“A dream about shopping or being at a shopping mall means that those things that you need (affection, friendship, spiritual support, quality time with people you care about) are available to you. However, you may need to learn exactly where to look, how to select what you need, and how to ask for these things when you need them.”1 This quote is part of a “key” for interpreting night dreams, a dream dictionary that, in reflecting collective consciousness, illustrates how the mall is signified in the imaginary: as the dream-world where literally everything one needs is purchasable. But more than that, it unveils how dreams themselves—representing the unconscious psyche—are signified and colonized: their possible symbolic contents and emotional tones are disregarded and replaced by the dominant consumption dream that life is fully available through shopping. Under this ideology, to dream is to learn exactly how to be a good functioning consumer , and then everything will be magically provided for.2 In contradistinction to such imaginary miracle, this chapter offers some rather meaningful and disturbing night dreams that take place in malls and department stores, and present a different view on the temples of consumption and the imaginary they symbolize.
11.1 Another Cathedral of Consumption?
Dream reported by a North American man in his late 30s.3 It also presents the theme of colonization of the sacred, the symbolico-religious function, but in a different form.
I had a dream of being in a building that was shaped like a cathedral, with nave, transepts and choir. A worship service took place in the front part. Later I found out that the back part was just one gigantic department store, filled with strangers and friends from various eras of my life walking and running around through the aisles. I eventually got upset about this and decided I would chase out each and everyone. I was trying to do this when I woke up.
The dream theme is clearly centered on the symbol of the cathedral and its partial commodification into a department store. Thus, its narrative can be viewed as an oneiric depiction of the concept of “cathedrals of consumption” (Fiske, 2000; Kowinski, 1984; Ritzer , 2000, 2001), the new prime temples of the consumerist religion, here attempting to open business within the dreamer’s own psyche.
Initially, we can assume that the symbol of the cathedral-like building represents the same the church symbol did in the prototype dream: the dreamer’s religious-symbolic function, which reflects and expresses the functioning of the unconscious. Here too worship is taking place—such function is alive, operative, and effective in him. In contrast with the previous analogous dreams, however, here it appears not under an institutional, cultural form (Church), nor as a primitive temple; it resembles a cathedral, but the dream places the emphasis upon its shape.
Such emphasis, seen alongside other elements in the dream, immediately raises the hypothesis that the symbol is employed with a deeper meaning here. Cathedrals are buildings with archetypical geometrical structures that combine harmoniously quadratic forms, the quaternity as a central cross, with circular ones—a symbol that unites the opposites as the quadratura circuli (see Jung , CW12, §123). In other words, they represent typical mandala-like formations, which stand for an ordered, transcendental totality: as such, they can symbolize the Self,4 the archetype of wholeness, the virtual totality of the psyche, the very origin of the religious-symbolic function.
In fact, the dreamer himself associated the cathedral to one’s “psychic life” in general, and the ways it functions. Thus, the dream represents a possible psychological transformation in him, in this case, a structural one.5 The building, as his psyche, seems to be in an intermediary state, as it were: once again, the religious-symbolic function of the Self is “alive” but menaced by colonization. On the one hand, it can become a cathedral, representing its development into solidity and specificity—a personality that is more individual and integral (and that is why an image of the Self appears). On the other hand, it can be commodified and transformed into a cathedral of consumption, a department store—the ImCon already turning into a gigantic colonial power within his psychic space. As in the “massive temple” and the “McDonaldization of the country” dreams, the colonization process seems to be effected automatically and autonomously: it is not his “plan” and does not seem to be forced nor even effected by people. That means that the social imaginary encroaches upon individual psychic life in a surreptitious fashion, “at the back of his mind”. It simply happens; it is taken for granted—living within a collective consciousness dominated by consumerism naturally induces an automatic identity with its ideological mentality.
The dream shows that there was some significant part of his psyche that was already colonized—the “friends and strangers”. As the dreamer did not provide any personal associations regarding them, one can only speculate. They probably symbolize his own psychic contents—complexes, emotions, experiences, and memories (“from various eras of my life”)—that seem to function under the aegis of consumerism; the ideology of consumption there assumes the role of “worship service”. That is, if part of his psychic “cathedral” is colonized, the result is commodification of part of his Self, his history and memory.
Although the consumption ideology is depicted as an autonomous and “gigantic” force, the dreamer does not identify with it: it upsets him, and his conscious choice, his ego attitude, is to go against the grain—he tries to banish, “to put out of his mind” the consumers, the colonizing influence, or the form of being psychologically determined by the ImCon . Analogously to the dreamer’s act in the massive temple dream, here the required action contra culturam—against the mass of people, the mass mentality—can only be individual. The absence of lysis is meaningful6: the dream ends with the dreamer working hard on his task and decision; it points the task ahead and the necessary effort. His conscious ethical attitude indicates that, like the previous dreamer, he has a lot of work to do in order to defend his cathedral (his psychic life) from colonization, but there is room for reaction. Meaningfully enough, the dreamer did not seem to be very religious in terms of institutional creed; yet, his attitude is clearly redolent of Jesus’s cleansing of the Temple: “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” (John 2, 13–22).
What is colonized: symbolico-religious function; part of Self.
How: it is an automatic colonization (transforming into a department store).
Effects of colonization: possible identity with the ideology of consumption, which takes the place of a religious mentality.
11.2 Sci-Fi Hyper-Business World
While reading your request, I noted that I never recalled having dreams that included buying anything, and found that to be very interesting. All the resources in the dreams have to be fully funded without the slightest concern for the process of procuring materials, food or objects.
Until now.
