I don’t think I’ve ever dreamed about a US President, until that President was Donald Trump. But then, Donald Trump has been a President unlike any other, unconstrained by the inhibitions on speech and behavior that used to be taken for granted in someone seeking or occupying high office.
You and I may disagree on whether this is for good or for ill. But surely we can agree on the fact of his uniqueness, and that it’s likely to have reshaped–in greater or lesser degree, permanently or temporarily, for better or for worse–the collective psyche of the country he leads.
“When he walked through the door he blew out the jambs,” Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal last January. “He left a jagged opening big enough that anyone could walk through after him. He was like a cartoon character that bursts through a wall leaving a him-shaped hole.”
What does it mean to us, consciously or unconsciously, to have such a person first as Presidential candidate, then President-elect, and now President? I’m asking this question, not as a political polemicist–which I’m trying hard not to be, although like most of us these days I have my strong opinions–but as someone interested in cultural history. In collective psychology, and how it intersects with our psychology as individuals.
Kelly Bulkeley, the dream expert I’ve written about in connection with his work with the 16th-century Spanish seeress Lucrecia de León, has put together a collection of materials that may offer a clue: a dossier of 199 dreams that people have had about Trump from February 2016 to the beginning of April 2017. It’s an extension of an ongoing project of Bulkeley’s, first set forth in his 2008 book American Dreamers: What Dreams Tell Us about the Political Psychology of Conservatives, Liberals, and Everyone Else.
You can find Bulkeley’s Trump dossier among the rich resources of his “Sleep and Dream Database” by clicking on “Word Searching” in the menu at the top of the home page, then opening the drop-down menu in the “(1) Choose survey(s)” question. As you scroll down the menu, you’ll see “Trump Dreams 2016-2017.” Select that, and click the “Search” button at the bottom of the page. And there it will be.
The first thing that will leap out at you as you read is how many of the dreams are sexual. “I had a dream that I was dating Donald Trump,” says a 33-year-old woman in the very first item of the collection. “I was very embarrassed about it, But I explained it by saying that his parents treated him very poorly and that’s why he acted out for attention” (2/18/16).
Or a 47-year-old woman: “I dreamt that I was dating Donald Trump. I guess it was at the point of the dating process where you proceed to sex, cause that is what the Donald was wanting. … I was grappling with how I got myself into this situation, that I was actually dating Trump and how I could possibly tell my brother, without being mortified, cause I knew he would find that idea horrific. As did I. All I was thinking, how can I get out of this?! The thought of having sex with Trump made me sick to my stomach” (3/6/16).
This initial impression, I must add, is a bit misleading. By my rough and ready count, some 30% of the Trump dreams before the election involve sex. This drops to something like 25% after the election, which I don’t suppose is a huge proportion, although I’d be curious to know how it compares with the numbers in the Obama dreams that have been collected. But it squares with the image that Trump has, that he’s spent much of his life cultivating, of an unrestrained and successful libertine.
Nor is Trump known for restraining his aggressive impulses, and it’s not surprising that the theme of violence crops up fairly often. “He was trying to drown me, holding my face under water! I would fight him and come up for air, I remember thinking his little fingers aren’t strong enough I can get out of the water if I try hard enough! When I broke free and pulled my head out of the water I was rolling over on my side [in bed]. Each time I returned to my back the dream repeated itself” (3/9/16, 46-year-old woman).
All three of the women quoted in the past few paragraphs give their political orientation as liberal, which helps explain why they chose Trump as a screen on which to project their fears and revulsions. Not all the dreams share their image of him as frightening or repellently lecherous. For at least one 18-year-old “conservative” girl (8/3/16), his lust was appealing. “We started making out and I was kissing his neck and he was kissing mine and I never gasped so sharply in a dream.” (But then dream-Trump, whose wife was on the scene, refused to make love to the dreamer because she wasn’t decently dressed.)
A number of dreamers reported being pleasantly surprised by dream-Donald’s kindness, his helpfulness. A 15-year-old Polish boy–the only non-American in the file? I’m not sure–who gave his political orientation as “progressive,” wrote that his dream was brief, “but it was a very good dream that I much enjoyed. I was shaking God Emperor Trump’s hand, and we exchanged some kind words, however I can no longer remember what those words were” (10/30/16).
