Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,54

she continued.

“So in the dream, I’m at the mall, and Liza is there. I’m no longer in high school and I look different—I’m thin, wearing the perfect outfit, blow-dried hair. I’m flipping through some clothes on a rack when Liza comes over to browse through the same rack, and she starts making small talk about the clothes, the way you might with a stranger. At first I’m pissed, like here we go again—she’s still pretending not to recognize me. Except then I realize that now it’s real—she doesn’t recognize me because I look so good.”

Holly shifted on the couch, covering herself with the blanket. We’ve talked in the past about how she uses that blanket to cover up her body, to hide her size.

“So I play innocent, and we start chatting about the clothes and what our jobs are, and as I’m talking, I see this look of recognition dawning on her face. It’s like she’s trying to reconcile her image of me from twelfth grade—you know, pimply, fat, frizzy hair—with me now. I see her brain connecting the dots, and then she says, ‘Oh my God! Holly! We went to high school together!’”

Holly was starting to laugh now. She was tall and striking, with long chestnut hair and eyes the color of a tropical ocean, and she was still a good forty pounds overweight.

“So,” she continued, “I scrunch up my forehead and say, in the same fake-sweet voice she used to use on me, ‘Wait, I’m so sorry. Do I know you?’ And she says, ‘Of course you know me—it’s Liza! We had geometry and ancient history and French together—remember Ms. Hyatt’s class?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, I had Ms. Hyatt, but, gosh, I don’t remember you. You were in that class?’ And she says, ‘Holly! We lived a block away from each other. I used to see you at the movies and the yogurt place and that one time in Victoria’s Secret by the dressing rooms—’”

Holly laughed some more.

“She’s totally giving away that she did know me all those times. But I say, ‘Wow, how weird, I don’t remember you, but it’s nice to meet you.’ And then my phone rings and it’s her high-school boyfriend telling me to hurry up, we’ll be late for our movie. So I give her that condescending smile she used to give me, and I walk away, leaving her feeling how I felt in high school. And then I realize that the ringing phone is actually my alarm and it was all a dream.”

Later, Holly would call this her “poetic-justice dream,” but to me it was about a common theme that comes up in therapy, and not just in dreams—the theme of exclusion. It’s the fear that we’ll be left out, ignored, shunned, and end up unlovable and alone.

Carl Jung coined the term collective unconscious to refer to the part of the mind that holds ancestral memory, or experience that is common to all humankind. Whereas Freud interpreted dreams on the object level, meaning how the content of the dream related to the dreamer in real life (the cast of characters, the specific situations), in Jungian psychology, dreams are interpreted on the subject level, meaning how they relate to common themes in our collective unconscious.

It’s no surprise that we often dream about our fears. We have a lot of fears.

What are we afraid of?

We are afraid of being hurt. We are afraid of being humiliated. We are afraid of failure and we are afraid of success. We are afraid of being alone and we are afraid of connection. We are afraid to listen to what our hearts are telling us. We are afraid of being unhappy and we are afraid of being too happy (in these dreams, inevitably, we’re punished for our joy). We are afraid of not having our parents’ approval and we are afraid of accepting ourselves for who we really are. We are afraid of bad health and good fortune. We are afraid of our envy and of having too much. We are afraid to have hope for things that we might not get. We are afraid of change and we are afraid of not changing. We are afraid of something happening to our kids, our jobs. We are afraid of not having control and afraid of our own power. We are afraid of how briefly we are alive and how long we will be dead. (We are afraid that after we die, we won’t have mattered.) We are