I think that this post created a subtle trigger, and last night I had an intensely Sci-Fi hyper-business city environment dream. One of the main development features was a row of tall wide buildings that had earned a nickname of “The Wall” and the plan to extend The Wall to a great distance was common knowledge among the inhabitants. The characters included hungry consumers , driven by the insatiable curiosity to see and learn about new and novel products and processes. On the other side [of] the social arrangement were the equally hungry sophisticated sales representatives, exercising the most accommodating protocols.
My guide and I walked along the pedestrian walkway to one of the established showroom buildings and entered the reception area to wait with two other people for our turns to be personally introduced to the mystery of the new products.
The dreamer begins by stating that he had never had (or recalled) any dream related to “buying”, that is, to consumption, which, therefore, does not seem to be an issue for him or his unconscious psyche, normally. That makes his dream all the more meaningful: certainly it is not a personal dream, referring to his subjectivity, but rather what primitives called a “Big Dream”7—a chiefly archetypal dream that criticizes culture from a strangely wise point of view, thus having a primarily collective value. Indeed, one can clearly see that there are no subjective elements in this dream. Therefore, it seems that the unconscious “answered” my question, my request, with his dream,8 and in a very specific symbolic way. He was not able to provide any further personal associations to the dream-images, which is in fact typical of archetypal dreams.
The theme of the dream is clearly given in the symbol of the sci-fi hyper-business city. It corresponds to a mythological motif, the Paradise or “heavenly city”, which Jung (CW18) considers as a “powerful archetype”: “This myth is the time-hallowed archetypal dream of a Golden Age or a paradise on earth, where everything is provided” in abundance for everybody (§563). Two interrelated dominant forces rule this paradise: hyper-business and consumption. Based on these main elements, the core idea for interpretation may be advanced: this dream can be seen as the symbolical depiction, autonomously produced by the unconscious, of what was discussed in this work as the totalizing Imaginary of Consumerism, and the society or world it institutes: total capitalism-consumerism. Both are here revealed as a self-contained world, a totalized microcosm, indeed, an archetypal dream that embodies the utopia of consumerism, what Benjamin (1999) called a “primeval landscape of consumption” (p. 827), “the Great Consumer Paradise” (Kowinski, 1984).
This paradise (and the dream itself) is characterized as “intensely Sci-Fi”. This expression obviously refers to the role of hypermodern science and technology for the ImCon and consumer society: functional rationality governing and automating protocols, products, processes, and people, under the irrational imperatives of capitalism. Thus the image conveys a perfect marriage of capital (business) and science (technology), producing a fiction: a seamless hyperreal dream-world, which resembles more a portrait of the techno-imaginary of consumption (Balandier, 1985).
Next in the dream narrative is the curious image of The Wall, whose meanings seem manifold. First, it appears to institute a fundamental divide. In fact The Wall is a common element in symbols of paradise and of the heavenly city, as can be seen in the images below; it defines the paradise in its essential significance as a closed world—like a womb, the primeval paradise. Speculating based on this idea, perhaps the divide refers to a fundamental separation from reality, from any reality that is not determined by the ImCon , and the idea that there is no escape from it, no way out—it consists in an all-encompassing hyperreality. This meaning would fit one essential characteristic of the other dream-worlds of consumption studied here, namely, that they purport to be fully enclosed worlds, or microcosms.
The second meaning is related to the plan to extend The Wall to a great distance, as its normal development. This clearly symbolizes the principle of unlimited expansion of capitalism-consumerism and its imaginary. Their colonial imperative already appeared symbolized as tall buildings before, the dovecots, and as a tall tower in the zombie-moms dream, a symbol of the Disney imaginary. This interpretation seems to be confirmed by two expressions in the dream: it encompasses the whole city; it invades all spaces, to the point that it becomes the environment—it defines the Lebenswelt, the social order, in a total way. Thus, The Wall and city seem like perfect symbols for an imaginary whose telos is the institution of a self-enclosed, totalized world, which at the same time expands and colonizes the whole environment.
In this total social order, there are only two possible roles and actions: its sole dramatis personae are the salesman and the consumer and the imperatives, to sale and to buy, which means, to consume. Within this fully technological, rational habitat, it is interesting that what drives the subjects are solely irrational forces: hunger and curiosity. Again, this image depicts perfectly the dynamics of total consumerism: the fundamental vis motrix of both subjects and world is functional irrationality, desire debased into an insatiable hunger for the commodity. In the dream, psychological functioning is reduced to the craving for the novelty engineered by technology and congealed into commodities , and the ravenousness for selling and buying, both commanded by an invisible external force, the imaginary of consumption. That is, a “psychology” very close to that of the zombie, or the rat in a Skinner box.
Besides that emphasis on irrationality, the dream also defines the subjects of such world in an interesting way. Its characters embody what Marx (1867/1990) called Charaktermasken: “the economic character masks of persons who encounter each other as their carriers, are only the personification of economic relations” (pp. 178–179). Curiously enough, the dream presents exactly “two persons in the same character masks, a buyer and a seller (…)” (p. 248). Yet, one crucial difference can be pointed out. Whereas within the modernity that Marx described, work and production, as main social referents, still defined economic relations and thus identities and masks, within both the dream and total consumerism, production, and hence work as a referent, increasingly disappear; as Baudrillard pointed in his oeuvre, what matters is reproduction, semiurgy, and consumption. Thereby consuming and selling come gradually to determine all the character masks, the personae to which everyone must conform.
However, in the dream these identities no longer seem to be mere masks or personae—they are clearly the only definers of existence for the inhabitants, the only thing that seems to differentiate them. In this sense, they are no longer masks; the subject here is a personification of the transcendental law that rules this hyper-business paradise: you shall buy and sell, subsumed under You shall consume. Not identity, but mimesis with the law; a being made to the semblance of an invisible market god.
