Dreams Dreams Dreams

" Yeah, but don't you think that.. that if you write minutely and rigorously enough about your own life... you can, you know, transcend your particular self?"

If "Fun Home" is a cerebral deconstruction of the artificial and external influences on the narrator,  "Are You My Mother" picks up where this leaves off, to see what lies beneath. It's the psychological autopsy.   "Are you My Mother" is structured and titled as a kind of graphic Jungian analysis;  each chapter title sounds ripped from the pages of some psychoanalytical texts (True and False Self, The Use of an Object, etc.)  and begins with the narrator's raw dreams in an attempt to unpack her subconscious.  

The dream sequences are somewhat liberated from the form of the rest of the book, although they create their own pattern within the larger text, through repetition. They are drawn broadly, as if there is more room for interpretation. Bechdel uses vaguer, simpler language and sentences.  There are comic book sound effects, "Slam!" "Clunk!" and the action of the dream is told against black drop and feature the narrator herself at some time floating outside the main frames of the story.  We always know we are in a dream when the pattern repeats. 

Bechdel's dreams are specific but by including them she achieves her goal of "being more universal" (page 198). In dreams ordinary extraordinary things happen, and we've all had them. 

In Chapter 1, titled  "Ordinary Mother" (as opposed to say, the Great Mother, a Jungian archetype), Bechdel dreams of a blocked exit. The dream raises feelings of panic and surrender that lead to questions she will answer throughout the rest of the chapter.  The dream also includes totems of the subconscious that will be revisited throughout the book, creating a sense of discovery/deja vu for the reader as well as the narrator in the multilayered way we have come to expect from this author.  (S-P-I) 

Here's a typical Jungian quote about dreams,  which is mostly gratuitous: 

The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.

CARL JUNG, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man

Here dreams are defined as deeper windows to the soul than say, eyes. Bechdel makes much of mirrors, and so do the therapists and the texts, but she gives dreams prominence. 

In Chapter 2, Transitional Objects, the spider theme (web)  becomes more elaborate, and again Bechdel notes the feeling that the dream gives her. (In this chapter "tingling exhilaration")  The feelings become an emotional thread that the story and the psychoanalysis hangs on. (S-P-I) 

In Chapter 3, True and False Self, Bechdel describes an ordinary "no pants" dream, wherein she transfers to her therapist and betrays a subconscious wish for the physical touch her mother has denied her. 

In 4, Mind: Bechdel's lover suggests the key to the dream.   Again, the feelings: "As she leaves with my pants, I feel as secure and happy as I have ever been."  The dream panels again are uncluttered, the text is minimal, the shadow of a tree outside the apartment is barely there. 

In 5. Hate: The author clings to a cliff that turns out (through the process of discovery =melting ice) to be her childhood home.  This chapter goes right to the core, deconstructing the relationship between the narrator and her mother, the narrator and her mentor,  the narrator and herself, all mothers and infants...  It's a wild chapter that I feel I can barely hang on to, where the author must come to separate/ reject her mother in order to be and live and work and love herself.  I love the lifted Winnicott (p. 174) , the list of "Some of the reasons a mother hates her baby": especially E: "The baby is an Interference with her Private Life" And how!

In 6. Mirror:  The narrator's mother takes up nearly every frame of the dream. From corset laces to bodice to full length in period costume, as if to say the mother is as inescapable as one's own image in a mirror. 

Here's another Jung quote for chapter 6: 

"The dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter,
stage manager, author, audience, and critic" (General Aspects of Dream
Psychology)

In Mirror, Bechdel plays with the analysis, suggesting to the reader that everyone in the narrator's dream is an aspect, or reflection of herself. And everything. It seems that Alison, of the red shirt, is trying to tell herself something, in her mother's red sores, the red alarm clock, the red word, "laden". 

Laden, no kidding. By the time we get to the pimple and Stonehenge, in Chapter 7, The Use of an Object,   I'm tempted to say: I'm afraid we have to stop,  Alison... I'll see you next week. 

But oh wait, the P.S. 

The Crippled Child story panels at the very end cleverly wrap up the unfinished business from Chapter 5, Hate,  (Page 200) when the narrator interrupts a conversation with her mother to describe an anecdote from Winnicott. For this Bechdel employs the black dream panel format, perhaps because the memory is not specific and mostly imagined, it is like a waking dream. Also, it is guiding her, as her other dreams have, this time, right out of this book.