In this chapter, only two night dreams are presented and interpreted; they are rather complex and rich in details and meanings. Both depict the possible colonization of subjectivity happening through identity with certain models of being: models that used to function as symbolic, even archetypal représentations collectives, but here appear as Disneyized simulacra. While they unveil some dark, dehumanizing aspects of the ImCon, it is also possible to discern a rather ironic cultural critique in them: they criticize the whole of consumerist culture through its icon, Disney. As the Disney Epcot logo ran many years ago, “If we can dream it, we can do it”.
10.1 A Reoccurring Nightmare: Evil (or, Disneyization by Walt Disney Himself)
This dream kept happening—I kept going to Epcot at Disney and going into this castle, in the Japan part of the park. You’d go up an elevator, then into this “celebrity deathmatch” show, fight 7 people, and if you won you could pick a celebrity or a normal person to give you a tour of the castle. I wanted to go back and save this celebrity because I kept having the dream, and finally I went back and did with one of my friends—even though just a few dreams ago I was captured by Walt Disney himself, and forced to do Simba’s voice in The Lion King and Koda in Brother Bear. My friend took pictures of the castle after we left—it was black bats and a black aura all around it that only her camera could see. It made me terrified—then I woke up.
In the interpretation that follows, the oneiric narrative is made more linear. In fact we have more than one dream here: the first dream is with Walt Disney and the movie characters (which he had “a few dreams ago”), and then the reoccurring dreams. Recurring dreams usually reveal a very important problem, which the unconscious “presses” continually upon the ego, forcing him to become conscious of it. According to Jung , they happen particularly in youth; often they are very impressive, highly emotional dreams “which convince one that they ‘must surely have a meaning’” (Jung, CW8, §536).1
Such meaning is centered on the dream’s main theme or problem. At a first glance, its theme does not seem clear at all. However, considering that he is a teenage male, and that the symbols and symbolic meanings employed by his dreams are more or less typical, it seems that the dream problem is related to rites of passage, or puberty rites: the coming-of-age narratives and myths that symbolize the process of becoming a man, an adult. Thus behind these dreams and their emotional and frightening character is the telos of individuation of the unconscious libido, which tries to impulse him into adulthood. But what elements in the dreams would allow us to affirm such? First, the Disney movies mentioned: Lion King and Brother Bear are essentially coming-of-age stories; their main characters, Simba (a cub) and Kenai (an Indian Inuit boy turned young bear), undergo “archetypal”—albeit thoroughly Disneyified—rites of passage. And, second, the fight (“deathmatch”), which involves saving someone, would correspond to the typical deadly battles and tasks, integral parts of such rites, that the initiated (hero) has to endure.
Therefore, the main idea for interpretation is that these dreams depict a general colonization of the cultural forms under which such rites originally appeared: the représentations collectives—archetypal narratives, mythological models, and rituals—are replaced by simulacra fabricated through imagineering. That is, the typical process of Disneyization that happens culturally—and institutes a totalizing imaginary—here materializes in the dreamer’s psyche.
Thus, to understand the dreams we need a few words on such type of rite. The rite of passage, and especially the puberty rite, is a principal rite of initiation. According to Vierne (1987), it is a commencement of a state that must lead the human being into maturity; “an education [Bildung], that is above all a modification of the ontological statut of the subject into an initiated being” (pp. 7–8). As Eliade (1959, pp. 10ff) puts it, it consists in “an ontological mutation of the existential regime (…). Initiation introduces the neophyte in the human community and in the world of spiritual values at once”. Accordingly, in primitive societies, the life of the subject and the community wholly depended upon such rites; they condensed their représentations collectives, and for many tribes were simply the most important ceremonies (Campbell, 1997, p. 82), a fundamental part of their symbolico-religious imaginaries.
Eliade (1959) mentions a structural solidarité between and within all forms of initiation and rites of passage, which reflects the fact that they are archetypal formations, translated into symbolic rituals that are exceedingly charged emotionally. Such rites typically involve the myth of the hero: the hero is the symbol (the archetypal model with prescribed actions) for the emancipation from the father and mother imagos, from the unconscious world of childhood, and initiation into the sociocultural and spiritual world. It is a second birth, a new, complete life: a spiritual, symbolic, and social life—thus in complete connection with the “world of dreams”, altjeringa (Campbell, 1997; the term comes from the Australian Aranda tribe), the eternal, transcendental world (i.e., the collective unconscious). Its symbols and numen translate culturally into drastic and complicated ceremonies, fights, and quests—sometimes of a very gruesome and possibly deadly nature—which the child has to overcome just like the hero did, that is, identified with the hero symbol. If the child succeeds, he receives a name (a social identity) and becomes an adult human being, fully integrated in the adult social world, but also, and most importantly, with the spiritual, transcendent world, which is the basis of life.
