How a Dream Helps a Psychohistorian Learn about the School Shootings and His Unconscious

As a psychoanalytically trained psychohistorian, I’m quite aware of the value of dreams in probing deeply into the unconscious. Consequently, I recorded the following dream, which I had in my last dream cycle on the morning of January 4, 2013, which I knew to be about the violence manifested in the Connecticut school massacre and my own unconscious. I’ll start with the facts, move on to my associations, the possible meaning of this dream, and conclude with its relationship to the Newtown shootings.

The Dream

I was standing to the side observing the back of a suburban house, which had a small patio and a sliding door with a screen on it. A dark-haired woman who appeared to be in her late 30s or early 40s walked out of the house (it may have been her home) and shot her brother, who was on the small patio. There was a small amount of red directly around the hole where the bullet entered his chest. I did not see him fall. She walked back into the house and to the right where she shot her sister, who was not in my view. I knew that both brother and sister were killed immediately with a single shot to the chest.

I said, “We must get out of here,” to the tall, thin woman

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with long hair, who was my companion and I believe my wife. (When I glanced at her face, she did not look like my wife or anyone I know, although her character, height, and my intense identification with her made me think that she was a younger version of my wife, Geri.) We were running as fast as possible down a very green lawn with a wall at the bottom, the shooter running after us from a stately old house at the top of the hill that appeared quite different from the one in which the shooting took place.

The scene changed, and now we two chased the shooter, who was climbing what appeared to be a white wall of a house, apparently to get to a higher level. She seemed to be getting away, with my companion’s fingertips just barely touching her clothes. In fear and hesitancy, I held back perhaps six to 10 feet behind my almost fearless companion. Then suddenly, she pulled down the shooter and before she even hit the floor (or ground, there’s some uncertainty as to whether it was inside or outside), I rapidly stepped forward and searched through her clothes for her weapon, finding a black Glock pistol in her pocket. I was amazed at how black and comparatively small and heavy it was (it was metal, unlike the real Glocks which are made of high quality plastic) as I took it away with a sigh of relief. I remember thinking, “We need to take her to the police,” and yet I had some hesitation about immediately turning her over to the law. That’s when I awakened.

My Dream Associations

In our dreams, our conscience is free to probe not only what we were thinking as we went to sleep and during the day (what, in psychoanalysis, is called the “day residue”), but also how the dream relates to important issues in the dreamer’s life. A basic principle of dreams is that everything within them is coming out of the consciousness of the dreamer, even if the dreamer would rather disclaim particular thoughts, images, actions, or impulses. The associations always begin with what was on the dreamer’s mind in “falling into the arms of Morpheus” and the residue of earlier events of the days preceding.

When I think of the brother and sister being killed by the shooter in the dream, I associate to my brother and sister, who both died very young, of cancer and in an accident, and who I’ve missed more and more in recent years. This longing does not negate the

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reality of my sometimes having had envious feelings toward my siblings and that as a young boy, murderous impulses toward my brother, who was so much bigger, stronger, and freer from parental controls than I was. The association to the deaths of my siblings was a symbolic connection to the deaths of the children in Newtown.

Earlier in the day, I was torn about writing to the Clio’s Psyche listserv about the validity of and need to do psychobiographical work on mass murderers like Adam Lanza, but I just didn’t have the time to get involved in a discussion of this with colleagues, one of whom appeared to be somewhat dubious of the process. My standing to the side relates to my role on the Clio’s Psyche listserv, which I gradually disengaged from active participation in, although I was sorely tempted to jump back in on many occasions, but I did not.

What is striking is that the black-haired woman shooter in the dream with her black revolver portrayed no emotion whatsoever during her murderous rampage and capture. Our discussion online had to do with how to get at the motivation of suicidal mass murderers who do not leave diaries or other very direct psychological evidence and are no longer available for consultation.

A discomfort with hurting other people and my own murderous impulses is a longstanding part of my makeup and is apparent in my dream. Upon falling asleep, I was reading a Robert Parker crime novel in which the lead character is about to facilitate his friend’s killing of gang members who had grievously wounded the friend. I was struck by the mixture of extremely normal, civilized behavior of the lead character, his Harvard PhD psychologist girlfriend, and the black friend. I found the dialogue to be amusing, but I was troubled by how in the past year I found it relaxing to read detective stories right before I fall asleep. How can this violence be relaxing? Is it that violence in a detective story, TV program or movie, is presented but then safely contained? Does this approach to violence really differ psychologically from that of my serious students who sit in my course, Hitler, the Holocaust, and Genocide? Doesn’t the detective story and video presentation offer a safe outlet for that which we fear most, including our own very

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violence impulses? What about my lingering guilt over the pleasure involved in enjoying this contained violence rather than devoting the time to something more serious?

Running fearfully over the green of nature in my dream is sharply contrasted with the poor children being crowded into classrooms where Adam Lanza could get at them. The very green lawn leading to a wall are reminiscent of the greenery and walls in “All Creatures Great and Small,” a British television program set in Yorkshire involving veterinary care, where the beauty of nature and the emotions are more direct and out-front than in my everyday world.

An even more direct connection to the shootings is that the day prior to the dream, I had been editing some articles on the Newtown shootings, including one in which the author wanted the reader to identify with the psychic struggle that she imagined the shooter went through in denying his own neediness, and a struggle to assert his masculinity as he killed the 20 children, their caretakers, and his mother.

Because of my anger at his terrible act, I did not want to know about Lanza, but in my dream I am reminded that violence is a family affair and that we are part of the same family.

The Continued Relationship of the Dream to the Shootings

The shooter not revealing any emotions reminds me that my strong early response to Adam Lanza was to not want to know about his emotions and motivations because of my frustration at the endless cycle of shooters who gained their “15 minutes of fame”— although I prefer to say, 15 minutes of infamy.

I suspect that the shooter in my dream being a woman is a response to the focus of the article by a woman I had struggled to edit and help the author develop for several days. Violence is very much a family affair, and it is something that women are quite capable of doing. Some colleagues on and off the listserv were wondering to what extent Adam Lanza was acting out the violent fantasies of his mother, who liked to target shoot and who had purchased the guns used to kill her and his 26 other victims. That no motivation is given for the shooter in my dream is in direct contrast to my conscious daytime thought that we always need to probe the moti-

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vation of murderers even though it is very hard, and in so many ways repulsive, work. The image of my companion only holding on to the murderess by her fingertips seems to me a metaphor for how tenuous our control of and understanding of the violence actually is. Yet, then she is pulled down into our hands and I disarm her, just as I would like to disarm violence in our society. My hesitancy about turning her over to the police seems to be both an acceptance of her humanity once she is no longer a threat and a desire to know more before safely locking her away. Perhaps this means that I am now ready to research and attempt to understand more about Lanza’s motivation.

As someone trained in psychoanalysis and dream interpretation, I realize that all parts of the dream represent some aspect of me since it is my unconscious creation. In it are my fears, hopes, wishes, and much else. It reveals both aspects of me and my thoughts and feelings about the horrible events of December 14.

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