Dream Interpretation

This morning, we were all sitting around the breakfast table enjoying pancakes and discussing those of our most recent dreams as we could recall.

When it got to my turn, I told my family about the dream I had this early morning in which I was a nurse in a hospital ward which cared for babies. I had one patient in particular who concerned me greatly. He was an older baby, perhaps close on to a year old, who was enormously obese and had yet to learn to walk.



His father, an absolute giant of a man who was so huge he was unable to walk himself, berated me every time I entered his son's room for his daily physical therapy. As I hauled the child to his pudgy feet and encouraged him to at least TRY to balance upright, the father would scowl and humph from the corner of the room. "The kid doesn't NEED to learn to walk" the blob would growl at me, "I don't walk, and I get around just fine." The father DID get around just fine, in fact; he made his way through the world in a wheelchair-like contraption that actually turned him sideways so he could fit through doors.


His son, too, didn't seem to mind not walking. He would roll happily where ever he felt he wanted to be. The effect reminded me a great deal of Violet Beauregarde being rolled to the juicing room after expanding to a giant blueberry. The baby didn't seem to mind my coming every day to teach him to be bi-pedal, though; he was happily rolling around in his crib, and when I opened the door he stopped, his face splitting into an enormous, fleshy smile he giggled gaily and rolled toward me. I hoisted him from his crib and helped him upright where he wavered between delight at the exercise and frustration that he couldn't maintain the posture by himself.

That's pretty much all I remember of the dream. When I told my family the story, though, my husband had an immediate and intriguing interpretation, which led me to post this here for you. He said that the story speaks to my opinion of the state of our educational system and my own place in it: the indulged child rendered incapacitated by guardians (whether they be parents specifically or "the system" in general) which expects nothing of him but who, despite all that, really WANTS to learn: the frustration I feel at not being able to actually DO my job, hindered by the powers-that-be who won't offer up the chance for me to show how much good I can really do: and the excitement and joy I felt at the excitement and joy the baby showed when I came in the door echoing the eagerness I'm keeping contained at the thought of actually being able to get into a classroom, where I can see to the care and keeping of my own "babies."

It's not such a stretch. Freud he's not, but I think my husband's got a good case for his interpretation of my dream.