Now we can proceed with the interpretation proper. In the first scene, the dreamer is captured by Walt Disney himself. Staying first with the image of Walt, it is possible to interpret it positively and negatively. Positively, he would represent the adult or elder, the hugely successful, self-made businessman; in a capitalist culture, he would represent the adult model the dreamer should identify with. This model-symbol coerces him into identifying with the characters that do undergo the rite of passage and apparently become adults. So Disney would personify an attempt of the unconscious to “force” the dreamer into becoming an adult.2
However, the details, the whole emotional atmosphere, and the end of this dream point to a rather negative interpretation. First, in the global imaginary, Disney is by no means just an adult model; he represents as much a commodity-sign, a manufactured myth , as his characters.3 Besides embodying the Great Capitalist, he represents the creator of a dream-world which is clearly infantilizing, dehumanizing, and totalitarian. In sum, he personifies—like no one else—the imaginary of consumption as a totalizing subjectivation force. And that is why and how the dream employs his image: he captures the dreamer, forcing him to become his creature, another Disney character, a commodity . Ironically, the dream employs Walt Disney himself as a symbol of forceful Disneyification.
Thus, the “passage” here is not into adulthood: it is the danger of pure commodification. That appears as the dreamer being forced to do Simba’s and Koda’s voices. As argued, these movie characters (and their respective movies) appear as the surrogate représentations collectives for the initiation into adulthood. In the dream, it is Disney’s fantasy world, its “myths” and rites—as commodity-narratives—that determine the social imaginary’s rites of passage, forcing its models upon the dreamer. Again, these models pertain to an order of simulation. Both movies employ narratives from fairy tales and typical hero myths, and Lion King uses themes from biblical tales (Joseph and Moses). However, they do not refer back to any of these referents; they become the referent, erasing any original—simulacra that replace symbolic models.
Amplifying both movies and their characters would be too long and involve too many details. Instead, the interpretation can be limited to what the dream symbolizes as two of the main effects of such models. If the original rites of passage created, through the symbol, a transformation of the purely instinctual, infantile state into full human adulthood, here the Disney characters represent the opposite: infantilization and dehumanization.
Symbolically, animals usually represent the instincts. Thus, in the dream, the dreamer is forced to identify with childish lion and bear images. But more than that, Brother Bear starts with a regression to a state of animality; the hero, the “primitive” human (Kenai), is transformed into a bear. He then undergoes the passage, becoming adult, yet remains a bear. Koda, the one that appears in the dream, in fact is not the hero but the baby bear that does not grow—he stays attached to his (dead) mother.4 Therefore they represent a regression, or reversal, into infantilized, animal instinct. Beyond that, such forceful identification means dehumanization in the sense that the dreamer is ontologically transformed into a commodity-simulacrum, a Disney product. It is not even a persona: what remains of him is only the voice, fabricated, infantilized; like Echo in the Narcissus myth, he is condemned to reproduce the discourse of the commodity, of the Disney imaginary, as a mere image. The dream implies that such “evil” rite means not adulthood but mimesis with the ImCon —replicating its simulacra and becoming a virtual screen.
That prospect sets the emotional tone for the recurring dreams, which take place in Walt Disney World. The initial scenery, mixing Epcot, Japan, and castle, is the typical Disney dream-world: hybridized, dedifferentiated, a hyperreal bricolage of cultures, imaginaries, and themes—a commodified fairy tale, in lieu of the symbolic “world of dreams” of primitive rites of passage. The castle actually reminds one of fairy tales, the hero and his quests (save the princess, redeem her and himself, become the king, etc.); it is a symbol linked to rites of passage. But why Japan? It might represent symbolically the antithesis, the opposite Eastern culture, with a traditional history that celebrated and valued its initiatory rites.5 Seen together with the castle image, it is an attempt of the unconscious to search for a different cultural model of rite, a different imaginary. At the same time, it shows that all old traditions and old imaginaries have been Disneyized; all that is left are simulacra: they are part of Epcot, the prototype of a future society, a utopic self-enclosed world6 in which virtually everything is ruled by hi-tech consumption—the perfect embodiment of its techno-imaginary.