In this peculiar dream, total colonization seems to have been actualized, no longer a process, as in other dreams, but a fait accompli: a dream-world in which the ImCon and its logic rule absolutely, determining desires and subjects as consumers. Accordingly, and in contradistinction to the other dreams, here there are no symbols, no mention to previous symbolico-religious imaginaries.
Apart from one word: the “mystery”. In this environment commanded by sci-fi instrumental rationality, consumerism appears as a mysterium whose numen is in the commodity fetish, the rites of consumption and sale, and the fascination and cold enchantment of the technological artifact. Historically, the “mysteries” have always represented the représentations collectives (Jung, CW5, §654) of a society; expressions of the main symbolic forces, the numinous myths that determine its functioning. Here they are reduced to phantasmagoria: the ideology and logic of commodity and consumption are the absolute laws in this world, its ruling gods. Thus, the showroom building appears as the equivalent to a thoroughly desacralized temple of consumption, where the personalized worship of phantasmagoria—the initiation into the mystery of new products—is celebrated.
Thus the dream ends with the religion of hyper-business. But, if we compare it to the previous dreams, some questions remain. Where is the truly metaphysical factor, the real mystery? The symbolic, mythic, instinctual forces, the unconscious underworld—where have they gone? What is underneath such business paradise—does it have any foundations? Once again, what I propose is that we look at such questions, and to the dream itself, through a historical parallel. The whole dream, but especially the city symbol, reminds one of a cultural symbolic product: the dream-like movie Metropolis (Lang, 1927), which described symbolically an analogous situation and psychology.
What is colonized: society, or the whole imaginary (it is not a personal dream).
How: the dream-image is a symbol of total colonization, which is no longer in process; ImCon and logic of consumerism-capitalism rule this world absolutely.
Effects of colonization: commodification of subjects; only possible identities are seller and buyer.
11.3 Metropolis: The Underground Reactions
The similarities between this last dream and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis are numerous. The movie presents an intensely sci-fi, futuristic depiction of an archetypal Golden Age, a Paradise or heavenly city, as the utopic capitalist world. This world too is dominated by immense rows of tall buildings, which totalize the environment. The main difference for us, however, is that in the movie the divide suggested by the image of The Wall is shown to be the city’s very structure: it is based on a fundamental dissociation, a schism between above and below. The capitalist paradise is founded upon the domination of the workers, who, enslaved and dehumanized, are the moving force of the city—what feeds the monstrous machinery underlying it in the depths. Seen as a metaphor, they obviously represent the proletariat, the forces of production conspicuously absent from the business paradise. However, if seen symbolically, they reveal what has already appeared in other dreams: psychologically, they personify the underworld, the forces of the collective unconscious—the basal instincts , alienated and hidden from the life above. Subjugated and colonized, they merely replicate the machine—the workers actually resemble automata.9
Like in the dream, this capitalist microcosm too is fruit of a pact between capital and science: the alliance of the bourgeois, Fredersen (embodying the ethos of capitalism10) and the mad scientist, Rotwang (personifying science and functional rationality). Both seem to feel empty, due to the death of their common love, Hel. They miss what she represented: the emotion, sentiment, love, and the irrational and feminine element (all of which, incidentally, is entirely absent from the dream above). However, in a cultural, mythic plane, Hel symbolizes something much more profound. She was a Nordic goddess who presided over the underworld (Hel = hell), a chthonic divinity connected to the dark, primeval, terrible aspects of Nature. Thus she embodies the real archaic mystery, a symbolic expression of the primitive collective unconscious. In relation to German and Nordic cultures, Hel represented the shadow of Christianity: the human elements that used to be contemplated and expressed symbolically by the old pagan imaginary, and thus lived through it, and the “barbaric” but profound mythic unconscious forces that were buried by the colonial Christian imaginary, and thus “died”—the Christian imaginary that, as Walter Benjamin indicated, turned into capitalism . As archetypal components of the psyche, however, such aspects never die; they become more primitive and ever more destructive the more they are repressed, the more culture fetters them in the underworld of the unconscious. Symbolically, they become demons.11
What the alliance of capital (the bourgeois) and science (the mad scientist) then creates is what would happen in Nazism12 some years later: the movie expressed symbolically what was still dormant, but already arising, in the collective unconscious. Capital and science fashion a mystery, a simulacrum of divinity, of a goddess: the automaton, a demonic technological product who is meant to take the place of reality (Maria, the real feminine) and cause an upsurge in the workers, the mass below—in the unconscious energies, in what seemed to be dead—the “catacombs”, in cultural terms, in the “mob”, the mass mentality.
A simulacrum of a goddess means a simulacrum of myth and religion13: an artificial substitute, an ideological simulation that has an equal absolute claim, substituting the current imaginary (Maria as a metaphor for the Christian feminine). That was the Nazi totalitarian ideology : like the automaton, fruit of an alliance of mob, science, and capital, it emancipates from human control and becomes an utterly destructive and apocalyptic myth. An ideology that sought not merely to control the subjects completely, but to create an artificial human being, a perverted simulacrum: to produce an automaton that was at the same time a “divinity”, the all-powerful and inhuman Nazi Übermensch—the actualization of the Übermensch that Benjamin (1921/1996) said was the deus absconditus of the religion of capitalism , “a religion that offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction” (p. 289).
This simulacrum of religion causes an eruption in the underground mythic forces, unleashing all the chthonic, dark, primitive impulses (=Hel). In the movie, these impulses appeared as a massive flood coming from the underground. Water is the primary archetypal symbol for the unconscious energy, libido, and thus for the unconscious itself. It translated into a human flood, the workers transformed into a medieval mob, an uncontrolled mass movement possessed by atavistic irrational forces. The movie ends with a romantic, sentimental reunion. Yet, seen as a symbol, it foreboded the destroying deluge that would soon submerge Europe and capitalist society: its final denouement was the collective psychosis of totalitarianism.
