Petschauer’s Dream

I appreciate Professor Petschauer’s willingness to share this remarkable dream and his personal associations to it. Since I believe the dreamer is always in the best position to understand the meanings of his or her dream, I don’t want to take anything away from Petschauer’s detailed discussion of his dream’s psychohistorical roots. My only contribution to his reflections is to continue exploring the question: Why did this dream come now? The immediate answer seems to be, because of the impending colonoscopy. The anxieties surrounding that invasive medical procedure expressed themselves symbolically in the fantasy of the concentration camp. The interpretation of the dream leads Petschauer back to troubling childhood memories and unresolved

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emotional difficulties with his father.

I wonder, however, about the dream’s orientation towards the future, and specifically toward Petschauer’s relationship with the health care system. To make it clear that I’m offering my own projections rather than a detached, authoritative pronouncement about the dream, let me put it this way: if I had this dream, I would wonder about its anticipation of my future, as I get older, my body becomes more prone to illness and injury, and I become increasingly subjected to the power of medical professionals. I can easily imagine that future as one that feels like being a prisoner in a concentration camp: a powerless individual in a depersonalizing environment, surrounded by strangers in uniforms, enmeshed in a faceless bureaucracy, plagued by concerns about cleanliness and pollution, with the conditions of my life and death determined by ideological forces that are out of control. If I were about to have a colonoscopy, I suspect these anticipatory fears of the health care system would be activated and would express themselves in my dreams. The fact that the dream draws upon concentration camp imagery would, for me, be an invitation not only to look back to early family history, but also forward to what awaits me in the final stages of my life cycle.

Ultimately, I share Petschauer’s feeling that the dream provides some hope for the resolution of these fears (another of my dreamwork axioms: dreams never come simply to tell us we’re stuck with a problem; dreams almost always provide images of possibility, change, and hope). The facts that the dreamer finds water to clean himself and is able to walk out of the camp on his own power indicate a potential to overcome the oppressive forces threatening to destroy him. One last question, though—is the dream suggesting that escape from oppression is only possible by becoming an oppressor oneself? Or at least a collaborator with oppression? That’s a question I would carry with me and reflect on in connection with future dreams.

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