However, under the contemporary ImCon , instead of an archetypal pattern, it is “celebrity deathmatch”—a hyperreal television show—that stands as the simulacrum of ordeal. Its semiotic mood of death is made more thrilling: the dreamer has to fight celebrities , in order to save another celebrity—a spectacle to die for. But why does the dream employ such image? In the imaginary, the celebrity is the great commodity-sign that personifies a simulacrum of individuality: a representational identikit with codified referents for lifestyle, worldview, sexuality, creativity, political position, and so on. Its numen and fascination lie in the visibility, fame, and power it promises. As such, it stands among the ImCon’s most coveted, desired commodities —the image of a unique individual permanently fulfilling a plethora of consumption dreams. Such fetish establishes their role in the ImCon pantheon: veneration and admiration of celebrities is one prevalent practice of consumer culture (Marshall, 1997; Turner, 2004); their worship, an important part of its liturgies. Being manufactured and managed as spectacles by what has been called the celebrity industry (mainly PR, Hollywood, and mass media), they, just like the Disney characters before, represent creatures of imagineering that replace mythological models and symbols. As Kellner (2003) puts it: “Celebrities are the icons of media culture, the gods and goddesses of everyday life” (p. 4; e.a.). To sum it up, in the dream the celebrities replace the mythic hero model, with which the dreamer has to identify—a commodified image of self—a simulacrum.The novice for initiation is called upon (…) to submit to the ordeal. He must be willing to experience this trial without hope of success. In fact, he must be prepared to die; and though the token of his ordeal may be mild (…) or agonizing (…), the purpose remains always the same: To create the symbolic mood of death from which may spring the symbolic mood of rebirth. (Henderson, 1964, pp. 131–132; e.a.)
As for the “celebrity deathmatch”, it is an MTV show, an animation with clay characters that depicts celebrities fighting each other in a wrestling ring, in which at least one always dies gruesomely. Basically, it is a spectacle of commodified hyperviolence; it simply never creates anything but grisly, extremely bloody violence and death, in the celebration of which the ephemeral heroes of consumption society consume themselves.
Also like creatures of imagineering, these heroes are not even human celebrities but “clay characters”: inhuman, moldable, resembling the celebrity personae who phantasmagorically stamped the book on “personal branding” whose cover appears in Chap. 5 of this work. Moreover, the whole spectacle is a satire of the pro-wrestling format, which is already a (hyperreal) travesty: it is a parody of a parody, a farce of a farce, a simulacrum of a simulacrum. Actually, this is a pattern that is repeated in the whole dream: it portrays the precession of simulacra, typical of postmodernity and best symbolized by Disneyworld.
Returning to the narrative, the dreamer seems to be presented with a choice of identity, which he can save: a celebrity or a normal person. He chooses a celebrity. However, it seems that whatever he chooses, he will just get a tour: the dream hints that such an “initiation” has only one possible result—to remain in the fantasy castle, never leaving the dream-world. It is an initiation into participation mystique with the ImCon .
Yet the dreamer eventually saves the celebrity—completing the task, the “rite” forced upon him by the dreams—with the help of a female friend,7 a real person. This changes the dream completely; the lysis is strikingly dissimilar to the rest of the narrative—which can probably be attributed to the appearance of a real, human relationship in this world of simulations. It is only then that they can finally leave the Disney imaginary. She is the one with the camera that can see—symbolically—the pictures are real representations, which reveal the reality of Disney signs and simulacra. That is, at this point the dream de-sanitizes the Disney consumption fairy tale and the imaginary it symbolizes—not merely as the magical world of eternal childhood, which the dreamer must leave, but somehow as an “evil, reoccurring nightmare”.
