The interpretation of dreams, according to Freud, is meant to teach us about individual dreamers’ states of mind, not about the people and things that populate our fantasy lives; those are symbols. Teeth, swimming pools, nuns —they stand in for basic human desires and anxieties. When Sheila Heti, a novelist in Toronto, learned that her friend Margaux had recently dreamed about shopping for Tupperware with Hillary Clinton, however, she began to wonder: what if the recurrences of Presidential candidates in people’s dreams were meaningful in the aggregate? “I like Carl Jung and the idea of the collective unconscious,” Heti said the other day. Last month, she established a website, IdreamofHillary?IdreamofBarack.com, inviting strangers to submit candidate-related dreams. She calls her project “the world’s first metaphysical poll on the Democratic contenders.” .A composite dreamland Hillary might look something like this: she wears bad perfume but good lipstick, has great skin, is often hungry (she likes spareribs) but has bad table manners, and, when doing chores (say, cleaning the attic), is fun to be around. Pineapples, for some reason, turn up in two separate Clinton dreams, and the Clinton campaign is tough to please. (“They started requesting all sorts of food that we don’t serve, like baked potatoes, bouillabaisse, and ‘English tea squares.’ ”) The Obama dream figure that emerges is not as vivid: a teacher, eight feet tall, with a foul mouth, smoker. Obama dreamers also appear to be more international. A Saudi woman imagined he was reading a bedtime story to her (classic father-figure role), and a lawyer from Zimbabwe dreamed of being chased by him (the pursuit of justice).Nightmares are few and largely partisan. (A Baptist man sees Americans streaming into Mexico and realises that Clinton has won.) Two prominent and predictable themes — sex and death — are perhaps not worth dwelling on, other than to point out that Obama is not the only one whose safety people worry about, nor is he the sole object of romantic desire. Drugs, too, are a common topic. “Hillary Clinton came to my apartment, smoked a bowl with me and a couple [of] friends, then she gave me an iPhone,” an Obama supporter dreamed. “We walked around Seattle for a while. I woke up with a strange feeling of satisfaction that it would be O.K. if she wins.”Heti had her own candidate dream, about Obama, a few nights after launching the site, although she hasn’t posted it. “We were at the mall or something, and he professed a desire to have an affair with me,” she said, and described a tortured process of indecision. “But I have a boyfriend. But then I thought maybe I ought to, because it’s Barack Obama, and how often do these opportunities come about? Then the dream took another path, and I ended up a prisoner in the basement.” Excerpted from Ben McGrath’s ‘Dream on’ in The New Yorker, March 10