To return to the dreams, Metropolis can be seen as a representation of the same phenomenon depicted in the dream in which Ronald McDonald’s head appears in the basement, but in a cultural scale. Both images present a simulacrum of divinity, a totalizing ideology (Nazism, and consumerism as McDonaldization, respectively) that simulates a mythic imaginary and functions as such in the hidden underground, that is, in the unconscious. Underneath the dream-like and artificial world of Metropolis, the alienated primitive libido, the mythic forces, resurged as a tsunami. Perhaps that is also what is underneath the paradisiac hyper-business dream-world—the ImCon .
Such dissociated, perilous unconscious forces appeared in a number of other dreams with temples of consumption. The form under which they appeared more often was as animals: symbols for the unconscious instincts, the “animal” parts of our psyche. For instance, in some dreams they were caged in malls or department stores, at times in their underground deposits—sometimes hidden, sometimes in plain view. These were not pets, which would represent more humanized, or tamed, forms of instinctual libido, but lions, sea turtles, giant fish, an eagle, sharks, and even a killer whale, sometimes injured, sometimes presenting a menace, but always captive, incarcerated, and usually viewed and displayed as commodities . Of course each dream can have a different meaning, and each animal can symbolize a different psychological aspect; yet, taken as a whole, they may be interpreted as symbols for what has been discussed as the commodification of instinctual libido.
Other dreams revealed enormous animal-like monsters (like Godzilla, or dinosaurs) connected to such temples of consumption, sometimes chasing the dreamers. While being chased by dangerous animals is a typical dream motif (Jung, CW18, §477), in this case the animal monsters probably represent the caged, commodified instinct turned into a primitive, destructive beast. There were some other nightmares as well, in which uncanny, metaphysical forces emerged in malls, frightening dreamers. In two of them, the perverted or colonized instinct was again symbolized as zombies; and in a rather singular dream, celebrities turned zombies attacked and tried to devour and kill the dreamer (this time not in Disneyland : in an underground shopping mall).
If we look at these dreams more culturally than subjectively, they seem to reveal some collective forms or patterns through which the unconscious psyche manifests itself and reacts primitively to what the temples of consumption represent—the ImCon .
11.4 Dreams in Malls
To close this empirical part of the study, a collection of unusual dreams had by a woman is interpreted. They were part of a very long dream series, span across ten years, and reported by her with lots of details. She spontaneously published a separate series under the title “Dreams in malls”, from which the specimens below were selected. Originally, I wanted to present some 22 dreams from such series but had to limit their number. The dreams chosen focus more on the unconscious’ critical reaction to colonization by consumerism, and the ways it depicted the latter’s effects upon subjectivity (effects which can be seen as fairly typical). Although many subjective aspects and problems—at times of a very personal nature—were revealed with clarity by the dreams, interpretation tried to avoid discussing them in depth. Instead, the discussion concentrates more on the ways they reflect and illuminate sociocultural themes, the problems and pathos of our times, through typical symbols (which at times are decidedly historical). A few other dreams that provide relevant context are mentioned along with the main ones. Dreams are presented in chronological order.
I was working as a supervisor in a very large building and carried a huge ring of Master keys out in the open so everyone knew who I was on sight. I decide to go buy something at Sears and Roebuck, so I went into the sunny street through some big glass doors, turned left and went to the huge mall that Sears was a part of. I went inside and was dismayed. The inside of the mall was very dim, the halls immense, and there were many stores but their shop windows were very dim also. Even worse, the air quality in the mall was so poor with pollution that I could actually ‘see’ the air.
I decided to go back to my office. I chose an exit, but was confused to where I actually was. The street name started with ‘M’ like Masters. I could feel my heart pounding very hard. I went down a hill and looked down this large area where I could see tiny houses and vehicles and trees and even tinier people. Not as small as ants, but very small. Some children were playing on the edge of a cliff where their world ended. I was amazed that these two worlds were coinciding precariously and we were creating havoc in their world with our carelessness and allowing our children to destroy their world.
The dream theme is clearly the shopping mall. However, the exposition presents a related theme: work. It appears in many other dreams as the main possible source of personal identity for the dreamer, in two interrelated senses: a concrete one—work as labor, having a job, and so on—and a more symbolical one, working on herself, cultivating her personality, her libido, in a productive and creative way. Here such work identity is signified by the symbol of the keys; they also figure often in other dreams meaning the possibility of a stable identity, of differentiation as a subject.14 The expressions used denote power and authority, an individuality that stands out (even in a very large building): she is the one who carries the Master keys, and thus “everyone knew who I was on sight”. Although this image is also connected to a persona of authority, it exemplifies how work could provide her a feeling of being her own “master”, a strong definition of who she was.
However, her desire to buy, to consume something (which, meaningfully, she did not need) elicits a change in the oneiric drama. This is also a recurrent theme in her dreams: they present “work” and “shopping” as antithetic worlds, or ethe, for her. She is again and again confronted with an ethical decision: the choice between work and shopping; between a stable identity gleaned from work, and the consumable identities derived from shopping. Her dreams point that she invariably chooses consumption (here, as in many other dreams, symbolized as “going shopping at the mall”); she does not seem able to obtain and cultivate an identity through work. In this regard she replicates her social reality: she mirrors the cultural shift from work ethic to consumption ethic, from being a “worker” to being a “consumer” as the major source of identity, and the colonization of work (“work”—or in fact labor—as merely a means to consume).