The symbols that signify this uncanny reality are the black bats and black aura. To understand their significations, one must amplify them and see how their cultural meanings fit into this image. Chevalier and Gheerbrant (1969/1997) provide the central meaning of the bat symbol for this dream: “as a nocturnal flying mouse, the bat represents a blindness to the most patent truths, and it hangs in accretions of filth and moral deformity” (p. 72; e.a.). Thus the bat symbolizes the dark, hidden counterpart of Mickey, the great icon of this imaginary—its shadow side. Like an actual rat, it is “an unclean beast”, but also stands as a “symbol of idolatry and fear” (p. 70). The image of the “beast” can be connected to what was discussed in relation to the movie characters: it means to remain “animalized”, a regression into beast-like instinct. The character of “idolatry” fits well with a total imaginary based precisely on the idolatry of commodity-signs (e.g., celebrities ) and is analogous to the meaning of matzevot in Ronald McDonald’s dream. Another peculiarity of the bat is that it lives upside down, an image of reversion or perversion: in a sense, the symbol turns the luminous, fantastic Disneyworld imaginary upside down, revealing it as a perversion. The black aura that it exudes seems to confirm this idea: instead of the aura, the glowing seduction of such imaginary, the dream reveals its phantasmagoria. In a sense, Disney’s magic world is portrayed as black magic8: operatic transformation of fantasy and imagination by capital and technology. To recall Walter Benjamin’s theory, in the dream the Disney imaginary appears as the phantasmagoric world of commodity capitalism —for the dreamer, an evil world.
This last oneiric image seems to summarize the unconscious’ view about the Disney ImCon and its models of subjectivity—models which it not only colonizes and manufactures but actually forces upon individual psyches, bludgeoning them into identification. Such models appear as simulacra of rites of passage—which are shown “upside down” by the dream, revealing the possible colonization of the dreamer’s subjectivity. As in the symbolic rites of passage, they institute an ontological mutation—one in which the dreamer would not become an adult human, but rather be initiated as another dehumanized, “animalized” consumer-commodity. A mutation that implies full identity with a simulation: in an image that is even more clear than the one in the Ronald McDonald dream, the subject here is forced to turn into a homo simulacrum. A mutation that entails remaining infantile, in full mimesis with the Disney ImCon , with its “deep-frozen infantile world” (Baudrillard, 2001, p. 2004 ): a totally Disneyified subject. The dreamer’s emotional reaction is consistent with these possibilities: he is scared, terrified, and clueless. Through the dreams the unconscious actually immobilizes him, for it is his future life that is at stake.
Thus, in the “reoccurring nightmare”, the représentations collectives and the “founding animals” are simulacra fabricated through imagineering (celebrities , Disney characters); the doctrine is that given by the Disney/ImCon imaginary, the totalizing ideology of consumption; what appears as God is Walt Disney himself, the Capitalist Demiurge who created the Disneyworld; the “meaning of death” is that broadcast by an MTV farce, completely and purposefully meaningless; and finally, mentioned not by Jung, but in my discussion of rites of passage, the communion with the “world of dreams”, altjeringa (the spiritual-symbolic world, the collective unconscious), appears as full identity with the imaginary of consumption embodied as Walt Disney World: “where dreams come true”.they undoubtedly contain representations collectives and they are in a way analogous to the doctrines taught to young people in primitive tribes when they are initiated into manhood. At such times they learn about what God or the gods or the “founding” animals have done, how the world and man were created, what the end of the world will be, and the meaning of death. (Jung, CW18, §536)
What is colonized: the dreamer’s psychological identity, his “existential regime”.
How it is colonized: forceful identification with ImCon simulacra, as representational models of subjectivity, in the context of simulated rites of passage.
Effects of colonization: immediate effects (elicited by dream) are fear and terror. Possible effects—full unconscious identity with the ImCon ; Disneyification of the subject; infantilization and dehumanization.
10.2 Zombie-Moms at Disneyworld
I’m in a park, talking to a female friend of mine. Across the way on an island are oil refineries (?), shaped roundly and looking somewhat like guitars done by an abstract sculpture. I’m admiring them. And can’t believe how big they look up close—the island is maybe a mile away over water.
It turns out I am in Disneyworld and I want to check out some things and go inside a tall tower. Every floor is a different theme—Sleeping Beauty, Little Mermaid, etc. It is very narrow, it looks run-down—paint chipping. On the Little Mermaid floor I see the girl playing Ariel fixing her makeup in a tiny bathroom with the door open. She looks slutty. The next floor is maybe Sleepy Beauty. I’m with my mother. This is near the top of the tower, and I realize it is a ship on water. The higher you get up, the more it teeters. The tower is moving back and forth and the floor isn’t steady. Very unstable. We are suddenly chased by a group of totally normal-looking middle aged women who think they are zombies. The rest of the dream is me being chased by people pretending to be zombies who can stop chasing me anytime they want, and running from them. Oddly, no children in “Disneyworld”.