So Trump is a “God Emperor,” and a benevolent one. That’s one extreme in the recasting of the man as something supernatural. As the other extreme, take this dream from 9/28/16, by a “progressive” 55-year-old woman in California:
“In my dream, I was in bed at home at night feeling comfortable. In the dream, I was woken from my sleep by a figure wrapped in a dark sheet who came into my room. I thought it was my sister. The figure got into bed with me, to my left. I couldn’t get back to sleep, because I felt very distracted by this person. I got annoyed and told the person to move to the other side – my right side. The figure moved, but then got too close to me. I realized how disgusting it smelled. It then got on top of me and tried to kiss me. I realized it wasn’t my sister, but a dark shadowy male figure. I couldn’t make out his face. I tried to scream in the dream, but words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. I was paralyzed with fear. I was able to say, ‘Get away from me.’ I woke actually moaning in real life, ‘Get away from me’ over and over. And as soon as I woke, feeling panicked, I knew the entity had been a combination of Trump and the figure of Death.”
This sounds a little like some UFO abduction stories, and naturally I was interested to see if Trump is ever associated with UFOs or extraterrestrials. (I’ve posted twice–click here and here–on the surprising new respectability UFOs have enjoyed in the liberal media since Trump’s election, and have speculated there’s a connection between the two. As far as I know, Trump has never, unlike Hillary Clinton, expressed any opinion or interest in UFOs.)
The answer is no, at least in the Bulkeley file. Other supernatural or borderline supernatural entities, however, do sometimes get linked to him.
He becomes the Devil in a dream reported on 11/26/16 by a 23-year-old California woman who describes herself–surprise!–as a conservative. “I was having a conversation with Trump but I saw his hands being goat hands. I was in shock, then I recall , the devil has one goat hand and one chicken. … I’m scared … frightened by the goat hands Trump had. … So at the very end I prayed because that’s what I always do to get myself out of a danger. I prayed and prayed until I finally woke up. So here I am. Thank you. Please help.”
Or, he’s a witch-hunter, in a dream of 11/19/16, when the Mueller investigation hadn’t yet begun and presumably no one had thought to speak of a “witch-hunt.” “My girlfriend and I were in a parking garage where a bunch of illegal immigrants were hiding their children in their cars so that they wouldn’t get deported, until Trump walked up to them threateningly and started digging through their cars to find the kids. At the very end, Trump suddenly thought that my girlfriend was a witch, which violated one of this decrees he had made earlier, and the two of us and him had an insane duel.” The dreamer was an 18-year-old Texas boy who called himself, politically, a “moderate.”
In a dream of a 60-year-old “progressive” woman (8/3/16), which mentions Trump not by name but by clear allusion, he’s “a slumbering monster … looming … like a rock growing out of a wall of a building in a city.”
A “liberal” 18-year-old girl has an “apocalyptic dream about the end of the world and zombies – and Donald Trump was in it.” The dreamer is playing cards with Trump and Idris Elba when “someone asked Donald why he bleached his hair when everyone knew he had natural brown hair. He immediately lost it started yelling and pointing and then left. After his departure, the hallway lights began to flicker like crazy and that’s when everyone in the dream realized the zombies were coming. We all started running and that’s when I woke up” (8/22/16).
A politically “moderate” 45-year-old woman in Missouri (11/15/16): “Last night I dreamed Donald Trump was standing in front of a huge mirror with a white dress shirt and trousers. I clearly see his reflection. Next, he puts on his red tie and black jacket. His reflection disappears. I begun screaming. It alarmed me so much, I started screaming the blood of Jesus. My husband woke me up. He asked what was I dreaming. I said, “Donald Trump had no reflection in the mirror.” My husband asked me, “What scripture?” He knows God gives me scriptures in my sleep. I replied, “Ephesians 1:3″ As he read it, I went back to sleep.”
Since Bram Stoker’s Dracula, vampires have had no reflection in mirrors. The woman’s “scripture,” however, doesn’t seem to have any bearing on this. Ephesians 1:3 reads: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ.” How did she link that to the action of the dream, I wonder?
Finally, a 200th Trump dream to add to Bulkeley’s dossier. The dreamer is a 70-year-old man in North Carolina, moderate to liberal politically, deeply conservative in his sensibilities; this latter trait, more than the politics, accounts for the revulsion Trump evokes in him. I quote from my diary entry of 1/20/17, the day of the inauguration:
“I dreamed a few days ago that I met Trump, talking with him as we walked; he struck me as a reasonable man. It was also part of the dream that the election he won was only a dry run; in the real election, Hillary was still favored. To say that all of this is wish fulfillment is too obvious to be worth saying. If only either part were true.”
There. You know my biases. If you’re inclined in the contrary direction–do you also dream of Trump?
If so, what dreams? Let’s build up the dossier.
by David Halperin
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