A Day In The Life Of An Unknown Dream Interpreter

   When I left for work in the morning, there wasn’t enough cat food left to fill the cat bowl. The bonding between Freddie and me has seemed precarious at times, and not providing enough food might imperil our relationship. “Hurry, Freddie,” I said as I was walking down the steps toward my car, “eat what’s there before the strays get to it.” But Freddie was nowhere in sight.
   I listened to the staff at the prison chat with each other as I made my way through the sequence of locked doors. “My karaoke disc jockey career is really taking off,” a man said. “In a few years I’ll be able to leave this place.” Another man spoke about how he’d shot a buck in the gut and it still was able to run, and he shot at it again. That second time he got it in the spine and it collapsed.
   At the morning meeting with the colleagues I work with, I mentioned I had a new poem but it didn’t make any sense. “Tell it to us,” a senior psychologist said in a tolerant voice.
   I recited:
   “It was molting season and the crow was at perihelion.
   Whither and whenceforth and why?
   How gently, gently the wind doth blow.
   It swoops down on you with a sigh.”
   “That makes sense,“ the psychologist said. “The wind doesn’t want to do that but it does so anyway. That’s a good metaphor about life.”
   It was time for the first interview. My workdays consist of interviewing three prisoners and writing reports about their mental status. If the prisoners want to talk at length then I have to race through the writing of the reports afterwards.
   My first prisoner had committed a forgery. He’d tried to cash a payroll check which an associate had given him. “I was homeless at the time,” the prisoner said. He related how his horrible knees and his horrible headaches interfered with his working. He’d tried to get on disability but the authorities hadn’t cooperated. He said he had horrible mood swings also.
   “Were you in a lasting relationship before you came to prison?” I asked him.
   No. His meth use interfered.
   I asked him if his use of methamphetamine had seemed to harm his health.
   “It’s ruined my teeth,” he said. He opened his mouth to show me he had only two teeth left in his upper jaw. I saw that his lower jaw seemed to possess all its teeth, and briefly wondered about that diverging outcome. “Do you know how hard it is to chew a carrot with just two top teeth?” he asked me.
   My second prisoner had committed aggravated battery. He’d gotten into a fight with his girlfriend and had fractured her arm, and then hadn’t allowed her to go to the hospital until the following morning.
   He was in his twenties and came across as macho and cocky. He tended to answer my questions with short replies and volunteered little information. He seemed at times to resemble a wary, watchful panther. Yet late in the interview his eyes appeared to thaw. His answers became more personal and revealing.
   At the end of the interview I asked him: “Can I joke with you a bit?”
   He nodded.
   “Raise your right hand,” I said, and modeled that behavior by raising my own right hand.
   He raised his hand.
   “I will never come back to prison again,” I said.
   He looked blank. Then he realized he was supposed to repeat those words. He did so.
   “I will be patient and gentle with people,” I said.
   “I will be patient and gentle with people,” he said in a flat voice.
   ‘If someone hits me I will turn the other cheek,” I said.
   He repeated those words also.
   As we were getting up to leave my office, he said, “Actually, I don’t want to come back to prison.” Was he thereby indicating he had no intention of keeping the latter two goals?
   My third prisoner was a sex offender. He’d molested the nine year old daughter of his live-in girlfriend. He spoke about that crime. “Something about it didn’t feel right and so I stopped doing it,” he said in a self-congratulatory voice. “I need therapy to help me find out why I did it in the first place.”
   I wrote the reports. They didn’t require significant mental effort. I said the first prisoner needed case management to help him resolve problems across a wide continuum of risk factors. The second prisoner could benefit from an anger management group. The third prisoner should receive a sex offender treatment program. As well, I gave that third prisoner a diagnosis of pedophilia.
   As I was leaving for the day, a woman who had been in the staff meeting had a comment to make to me. “Your poem didn’t make any sense,” she said.
   I checked my stocks after I’d gotten home. They market had retreated and they mostly were down. Then I checked my retirement fund even though there are years left before I can retire. Perhaps by some miracle it had gone contrary to the market? No, it was down as well. “Money is a transitory commodity which is meaningless in the larger context of the soul,” I said in an attempt at consoling myself.
   I went to an aerobics class at the YMCA in the evening. I’m a newcomer there, and some of the people in that class have been attending it for years. I listened to them talk sociably with each other before the workout started. No one spoke to me, but that’s all right. The routines began of moving and jumping around to music, and my body put up some resistance. Then it stopped hurting. “Live forever,” something inside me seemed to whisper to me during the exercising. But I left the class 15 minutes before it was over. They were getting out the mats for the abdominal exercises, and my abs are hopelessly weak. I realized that if I stayed and mostly just lay on my back and contemplated the ceiling, no one would be offended. Yet I couldn’t stop myself from walking out of the class.
   Before going into the locker room I stopped to watch the television in the recreation room. There was a contest taking place involving several scantily dressed women. The contestant who received the loudest yells and applause would win the cash prize. Some teenage boys were watching the program, and one of them glanced at me. “Reminds you of the good old days?” he asked, and he and his friends laughed.
   From the YMCA I visited my girlfriend. She’s generously offered to do my laundry, and I brought her some dirty clothes. She took the underwear I’d brought and mentioned she was going to wash it with a blouse her rat had peed on. I had a momentary qualm about that blouse being mixed with my underwear but then suppressed it. When I’d had to do my own laundry I’d wait five or six weeks until I absolutely was forced to go to the crowded, dirty laundromat where the few functional driers might be in use when I needed them.
   She suggested I give her rat some chocolate. I took a square of it and held it between the bars. I was holding onto the very end of the chocolate and my fingers were safely outside the rat’s cage. The rat sniffed from a few inches away and then made a sudden lunge at the food. I’ve seen it do that before, yet when it happened I involuntarily screamed.
   At home I thought about some of the prisoners’ vulnerabilities to drugs. Then I opened a science magazine and turned to an article about addiction. I tried to understand what I read. Dopamine is released from its storage sites by drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine. The users like that dopamine. It’s why addiction happens. But what might cause dopamine to be released without drug use? One cause is if a social interaction leads to an unexpected pleasure. In that way learning occurs in relation to significant “signals.” It’s hard to fool dopamine, however. The learning must be life-enhancing. There were some mathematics in the article and they were formidable to me. The value of an expected reward can be calculated, including by a discounting factor which reduces the value of delayed rewards, assuming exponential discounting. I seemed to grasp that the calculation of rewards could be a helpful part of drug treatment. Or had I read the article incorrectly?
   I wished I were smarter.
   I put the magazine down and my thoughts turned to my original approach to interpreting dreams. People still weren’t paying any attention to it. Why hadn’t the articles I’d published attracted the interest of other dream theoreticians? Why hadn’t the renowned persons I’d contacted expressed more than a polite dismissal of my dream interpretation process?
   What could I do to wake society up?
   The conventional ways had failed. What was a good fallback strategy? I resolved that whatever it might be, it wouldn’t lead to any harmful consequences for those whose lives it touched.
   No insights about that resolution of the problem occurred to me.
   But my dreams have more resources available to them than I consciously possess. Perhaps a dream of mine would have an answer.
   I checked to make sure Freddie had food. “Goodnight, Freddie,” I said.

dangollub@aol.com