The dream presents two distinct parts, or dramas, that take place in analogous scenarios: a normal park and the Disneyworld park. They correspond to two possibilities, two symbolic attitudes the dreamer can have toward herself and life, two aspects of her psyche in its relation with the social, which the dream contrasts employing analogous symbols. Such attitudes are related to the central themes of this dream, which, broadly, are being a woman (feminine identity, including motherhood) and creativity (creative libido and its relation with the unconscious psyche). It is easy to see that the dream is about femininity—all its dramatis personae are female figures. The theme of creativity, related to such feminine, is subtler; but it already shows up in the first scene. It must be said that each symbol in the first drama has to be understood in contrast with the way it appears in the second drama (and vice versa).
The first dreamscape is the park. It represents a more natural scenery (especially if seen together with the island, water, etc., that appear later), but at the same time a public, social space. Such landscape can be understood in two complementary ways: subjectively, it represents a part of her psyche, of her subjectivity; objectively, it denotes part of her social world. Placing both of them together, it signifies her attitude toward the social world, her positioning in relation to it—how she is, how she moves about or lives in it—which, here, seems to be more connected to nature, to an open, “natural way”. She is conversing with a female friend. As we do not have associations for the friend, and do not know who she is, she ought to be seen in the context in which she appears: she probably represents a female image, or model, that is connected to such “natural” ways of being. Subjectively, she is a shadow figure, that is, she stands as a symbol for a part of the dreamer’s psyche. Thus she probably has to do with the dreamer’s individuality and creativity, for it is conversing (= being together, exchanging) with her that produces the next image.
The dreamer then admires the oil refineries on an island. This image is parallel to Disneyworld as a tall tower, standing on a ship over water, in the second drama. Its symbolism is the most important one in the first part. Oil symbolizes a condensed form of energy, originating from the depths and from the water: libido, psychic energy, in its pure unconscious form—again, the unconscious appears as the original spring underground. Such form of libido is “crude”—dark, raw, unrefined, natural energy: instinctual libido as creative force. The means for refining it, the oil refineries, appears in a curious and different way (and that explains the dreamer’s feeling of strangeness, noted as a “(?)” in her text): not as an industrial, technological process, artificial and signified by consumption —but as artistic human artifacts, symbolized as guitar and sculpture. They represent art and culture as refinement (“culture” comes from cultivation): the artistic cultural form the unconscious libido takes through human creativity—and through a true symbol, which unites oil refinery, roundness, guitar, and sculpture, into one meaningful image. Thus the dream weds a concept of culture—the humanist concept, humanitas, discussed in Chap. 2, as the creative and symbolic transformation of Nature, feritas—with a model for creative life for the dreamer, an identity that depends on her creation.
The symbolic edifice for this model is on an island, on firmly established land surrounded by water. On a subjective level, this would signify a consciousness sitting on the vast resources (oil) of the unconscious, and feeding from their energy through refinement and artistic cultivation. This is pictured as a solid, direct connection with the unconscious forces and instincts, which provides a stable foundation—a creative foundation, which psychologically translates into fantasy, dream-thinking, and imagination. Its signifying edifice, like the temple symbols9 seen in previous dreams, appears gigantic and imposing to her, eliciting admiration. It seems that, in reality, she is a bit far (a mile away) from it, but the dream gets her “up close” to such possibility.
Immediately after that, however, the dream contrasts it symbolically with Disneyworld: it stands as the signifying edifice for a different form of “culture”—the totalizing consumer culture and its imaginary. The image, a tall tower, is the opposite of the round refinery on an island. However, and to advance the main idea for interpretation, it symbolizes the same things, but as a “refinery of the imaginary”: a purely capitalist industrial process, strictly technological, non-human, and artificial, destined only for consumption. It represents how consumer society “refines” culture, art, the unconscious, and nature; “creativity” here can only mean “imagineering”.
In contradistinction to the grandeur of the oil refinery, this imaginary is pictured as “very narrow and run-down”. In fact this is a pattern seen in many of the dreams analyzed; in them the edifices of the ImCon lose their fantastic grandiosity and fascination, being variously depicted as derelict, poor, dirty, narrow, and oppressive. This may be seen as the reductive function of the unconscious at work—it depreciates and dissolves the artificial aura of the ImCon ; it “chips the paint”, the fetishist makeup of its signs.
