Shaded areas represent parts of the psyche that are bad

I was undergoing psychoanalysis by a therapist. The method was this: one would draw a circle and make a grid within it. The circle represented the psyche and the gridwork divided your unconscious self into all the areas that had been mapped out by Science. Through testing, analysis and verification, one could shade in a part of the gridded area, marking off all areas on the map which were 'bad'.

When my session was finished, the map was almost entirely shaded in.

"My god," said the therapist when my map was complete, "how did your parents raise you?"

EDITOR'S NOTE

That crisp grid in a circle looked familiar to me, but this dream's from the 1990s--it took a while to dredge up. Survivors of the early days of personal computing all had the nagging fear that today a vital disk would turn out to have a bad sector. Goodbye, data! Anyway, as a survivor of the Diskflopalypse, I find it funny. But who's the joke on? Is it...

• Warning of serious problems requiring therapy? But that's not the tone.
• Mocking a perfectionist conscious? "Yeah, yeah, you're hopeless."
• Saying "Yep, now it's official--your family really is as rotten at you thought!"
• Saying "Therapists' tools and tests look impressive, but... come on!"

SOURCE: Dream Scene Magazine, a zine by Dan Holzner, (final issue 1996). Unpaged; c.30 pages in. Holzner's title. Dreamer's name withheld; Anonymous #43 added for World Dream Bank indexing.

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