She leaves work through transparent doors; reality outside still seems normal, sunny even, for here it is seen from the standpoint of ego consciousness. She wants to go to Sears, which represents an icon in American capitalist culture since the 1900s; it is the “archetypal” department store as cathedral of consumption. Then she turns to the left, to the unconscious,15 and things change radically: there appears the mall seen from the standpoint of the unconscious—its autonomous critical view of the dream-world of consumption. Contrasting with the latter’s typical spectacularity and bright opulence, the unconscious unveils through the dream a completely different, even shocking, reality; no wonder she is dismayed. What is usually a profusion of lights and neon, the seductive, fantastic, incessant flow of shining commodity-signs and consumers, now appears as a hazy, empty, immense edifice. This single oneiric image seems to offer a whole panoply of meanings—indeed, the mall here is a true symbol. One curious element there is the blurring of distinctions, an overwhelming dedifferentiation: quality, meaning, value, image, representation—everything seems to have dissolved into air. Or, to recall Marx , within this mall all culture—all that is solid and sacred—has been “consumed” and volatilized into pollution, waste, which befogs and blurs all perception. If the mall represents a consumption world made of appearances, here they all disappear; it seems to turn into a dim, opaque, one-dimensional world. There is no one there, no form of life: a radical depiction of the mall as inhuman “non-space” (Augé, 1995), a “nowhere zone” (Kroker, 1992), in which there are neither social bonds, nor differences, nor life. There is an uncanny supernatural quality to it: it is an immense temple of consumption, but empty and devoid of humanity.
Thus we arrive at the key idea for this interpretation: that the dream discloses an objective critique of consumerism and its imaginary, both of which it symbolizes as the shopping mall—which does not appear as the dream-world representing the “dominant mode of social cohesion” (Kroker & Cook, 2001, p. 21), nor merely as a “neon cage” (Langman, 1992, p. 40), nor as the sardonically named but truth-revealing “lifestyle center”. From the unconscious perspective, “the signifying and celebrating edifice of consumer culture” (ibid.) is revealed as an immense, polluted, and empty phantasmagoria.
Presumably spooked by the vertigo and horror vacui of such spectacle, the dreamer tries to leave. However, the phantasmagoria seems to have a confusing effect, even outside; she does not know where she is, or where she stands. In the dream, the ideology of consumerism is disorienting, transfixing, intoxicating; once she is identified with it, it is difficult to “exit” it, and she cannot return to the world of “work”. The name of the street, resembling “Masters”, is important. If the keys represented an identity and personal autonomy, here it is as if the unconscious asked, “who is really the Master?”—and answered, it is the commodity phantasmagoria. The emotional impact of this revelation is manifest by the heart pounding.
The dream then discloses that such consumption-smog does not limit its impact to her, or to the mall: it diffuses itself and affects the previously “normal” reality—in fact, it seems to mutate and colonize all her social reality, in an invisible way, like an atmosphere, or an imaginary. Like in the hyper-business city dream, it ends up totalizing the whole environment, by default. Consumption is airborne. The effect: the “normal” people and world outside the mall have been atomized. Symbolically, they represent everything in her psychic system that is (or in fact was) not related to consumption. The image presents an asymmetrical relationship: whereas the mall (consumerism) is immense and devoid of life, the human Lebenswelt (all the rest of her life) grows very small, withering, atomized, an image of (almost) total colonization.
If the mall was the crucial symbolic image before, here the children are most important. They symbolize essentially the same that was discussed in the “zombie-moms” dream: the spontaneous, creative, instinctual, natural functioning of the psyche, with all its possibilities. However, it seems that they too have been “poisoned”, or perverted, by the corrupting ideology: instead of representing natural creation, they become destructive, and their “world” can end. This symbolic image can be connected to the zombie-moms dream, in which “children” are replaced by zombies—creative libido turned into compulsive devouring. However, this same dynamic can be seen culturally, in the movie Metropolis : at the end of the movie, the workers’ children apparently die in the inundation that floods the machine city underground; stricken with grief, the workers become a rampaging medieval mob. Actually, the analogy can be further extended: in this dream too there are “two worlds coinciding precariously”, and again it is the world below that is menaced by havoc and destruction, the world “above”, represented by the mall, presumably taking its place. This image points to a possible dissociation16 in the dreamer’s personality, which becomes clear in some other dreams.
What is colonized: personal identity; ego consciousness.
How: through ideology of consumerism, depicted as phantasmagoria.
Effects of colonization: unconscious identity; disorientation, dissociation.
The next dream is mentioned because it presents an image of the results of such process of totalizing expansion by consumerism, and her identification with its phantasmagoria:
I lived in a huge house that included its own shopping mall.
The dream symbolism is very clear: as mentioned before, the house represents the dreamer’s personality, her own psyche, the way she lives habitually. Like the “huge mall” before, her house is now “huge”, “immense”: the mall, and all that it symbolizes, colonizes and commodifies her psyche. So part of her own psyche becomes a temple of consumption; her subjectivity and her inner life are more and more defined by participation mystique with the ImCon and its ideology, and dependent upon them. If the mall before was essentially empty, that is how a significant part of her personality becomes now: an empty self, she will constantly need to fill it artificially with the meanings, values, and identikits offered by commodities —to inflate it artificially with the mall phantasmagoria, so that she can feel “immense”.
This interpretation is confirmed by another dream, which I mention briefly here also because it presents a symbol that will reappear in the last dream of this chapter. It is a rather complex and long dream; the parts that interest us are abridged and simplified in what follows.