There the dreamer finds thematized floors, which is a characteristic of Disneyization (Bryman, 2004). Each “theme”, in lieu of creative refinement, represents a ready-to-consume identity . Here the dream symbolizes, through Disney , the whole ImCon as a supermarket of thematic female models: prepackaged identikits of femininity, of how to be a woman. The two models that appear in the dream—Little Mermaid and Sleeping Beauty—follow the pattern mentioned in the previous dream: they are simulacra, products of the Disneyification of fairy tales, cultural symbolic narratives and its archetypal models and referents, which are imagineered as commodity-signs and commodity-narratives.10
As consumption dreams, the Disney characters personify the mythic ideology of consumerism; they are the “very embodiment of consumer-fetishism” (Byrne & McQuillian, 1999, p. 23). In the case of this dream, to amplify thoroughly the symbolic meaning of the two characters would take us too far, so the discussion will be short (the reader can find a wealth of material on it in Bell, Haas, & Sells, 1995; Byrne & McQuillian, 1999; Ray, 2009). One symbolic characteristic that is common to both characters seems to be important for us: they both “live” in unconsciousness, outside of reality—Ariel is a creature of the sea, and Sleeping Beauty is literally unconscious. In their original fairy tales, they symbolize the need for an ontological transformation11 of this condition: to overcome unconsciousness, be redeemed, and become fully human and feminine. The mermaid is particularly meaningful for us in that regard: her unconsciousness and animalitas is “below”, the fish tail; that is what has to be transformed, refined, humanized, an analogous image to the oil refinery. And, of course, both share the stereotypical Disney beauty and sex appeal.
However, the dreamer stays on the Little Mermaid floor (i.e., this character seems to be the more significant one in the dream). Ariel, the mermaid, embodies a particular model of consumer-woman as a heroine (Bell et al., 1995; Ray, 2009): her main concern being material objects, she displays a real fascination for the glitz of consumption, especially of looks and appearance.
Her desire seems to be unbound: she always “wants more” and goes to dangerous lengths to buy and seek possessions from the human world. Even the prince, Eric, is revealed as an (aesthetic) object for her collection; “love” here means passion for possession. She personifies an “I want more and can’t get enough” lifestyle, rebellious and dangerous; very sexualized looks and aggressive seduction are her weapons, indulging in selfish desires something that defines her. In fact, perhaps the main ideological message of the movie, conveyed through her, is that to be human is to be a consumer : Ariel exchanges her individuality, her creative, artistic voice, for the role of being another human consumer in their world of objects. In this sense she also represents the deindividuation that appeared in the previous dream: not to have a voice means not to have a discourse, a personality, and merely echo Disneyified lines; it means not to create at all—to be debased to automatic replication.
The girl playing Ariel, which the dreamer sees next, seems to confirm this interpretation. Symbolically, she represents the identity with the ideological role: to incorporate the artificial identity, wear the mask of the model, and be a consumer-woman like Ariel. The mention of makeup refers to that pure persona. She appears in parallel to the image of the dreamer’s friend and the park in the previous part; the contrast seems evident: instead of an open space connected to nature, she represents a tiny life, tiny bathroom, no privacy anywhere—it represents living and working inside the Disneyworld park. No wonder she looks “slutty”: it is an oneiric symbol for selling one’s energy and character, like Ariel herself, selling her voice in her movie, not a transformation of libido into creative art, but its full commodification. Thus, such identity model means no individuality and no creativity: a prefabricated role, a Disney character—it means identifying with a simulacrum, in an image that is analogous to those in the previous dream (i.e., identity with Disney characters and clay celebrities ).
Yet, it must be noted that, as in the first scene, the dreamer merely observes these models, as possibilities of identity; it is not like in the previous dream, which points clearly to the dangers of full identification. However, whereas Ariel still is an aggressive model, the “next” model, Sleeping Beauty, would represent complete passivity and unconsciousness—she is not even alive. Strangely enough, precisely at this moment, the dreamer is with her mother: there is some connection between her mother (as the mother complex) and the symbols of Ariel and Sleeping Beauty. Unfortunately, I do not have elements to ascertain any interpretation regarding the mother. However, as a symbol, the mother stands for feminine creativity itself—the power to create new life. Judging from the specific moment and place in which she appears in the dream, the mother seems to represent the opposite of such creativity. As a hypothesis, one can think that buying into those prepackaged consumer models somehow represents for the dreamer to remain in the sphere of the mother complex, unconscious, not being herself; perhaps the mother is very identified with consumerism. The next scenes indicate this possibility.
