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All Fall Down

Ellen and I were walking towards the Grassmarket down the steep stairs of the Vennel with my brother, Andrew, and his girlfriend. It was dark and, when Andrew started to run ahead, I called after him to be careful or else he'd fall. Naturally, he tripped quite spectacularly, landing forehead-first on a step several feet below. When he got up, he was bleeding from a cut in his head, but laughing.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

Once, when Andrew was three and I was 14, my girlfriend and I were walking with him down a steep lane in Carnock. He ran ahead, tripped and launched himself down the slope, hitting the ground with his face. Momentum carried his little legs over his head and he ended up lying on his back, wailing and sobbing and bleeding.

When I was in second year at university, I was walking down the Vennel with my flatmate, Stephen Magee, on our way home from the pub. About halfway down the steps, Stephen, having unaccountably decided to start running, tripped and fell, ripping his jeans and cutting his knee. He took it better than Andrew had done, being considerably older and slightly anaesthetised by drink.

The dream uses material from both of those events, but I'm not at all clear why. The only similarity between each situation is that, in each case, I had to look at some idiot falling over because they were running.

For the benefit of my extensive foreign readership, here is a picture of the Vennel.

Plates of Clay

I had made a series of postage-stamp sized etching plates, each with a stylised drawing of an animal on it. The drawings of a gorilla and a rhinoceros were particularly excellent, I thought, and I planned to print the 20 or so plates on a single sheet of paper. However, when I took the plates to the stripping tank, which contains chemicals that remove the hard ground from the plates prior to printing, I discovered that, instead of using zinc or copper to make the plates, I had foolishly used clay. I watched with disappointment and dismay as they crumbled into sludge.

Alfons, the master etcher in the workshop, noted my error and said that, even if they had survived the stripping process, my clay plates would have been crushed by the printing press.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

Most dream locations are mystifyingly inaccurate -- "I was in my living room, but the furniture was from my old classroom and then I left the room, but found myself in a hotel in Kelty" -- but whenever I dream about the printmakers workshop, where I go most weeks in the hope of one day printing something that doesn't look like it was made in an art therapy class for head injury victims, the surroundings are exactly as they are in real life.

Last Tuesday, a plate that I had hoped would be quite successful turned out to be quite unbelievably bad. What a terrible print it made! Something awful had gone wrong at some stage in the process. In fact, whatever I had done wrong was so inexplicable that not even Alfons, who has been etching since he was six months old, I think, could work out what had happened or rectify the problem.

Freud might focus on the animal motif and take the opportunity to explain his belief that animals are common symbols of sexual matters, "due in no small measure to the openness with which they display their genitalia and their sexual functions to the curious young child" (this theory is developed in his case history of Little Hans, a young boy who was terrified of horses and whose mother had told him "I'll tell Dr A. to come and he'll cut off your widdler"), and note that my dream concerns something that should be hard turning out to be soft, but I'm sure that I wouldn't want to discuss that any further. Freud may be a genius, but he has a mind like a sewer.

An Examination

In a large room with lots of other people, Ellen and I were sitting an exam to determine whether we could go to Oxford or Cambridge. The paper consisted of a series of questions that required two or three-line answers, so it felt more like filling in a job application than sitting an exam. Everything seemed to be going well until I came to the last question, which was "To what do you attribute the mass hysteria caused by Orson Welles's War of the Worlds radio broadcast?" I paused for a long time, trying to come up with a form of words that would enable me to articulate all of the various reasons why thousands of people across America were apparently so completely taken in by a fake news announcement during a hammy radio show. I'm reasonably aware of the complex set of social and historical circumstances that surround the event so it was quite difficult to condense everything into a sentence that would fit the space available to me. Finally, confident that I had come up with something appropriate, I carefully wrote: "Martian moon-landings".

Notes for Freudian Analysis

Being a genius, Freud is quite clear on the subject of examination dreams. "We dream of our matriculation . whenever we fear that we may be punished by some unpleasant result because we have done something carelessly or wrongly". I can't think what I might have done wrongly or carelessly recently, I swear. Certainly nothing that I should be punished for. Wilhelm Stekel, who was the first to interpret the matriculation dream, has another theory, maintaining that this kind of dream invariably refers to sexual experiences and sexual maturity. Freud notes, obliquely, "This has frequently been confirmed in my experience."

However, I have no idea what either of them are talking about.

The Black Dog Theory

Noam Chomsky was sitting in the third row of a cinema in Dundee, taking questions after a talk that he had given. I'm horribly embarrassed to have to admit that I was sitting in his lap. I asked, "What about the countries that people tend to call 'failed states'?"

I felt very proud to have phrased my question in that way and was very pleased with myself when Chomsky nodded and said, "I'm glad you said 'tend to call' because, actually, they're not failed states but states that have been failed. Worse, they've been ruined by us. I call them top-sliced states."

Chomsky illustrated his theory by going to an easel at the front of the cinema and drawing a large picture of a three-storey shack with a tree in the front garden overhanging a dark pit. He quickly sketched a black dog leaping out of the pit to bite the leg of a man who had been hanged in the tree. He then asked if any of us could see what was wrong with the picture. Many people made suggestions, but none of them mentioned the dog or the hanged man until someone in one of the back rows said, "A black dog biting a hanged man is the symbol of the 14th cycle of rebirth."

"Yes," said Chomsky, "I call this my black dog theory."

Later -- I don't know whether it was part of this dream or a new dream -- I was trying to get my dad interested in the idea of online political discussion forums, which I was sure he'd enjoy taking part in. I told him about a non-partisan one where people from all the pro-independence parties debated various strategies for Scottish independence. It was called Scotfree.com.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

The night before I had this dream, Ellen and I went to Dundee to see the premiere of a film called Blinded, which someone Ellen has worked with had directed. It has only two locations: an old farm house and a dark pit of sucking mud in a nearby wood. Depending on personal taste, that might not sound too promising, but it was very good. There are no dogs in it, but there are a few corpses, although no-one gets hanged.

Earlier that day, I'd read a transcript of a studio discussion between Andrew Marr, who is loathsome, and Noam Chomsky, who is not.

Chomsky would never use a phrase like "top-sliced states."

Scotfree.com is a great name for an independence-centred website, but nobody is using the domain name yet.