The dreamer shuts herself off in a shopping mall, where she seemed to live, covering the long hallway she was in with a huge screen. She eventually reaches a shop in a corner. “I then saw a box of jewels which were on necklaces. I wanted one desperately”. She then steals a diamond, pushing it down her shirt.
the dragon guards the jewel that has been lost, the jewel being the symbol of the innermost value of man, individuality or the self. That myth is to be found nearly everywhere in the world. The great jewel in Buddhism, the mani (…) was originally the magic jewel which was hidden in the sea and then brought up to the surface by the gods. Buddha himself is called the mani. (Jung, SNZ, p. 264)
And also, “Many myths and images are concerned with the relation to the Self, the lost jewel, for instance, or the precious stone which fell out of the crown and vanished, or the recovery of the treasure” (Jung, SVI, p. 1304). The diamond represents the most precious stone, the symbol of brightness, solidity, perfection, immortality, incorruptibility, of the “true nature” (Chevalier & Gheerbrant, 1969/1997, pp. 291–292), that is, of the perennial lapis—the Self. All these meanings embodied by the diamond make it stand as the absolute antithesis of the mall phantasmagoria: it is a symbol of true individuality, and that is why the dreamer craves for it “desperately”. She thinks she can buy (or in fact steal) it as if it were another merchandise in a shopping mall; that is, she identifies completely with a central ideological belief of consumerism: that individuality is a commodity.17 In the dream, it is a theft.
What is colonized: dreamer’s own personality; her Self.
How: by becoming a mall (full participation mystique with the ImCon ); by identifying with (and stealing) a commodity that represents a simulacrum of Self.
Effects of colonization: possible ones—full identity with the imaginary; alienation from life “outside” of consumption (the mall).
The dreamer tries to go to a mall, but is not sure where she is. She has no money and no keys, and walks stiffly, as if her feet moved slowly but were not followed by her mind and the rest of the body.
“I got a big shock then: I came out into a brightly lit underground shopping mall. They had everything down there. It seemed like I had been in this place before and had forgotten it was here”. In a more dimly lit area, “a person sat alongside a seemingly stuffed animal bigger than life: the purple Barney. I knew these were security guards in case there was trouble. Next to them were a restaurant and a jewelry shop. You could buy anything down here in this completely underground mall. I really wanted to buy something but had no money, so I decided I’d go home, get some money and come back and shop. Just as I turned around, one of the security guards got up from the table and came over to me. It was a woman, threatening and intimidating. She asked strongly, ‘I need to see your picture I.D.!’ I said twice, ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t bring it with me nor any money!”
The narrative starts with the same theme: “going shopping”, which, for the dreamer, means communion and identity with the imaginary of consumption. The effects portrayed are similar: she seems lost and disoriented; again she does not have keys, that is, no identity —symbolizing a state of alienation from herself. However, here it appears not as mere alienation, but rather clearly as a dissociation of the personality: what is below (feet) moves independently from what is above (mind and body). The reader might recall that the children and the world “outside” the mall were below, that is, the foundations, the contact with the soil and reality, are split from the rest of the personality (which once again seeks a mall).
The [black] snake, like the devil in Christian theology, represents the shadow, and one which goes far beyond anything personal and could therefore best be compared with a principle, such as the principle of evil. It is the colossal shadow thrown by man, of which our age had to have such a devastating experience.18 (Jung, CW9i, § 567)
Let us return to the main dream: the dreamer is then shocked by the spectacle of the underground shopping mall. Symbolically, it is almost obvious: it represents the colonization of the underground, of the unconscious psyche itself—which becomes a paradisiac dream-world of consumption. Subjectively, it is the radical concretization of what appeared in the massive stone temple dream as a possibility. However, one should also consider an interpretation on the objective level: isn’t this dream revealing a process that is also cultural? In that case, it would mean that the “underground temple”—the symbolico-religious unconscious—is replaced by a shopping mall. Theoretically, it would symbolize the cultural colonization of the collective unconscious—the very source of symbols and the imaginary—by the ImCon , which takes its place.
the snake is the commonest symbol for the dark, chthonic world of instinct. It may—as frequently happens—be replaced by an equivalent cold-blooded animal, such as a dragon, crocodile, or fish. (Jung, CW9ii, §385)
The facts that such dark chthonic powers were connected with the devil, in the previous dream; that Barney is a typical image of mass consumer culture; and that it is in the depths of consumerism’s signifying edifice all point to the idea that Barney symbolizes not merely the dreamer’s personal shadow but the collective shadow of consumerism: the atavistic instinctual forces of the collective unconscious. As the reader may recall, the alienation, colonization, and perversion of the instinctual foundations appeared before—under many forms, but especially as destructive animals and animal monsters. In this dream, it appears as the most dangerous, voracious, and primeval predator—but absolutely infantilized, commodified, and bowdlerized: Barney is a stuffed animal that hosts a television show for children, a typical representative of the global ImCon , therefore, another creature of imagineering, but one that comes to life through a child’s imagination (thus representing it). In fact, the dream could not have chosen a more perfect symbol for the cultural bowdlerization and commodification of both imagination and the primeval instincts. Like other similar cultural signs that appeared in the dreams (Disney characters, Ronald McDonald, etc.), Barney is another model for the mass production of consuming children—who, of course, unquestioningly follow him in his show. He basically embodies an always happy, anesthetized, alienated consumer. His voice is “dopey” and he does not display any facial expressions other than a toothy grin; he is self-centered and saccharine and lives in a paradise in which conflicts and negative feelings and emotions simply do not exist. As Levy (1994) puts it, “the real danger from Barney is denial: the refusal to recognize the existence of unpleasant realities” (p. 192)—the denial of reality that characterizes both consumerism and the dreamer, denial that allows for living permanently in a condition of sedated happiness, within a childish dream-world—the world of Barney, the shopping mall, the dream-world of consumption. Levy adds: “along with his steady diet of giggles and unconditional love, Barney offers our children a one-dimensional world where everyone must be happy” (p. 191; e.a.).