Typically, when the mother enters the oneiric stage, the dream changes and gets more dramatic—she introduces the peripeteia. Here the tower is revealed as the very opposite of the refinery; it seems to symbolize both the ImCon and the dreamer’s psychic condition if she identifies with it. The imaginary is seen not as an island but rather as a teetering artificial construction in the air, fluctuating—the antipode of being on the ground, firmly established, in connection with the unconscious forces. Being on “top of the tower” means the possibility of full identification with the ImCon . As the imaginary stands as a replacement of the symbolic unconscious manifestations and its natural creativity, identifying with it (with its models) entails a disconnection from the unconscious grounds. Correspondingly, the floor is not steady, which symbolizes psychological instability: the more one identifies with the imaginary, the higher one gets—on its simulacra, the surrogate fantasy, the artificial unconsciousness—and the more one teeters, rootless up above, floating on the phantasmagoria of consumption dreams.12 The reader can recall that the Disneyworld logo conveys exactly that the castle representing the dream-world of consumption floats on clouds.
Then the dream reveals its image for such condition and the possible effects of identification: the zombie-moms. They can be seen as the last “model” for womanhood that appears in the dream; if we amplify the symbol of the zombie, its relations with the themes discussed so far become clear. A ubiquitous image in the contemporary cultural industry, especially in the United States, the zombie symbolizes an extreme image of the consumer as a product of consumerism. The idea of ontological transformation, present in both dreams in this chapter, finds in the zombie another expression, but as a perversion: it symbolizes the unconscious forces below—the creative libido, the instincts—thoroughly dehumanized and reduced to a mindless, bestial desire for consumption, in the form of an extreme compulsion, a perennial craving for consuming what is human (flesh, brains, bodies, etc.). It personifies the other side of “consumption” that comes to define society: consumere, to waste away, use up entirely—a principle “equivalent to destruction, waste, decay—in short, to a death-directed process” (Williams, 1991, p. 6). Differently from what Sleeping Beauty symbolizes in this dream, the zombie is not merely “sleeping”—the anesthesia or “collective dream” of consumer society; it stands for an extreme form of numbed unconsciousness that is not even alive, possessed by the imperative of consuming. That is one central aspect of its symbol: the complete external control of mind and body; their defining and only behavior is that of the dehumanized automaton, completely alienated from any instincts or reason. In this sense, they can also be seen as cultural personifications of the totalizing logic of capitalism-consumerism and its principle of unlimited accumulation and conquest, incarnated as an irrational, uncontrolled, absolute impulse to devour.13
Returning to the dream, when the distancing from the “water” below, that is, the dark creative libido, reaches its apex, the unconscious energy returns in a perverted form: debased into single-minded consumption. And the irony is not lost: these consumer-moms “think” they are zombies (i.e., are unconsciously identified with the imaginary model), behave like zombies, and at the same time believe they can choose (homo eligens) and can stop any time they want, like any normal-looking consumer. That is, the Disney imaginary is portrayed as zombiefying: the opposite of glamorous feminine models, the antipode of creativity. This meaning is contained in the dreamer’s last comment: oddly enough, no children in Disneyworld. As a symbol, children usually represent what is new, the possibilities, the human “seeds” that can or are about to develop: “The child is potential future” (Jung, CW9i, §278). Their conspicuous absence in the dream hints that this imaginary can only mean no spontaneity, no new, no creation. The image seems very meaningful: after all, the zombies are mothers—but nothing new can come out of a zombie, for it represents only destructivity and consumption, the very opposite of the image of potential creation at the beginning of the dream. Thus, if the previous dream showed that the utmost danger of identification with the ImCon was to become a simulacrum, here it means becoming a “totally normal-looking” middle-aged mom who is a zombie-consumer.
What is colonized: creative libido (instinct); feminine identity.
How it is colonized: models of femininity that are simulacra of symbolic representations; broadly, identification with the ImCon (as Disneyworld).
Effects of colonization: alienation, control by consumption instead of creativity; becoming a zombie-mom.