I was walking through a suburb of a town that I didn't know very well, on my way to a funeral. Nearing the crematorium, I realised that everyone else on the crowded street was also going there. The person who had died was clearly very highly thought of. As I entered the wooded grounds of the crematorium, I saw my mum entering through another gate so I went through the crowd to meet her and we went into the building together.
When we went inside, I became aware that this was Giuseppe Verdi's funeral. That was why so many people had come -- everyone knows who Verdi is!
I was seated at the back of an annexe just off the main hall and couldn't see much of the service. Luckily, there were lots of books along the walls, so I took down an encyclopaedia and started to read about William Makepeace Thackeray.
Notes for Freudian Analysis
Sue, an ex-colleague of mine, died a couple of weeks ago. Her funeral was in a crematorium very like the building in my dream. She had had many friends and there was a remarkable number of people there, so many that some had to sit in a small chapel off the main room and others had to stand in the hallway outside. She left the Parliament a few years ago, but I had seen her since, most recently when Ellen and I went to visit her in a hospice a week or so before she died.
Ellen was playing in the orchestra for a performance of Aida last week and, the night I had the dream, I had gone to see it with my mum and dad. I remember reading in the programme that thousands of people turned out for Verdi's funeral in 1901.
In the foyer, before the performance, I met my editor, Henrietta, who I'd last spoken to at Sue's funeral. Also, one of the Ethiopian slaves was played by a colleague of mine, Alison, who had been at the funeral as well.
Three years ago, after I first went to the opera -- also because Ellen was in the orchestra, of course -- I had a dream in which I met Sue at a performance of an opera that was based on her social policy book, Making It Work: Women, Change and Challenge in the 90s. Whereas her book discussed the progress that feminism had made so far, the opera was about a shadowy Victorian murderer who menaced the predominantly female cast and killed them one by one. Sue was unhappy about the liberties that had been taken with her text.
I don't think that this sheds any light on my dream (or the other funeral-themed dream on this blog), but I'll include it here anyway. In 1896, Freud had a dream after his father's funeral in which he found himself in the barbershop that he visited every day and noticed a sign that read, "You are requested to close the eyes." Being a genius, he was able to supply the following analysis: "On the day of the funeral I was kept waiting and therefore arrived a little late at the house of mourning. At that time my family was displeased with me because I had arranged for the funeral to be quiet and simple, which they later agreed was quite justified. They were also somewhat offended by my lateness. The sentence on the sign has a double meaning: one should do one's duty to the dead (an apology as though I had not done it and were in need of leniency), and the actual duty itself. The dream thus stems from the inclination to self-reproach that regularly sets in among survivors."