Thus Barney represents the undergrounds of the one-dimensional world of consumption as its “security guard”: the dark, primitive collective forces (the black snake) seemingly under total control, the instincts thoroughly commodified and turned to consumption.19 However, behind the façade of stupefied elation, it is still a Tyrannosaurus Rex—and that is precisely why the dream employs him as a symbol. Put simply, it is the dinosaur, that colossal, ferocious, primeval animality that seems to be extinct but somehow resurfaces, an atavistic force of which neither the sci-fi dream’s hungry consumers-salesmen nor the buoyant bourgeoisie in Metropolis seemed to present the slightest vestige, because it was buried in the unconscious. Meaningfully, in the last two decades, the image of the dinosaur appears to have resurrected as an immensely successful commodity-motif in consumer culture (Mitchell, 1998). One can recall Jurassic Park, in which these primeval monsters are unleashed within an artificial thematic park (like Disneyland , a microcosm for technological consumerism and the ImCon ). Godzilla, the apocalyptic, gigantic reptile that resurges from the sewers and brings collective catastrophe, is another conspicuous example among many others.
To summarize, the key idea is that these symbols represent the shadowy instinctual side in what used to be called the “mass man” (i.e., mass mindedness). Commenting upon a dream had by Hannibal20 before his conquest of Rome, Jung (SNZ) mentions the typicality of such symbol: “Any organized body of men is a huge snake; one dreams of such things in that form” (p. 598). It is “the crowd within”, the foundation underlying mass mentality21: the most primitive side of the collective unconscious—the instinctual roots which, when not expressed and channeled by symbolic systems and rites, remain untamed, unchecked, inhuman, perverted—even if they appear mesmerized, stupefied, and buried by the ImCon’s semiotic system.
Continuing with the dream, next the dreamer sees a restaurant (which will reappear in a following dream) and the jewelry shop (representing the commodity-self for sale, the ersatz identity). The last scene is meaningful: for her, to have an identity (I.D.) is equal to having money, and thus being able to consume; to be a consumer is now the only possible definition of identity.
What is colonized: unconscious personality, including the primeval instinctual sphere (possible related interpretation—colonization of the collective unconscious in culture).
How: again, by becoming a mall; in relation to the primitive shadow, by being commodified into an ImCon character.
Effects of colonization: full identity with the imaginary; split personality.
I started walking down the hall of my house and it appeared I was inside that underground mall I discovered last week in another dream. I had to walk a long way through the mall. There were lots and lots of jostling people out here. I assumed my office was at the far end. I was having trouble getting through the crowds. It seemed more and more nasty looking. The walls and floors were dirty. There were fewer people here but those I saw looked like bad off drug addicts, drunks, and the really bad off people.
The image seems to point to the possibility that her unconscious psyche has been nearly thoroughly colonized: if the mall was just part of her house before, now the house has been taken over—and also the office (the world of work). That is, almost the whole personality is depicted as being an underground mall; the process of expansion or diffusion of the consumption phantasmagoria, initiated in the first dream, is nearly concluded here. Yet, in contrast with the previous dream, in which the underground mall still appears as the dream-world in which everything is available, here its ideological and fictitious character is fully disclosed. The “mass mentality”, or crowd psychology, insinuated before, here appears concretely as a jostling mob. The shadow aspects are typical: the psychic depths appear bad off, “nasty looking”, dirty. The character of craving and compulsion related to consumption—the colonized desires and instincts—is personified as addicts and drunks. Her underground psyche, turned into a mall, is disclosed as a dark nightmarish world.22
What is colonized: unconscious psyche.
How: again, underground psyche appears as a mall—full identity with the imaginary.
Effects of colonization: split personality; addiction, compulsion.
I was with the owner of a fancy restaurant in the basement of a mall. Many rich people came here. The owner told us that she had created a shrine downstairs of the original kitchen because Hitler used to come there and stand outside a window and paint. We went down the stairs which were deep. I felt really comfortable going down these stairs because I had done it so many times before. Here there was a huge old-fashioned kitchen which had been preserved. Within the shrine, we could stand in the exact spot where Hitler had stood. It was beautiful down there.
The main theme and scenery is the mall: it reappears the way the dreamer’s ego sees it—glamorous, wealthy, fancy, signifying the ImCon’s fetishist dream-world. The restaurant owner, a female, is the dreamer’s shadow, with whom she identifies. Then there is again the motif of descent; this time she goes further down, reaching what is underneath the basement—seemingly the mall’s netherworld, what is “buried” beneath it, deep down: a kitchen. The restaurant and the kitchen indicate the symbolism of food, already discussed in Chap. 5; basically, they refer to the ways one deals with emotions, affectivity, the gut feelings—the fire, the passions—and cultivates and transforms them. Considering that the kitchen is deep underground,23 it is connected to the primeval irrational libido, the visceral unconscious, and its emotional charge (see Jung, CW16, §378). This kitchen has a religious connotation, for it has been transformed into a shrine. The image recalls the underground temple: the deep-rooted archetypal foundations, source of numen and symbol. Or, put differently, it reminds one of what used to coordinate and transform the primeval libido, the ancient “cultural kitchen”, so to speak, the symbolic “recipes” (rites, myths, etc.) of religious imaginaries, natural expressions of the archetypal spring.
Eerily enough, like the Mexican temples in previous dreams, this particular kitchen-shrine has also been “preserved” and is “old-fashioned” and historical. However, what is worshiped there, the divinity one would expect to find, is Hitler: the obvious cultural symbol for a totalitarian ideology , here functioning as the enshrined myth that underlies, very deep down, the edifice of consumerism.
This image, taken in isolation, may be interpreted in a number of different ways. However, if we compare it to analogous symbols that appeared in her previous dreams, some ideas stand out as more apposite. First, Hitler appears deep underground, where Barney was: he represents a transformation, or symbolic incarnation, of the devilish black snake. Instead of the stupefied, commodified Tyrannosaurus Rex,24 perhaps what is revealed is its true historical face: the arch tyrant himself, the Führer, embodying the collective, archetypal shadow. Psychologically, the oneiric image represents the atavistic primeval instincts commanded by the maximum cultural symbol of totalitarianism—as ruthless, cruel, and inhuman as a tyrannosaurus. However, both images appear as simulacra: just like the murderous dinosaur appears as the retarded Barney, Hitler assumes the guise of the romantic painter, in a very idyllic, beautiful shrine25—in a totally ideological denial of reality, which mirrors the imaginaries that both symbols represent (the ImCon and the totalitarian Nazi ideology).
