158 / The Dream

Athena revealing Ithaca to Ulysses by Guiseppe Bottani, c18th

I was woken up by a dream, but — as with most dreams — I wasn’t aware I had been sleeping.

This was back in January and things were good. I had recently turned 40, I was in a loving relationship, I had a fulfilling, prestigious job and I was starting to work on my book; my social life was full and I was healthy.

But I was sleeping.

The dream went like this: I am walking into a train station — not a specific one, but it was British; it has a long concourse with gates to the platforms at the end; overhead screens display a parade of destinations.

I don’t need to look at the screens though: I know what platform I am heading towards, I know what train to catch. I am perfectly on time.

As I walk along the concourse, I am approached by a young woman. She says: “Hey! Can I talk to you for a second?” I seem to remember her being quite pretty, with short hair, but there is something threatening, something devilish about her.

I reply in the same, breezy way you wave off a charity mugger: “I’ve got a train to catch, sorry.”

But she walks alongside me: “No come on, let’s have a chat.” She is smiling, but I instinctively do not trust her friendliness.

A little less breezy this time: “Like I said, I’m getting on a train.”

The woman grabs the sleeve of my coat, still smiling: “It’ll be fun!”

I am distressed now: “If you don’t let go of me I’m going to report you to security!”

“OK then”, she grins, putting her arm through mine, “let’s go!”

I am as perturbed as I would be, were this happening in real life, and I march her across the concourse in the dream-logic direction of the security desk. I glance to my right and see, to my astonishment, another man, about my age, also with a woman with her arms through his. We exchange knowing looks of recognition.

Behind a desk sits an older stout woman in the generic dream-uniform of a security official.

I find my voice, nervous this delay will make me miss my train: “Excuse me, this woman has grabbed onto me and she’s not letting me go.” I can’t quite believe the words as they’re coming out of my mouth and I’m unsure if the security officer will believe them either.

She lets out a wearisome sigh: “This happens all the time. Let him go please.”

The woman next to me is now making protestations, as if I had grabbed onto her, but no-one is convinced. Suddenly she is gone, and I am alone.

And then I wake up.

Yep, that’s it. The dream that would change everything.

✹

I have spent a lot of this year replaying that dream, turning it around in my head like a mental Rubik’s Cube, trying to unlock its meaning.

As I wrote back in letter #156, a therapist told me some years ago that dreams set in travel hubs where your journey is thwarted are signs that your subconscious is frustrated with your life.

That’s how I knew to take the dream seriously, that it contained a message.

A.I. chatbots are, surprisingly or not, quite good at dream analysis (yes, I’ve updated my A.I. declaration). The trick is two-fold: firstly, prime the LLM to draw from the published works of Freud, Jung and Joseph Campbell (essential for mythological symbolism); secondly, don’t take what it spits out as a definitive answer, just a starting point.

I repeated my dream to both ChatGPT and Claude at various points over the spring. They both ‘agreed’ on the identity of the mysterious woman.

Here’s what ChatGPT said:
“This woman appears as an aspect of the Anima: Jung’s term for the inner feminine in a man’s psyche. She is not the “ideal” Anima figure here (like a muse or guide), but a Shadow Anima or trickster-Anima—a disruptive, chaotic feminine force. Her flirtatious persistence, laughter, and mocking tone give her the flavor of a Siren or Temptress, but also the Trickster.”

And Claude:
"She's attractive and confident but also intrusive and manipulative - this suggests she might represent an aspect of your anima (Jung's term for the feminine aspect of the male psyche) that's both alluring and potentially destructive."

Jung said that we each have a ‘soul image’, an archetype of our subconscious that is, curiously, the opposite to our own gender (so women, you possess a masculine ‘Animus’.)

ChatGPT’s ‘interpretation’ was that my Anima, in this threatening and disruptive form, was a test: my subconscious wanted to know if I was ready for the journey ahead, if I was ready to get on the train. The fact that I took the woman to a figure of authority and that she disappeared, demonstrated that I had passed the test: I was ready to board the train.

✹

That satisfied me for a few weeks, until my friend Guy — who, I feel compelled to tell you, is a human being — suggested a different interpretation.

What if the train I was so confidently striding towards was the wrong destination? Trains, after all, symbolically suggest a very pre-determined, laid-out path: there is no freedom on a train, you go where the tracks go. In metaphorical dream-logic, did it represent the predictable path, the path pre-designed by society: marriage, mortgage, money?

In this interpretation, my Anima’s tricks are not meant to betray me from my path, but to stop me getting on the wrong one. She’s not disrupting me, she’s saving me; teasing me, intriguing me, as if to say: “Before you step onto that train, don’t you want to see if there’s anything else you want to do instead?”

I like this interpretation much better.

I have since become fascinated by the idea I might have this powerful feminine energy in me, wise but also mischievous; I’ve had some fascinating encounters with her this year, which deserve their own letter.

But, waking up on that January morning, I knew none of this. All I knew was that I’d received a message I couldn’t ignore, and I had an awful decision to make.

Until another Sunday soon,