An Excremental Dream of The Process of Elimination
Naturally I noticed the likeness of the sewer to human bowels, the pipe itself to a long male member inserted violently into Earth.
THE PROCESS OF ELIMINATION
AN EXCREMENTAL DREAM
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
“I emerge from the subway, climbing the steps to the street above. I see two men in the light above, on the last flight of stairs, hanging in squats from the railing, with their pants down, defecating on the top steps. I ascend and step over the stinking piles of fresh manure, shouting, “Animals!”
So is this my dream the so-called royal road to the unconscious, wherein are the romantic roots of poetic creation growing in repressed memories, imprisoned desires frustrated by civilization, impudent, impermissible, infantile wishes encountering conflict when escape is attempted to repeat some old pleasure?
Sigmund Freud, who tried to apply the scientific principle of cause and effect to psychology, theorized that dreams express the fulfillment of a wish; that is, dreams have a reason, a final cause, a goal. If a patient had a dream that seemed to counter his wish-fulfillment theory, that was obviously because the patient knew about the theory and desired some pleasure from resisting the great master. Freud was indeed right about everything because he fashioned his propositions so that nobody could prove him wrong.
He has his doubts, however, about his monistic theory, and he entertained a dualistic notion, the existence of a death wish countering the will to live. Even so, pleasure prevails, for is not death or the elimination of the body the ultimate relief from the travails of life, and may not this end be violently obtained by relieving oneself of inhibitions? This pleasure for Freud was always erotic although he was careful to contradict himself and deny it from time to time.
By the way, dreams coincident to evacuation are rather common, occurring when a person is almost awake and feels a need for relief. Freud’s famous urination dream is the psychological realization of his grandiose wish for superiority:
Illustration by Gustave Gore
“I urinate upon the bench; a long stream of urine rinses everything clean, the patches of excrement come off easily and fall into the opening. The stream of urine that washes everything clean is an unmistakable allusion to greatness…. It is in this manner that Gulliver extinguishes the great fire in Lilliput; to be sure, he thereby incurs the displeasure of the tiniest of queens. In this way, too, Gargantua, the superman of Master Rabelais, takes vengeance upon the Parisians, straddling Notre-Dame and training his stream of urine upon the city….. The bench is the faithful copy of a piece of furniture of which an affectionate female patient has made me a present. This reminds me how my patients honor me. Even the museum of human excrement is susceptible of a gratifying interpretation. However much it disgusts me, it is a souvenir of the beautiful land of Italy.”
Now to say that my dream expressed the wish for relief from waste does not say why the dream took the form that it did. According to Freud, the manifest or remembered content of my dream has a latent or hidden meaning that I have repressed and in want of interpretation if I am to know its meaning or purpose. Mind you that every thought we symbolic animals have has an intention or purpose. Whether we are aware of it or not, thoughts are always FOR something whether or not we know what they are really ABOUT.
I had clearly obtained the material for my dream from my extensive coverage of the horizontal directional drilling of a 54-inch sewer in South Miami Beach. Desire presents itself symbolically. Naturally I noticed the likeness of the sewer to human bowels, the pipe itself to a long male member inserted violently into Earth. It occurred to me that the waste could be used as fertilizer, or even reprocessed into food. For days on end I had seen drilling mud used to slick up the hole everywhere, and its reclamation by a machine that had two slides on the top to eliminate rocks and the like picked up by the drill head in the whole. Men on the top were dumping bentonite mud into the machine. The head put on the end of the pipe, laid out along several blocks, to pull the pipe through, had an unavoidable analogy. The appearance of the process was rather “nasty.” The proximity of the sexual and eliminative outlets in the body is food for thought.
“This is a lot of work just so 200,000 people can take a healthy dump,” I remarked on the job, much to the amusement of one young engineer.
Not much of an analysis of my dream is needed to explain why the number of men taking a dump at the top of the stairs was two, they being the guys on the mud reclaimer. Something symbolic might be made of the railings along the steps to which we cling as we mount the steps towards the light above.
The new sewer main is completely redundant, built because there was a very small chance, recognized magnetically as an “incipient risk of potential failure,” that the old pipe from the 70s might fail and inundate South Beach in sewage. Some people think the redundant sewer is just another boondoggle.
Actually, I have been concerned with signs of an incipient risk of potential failure of my personal sewer line, which I imagine is getting longer and smaller in diameter. I am too embarrassed to share the details with anyone. I have survived long enough to get Medicare Advantage, yet I abhor going to the doctor. A friend of mine who has not reached that age yet chastised me for not going to the doctor instead of worrying about my incipient signs of potential failure.
Well, I had another dream this morning. I had gone to the doctor’s office, and he was telling me that more tests would have to be taken, but I should get ready to die from colon cancer. At that he nonchalantly reclined on the examining table.
I am both doctor and patient. The dream is prophetic, but prophecies are made to avoid the consequences. To be or not to be is the question for me at this juncture. I wonder what Freud would make of that.
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