Seen on a subjective level, the dream implies that the ideology of consumerism—the ImCon —finally becomes a totalitarian shrine deep down the dreamer’s psychic basement, thus commandeering and ruling her very instinctual foundations, her archaic libido, from within. An outstanding illustration of the ImCon colonizing the deepest recesses of the unconscious psyche as a simulacrum of religion, and especially of its totalitarian character.
Nonetheless, this dream should also be seen on an objective level. If we consider it in parallel with Benjamin’s underground shrine, and also with what was discussed regarding the movie Metropolis , isn’t it a possible depiction of what lies in the psychological undergrounds of (American) consumer culture? Again, the symbols the dreams employ are not personal at all but clearly cultural and collective. Furthermore, they all signify the shopping mall—the dream-world of consumerism, not only for the dreamer but rather for the whole globe; and, most importantly, they seem to unveil what is underneath consumerism, its very hidden foundations or subterranean stream. If we unite the three parallel depictions of such foundations given by these dreams, namely, the jostling mob and addicts; Barney, the T-Rex; and Hitler, what seems to appear is the colossal collective shadow of consumption: a barbaric mass mentality, with religious tones, whose primitive affects and instincts are totalized, stupefied, and controlled by the imaginary as if it were a totalitarian ideology, a transcendent objective power that rules from within. In this sense, the dream would be a strikingly exact depiction of a core characteristic of postmodernity , the cultural logic of consumerism: that “It represses its own history (and tendency towards cultural fascism) beneath the logic of the shopping mall” (Berry, 2010, p. 77; e.a.). At the same time, it reflects a cultural phenomenon that, according to Baudrillard (2002), is symptomatic of our “current imagination”: “a perverse fascination with a return to the wellsprings of violence, a collective attempt to hallucinate the historical truth of evil” (p. 15).
Seen culturally, the dream also presents a curious depiction of what Walter Benjamin (1921/1996) saw as the deus absconditus of capitalism as a monstrous religion: the Übermensch, the posthuman demigod which Hitler incarnated,26 appearing here ensconced in the underground shrine of consumer society’s edifice. A Übermensch for whom everything is possible, because everything is available, who, transcending every human boundary, can fashion a world (a hyperreality) and be anything—all through consumption. The perfect model of divinity for the mass of Untermenschen consumers. In the dream, this model is available as a sort of religious entertainment, that is one can “stand” exactly where Hitler stood, that is, can identify with him, standing in his place.
The subjective attitude of the dreamer seems to be precisely a complete uncritical identification, a full participation mystique with the totalitarian imaginary: she feels “really comfortable” with it and finds everything beautiful. That she had “gone down the shrine” many times before indicates that such participation mystique has been the basis of her psychological functioning for some time; it has come to define her.
What is colonized: the very foundations of the unconscious psyche; whole personality.
How: by replacing such foundations with a totalitarian “cult” (i.e., the ideology of consumption is revealed as totalitarian).
Effects of colonization: full participation mystique with the imaginary.
I was in New Berlin. It seemed like my house, but it was also like a shopping mall. I picked up some jewels. Two of them actually belonged to a woman from church, but now that I had them I was going to have them set into a ring for myself. When I got to the store part of the house, a female friend of mine was there. She told me that she always bought my jewels. I disagreed totally and told her I had my own credit card.
The house, as a symbol of the personality, again appears as a mall, or indistinguishable from one. However, the name of the place, and of the mall itself, gives away the totalitarian character of colonization by consumerism: in an obvious allusion to the image and meaning of Hitler in the previous dream, here her psyche has been transformed into New Berlin,27 a new colonial outpost gained by the consumerist regime. The symbol of the jewel also reappears, and with the same meaning: a representation of a fake, stolen Self, the only identity permissible and conceded in New Berlin—that given by a commodity-sign. Once again, the unconscious stresses that such identity does not belong to the dreamer; part of it was from “a woman from church”—possibly a shadow figure, connoting what the dreamer could be, a different aspect of her. Yet the dreamer again “steals” it. The mention of a church (which is connected to the “shrine” before) hints that what originally had a truly religious character—the jewel as symbol of individuality and Self, the spirituality of the previous owner, the church itself—is transferred to consumption: the jewel as a fetishized commodity-sign, its worship by the dreamer, and the mall as the church of total consumerism.
The female friend who appears then is another shadow figure, this time representing the store, the clearly and utterly commodified part of the dreamer’s psyche—analogously to the symbol of the restaurant owner before, she stands for full identity with the ImCon . The friend points critically that the jewels, again, are not the dreamer’s: it is not her own identity, her self, but a fictional commodity-self bought by someone else. The dreamer’s answer to this questioning is revealing: it shows that for her it is not even the jewel, the meaning contained in a concrete product, that confers identity; identity is bestowed solely by the behavior of buying, by the idea of consuming.
In fact, the dream shows that she follows faithfully the immanent principle of consumerism, its metaphysical foundation: I shop therefore I am. Her existence, her “jewel”, her Self are defined by her immaterial purchase power, which finally becomes her “innermost value”, her Master: the key for actualizing all her consumption dreams. Within this totalitarian consumerism, deeply ingrained in her own mind, her life and identity are defined by her credit card. As the American Express slogan ran in 2006, “My Life. [American Express logo]. My card.”
Buying is the new being.