I come back drunk from lunch."
"So you're saying you identify with the Jewish culture instead?"
"When I go to McDonalds, instead of getting a Big Mac, I order the double cheeseburger on the dollar menu and ask them to add the Mac sauce and lettuce.”
"I'm not following you."
"Never mind. I don't want to give you the impression that I dislike all Asian people. I appreciate what they do. Sometimes when I'm riding the train from L.A. to San Diego and it gets to Solana Beach without derailing I think, 'It's a good thing those guys were good at math.' It's like this - every time they reinforce a stereotype like chain smoking or putting stickers on their car that say it's faster than it is or making photo stickers, what the hell is up with the goddamn stickers? It makes it that much harder for people like me to integrate myself into society. I don't consider an all Asian event to be working towards that goal, I think it's working against that goal. Now can we get back to my dream?"
"Okay."
"So Dustin Diamond is having sex with Mario Lopez while Ally Sheedy is furiously masturbating in the corner...she's wearing a monacle by the way..."
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bertrand (november 23, 2005 at 4:29 pm)
