Courteous subconscious
Some other night I had a dream. I was talking to a man about flowers. In the dream, both he and I knew that we were actually talking about his penis. Both he and I knew that it was customary in dreams to be polite and avoid direct reference to someone else’s genitals. Or one’s own. Or genitals period.
After having exchanged a few pleasantries about flowers with said (faceless) man, I walked my way, delighted, pondering over the significance of symbolic language and imagination in dreams. Still in the dream. Actually, my dreaming self thought, that’s the whole point of all this symbolism: Behaving in a polite and civilized manner in dreams. It’s not that the symbols represent something that has a particular personal meaning to you, or express a suppressed desire (a.k.a sex); rather, symbols in dreams only represent something that one does not publicly talk about or publicly (!) visualize in Dream Society. The subconscious is just a huge polite society – that’s all there is to it.
And then I woke up into reality. Next to a flower. Of course.