Dreaming & Storytelling

The following image and explanation from Bert O. States is helpful to me in understanding what Hillman may be trying to get us to see in the relationship between dreaming and interpreting or refusing to interpret. His words are as follows:

Once upon a time there was a clever fellow who worked in a factory that manufactured wheelbarrows. One day it occurred to him that he might improve his lot if he could somehow smuggle wheelbarrows out of the factory and sell them privately on the open market. But – how to get them past the main gate? Then a plan struck him. Why not simply fill the wheelbarrow with debris from the plant and wheel it straight past the gatekeeper in broad daylight? He did this and it worked, and he went on to become a modestly successful retailer of stolen goods.

This story serves as an allegory for two different ways of looking at dreaming and, by extension, storytelling at large.

Psychoanalytic: the gatekeeper might stand for the censor at the gate of the pre-conscious whose duty it is, in psychoanalytic theory, to protect the sleeper from disturbing thoughts rising form the unconscious. The worker-thief would be the id, which is trying to outwit the censor; the wheelbarrow would be the latent (or hidden) dream content obscured by its load of debris, and the debris itself would be the manifest content, or what we actually see and experience when we dream.

The alternative: The other reading requires that you see the allegory from an entirely different perspective. The wheelbarrow, the debris, and the worker-thief would all constitute a single unity – that of the dream process itself: the brain working in the moonlight after the body has been shut down for the night, hauling its strange load of daytime and lifetime experience to and fro for purposes we do not yet understand, each night different in kind, yet each night much the same in certain ways…Finally, the gatekeeper could be any of us: the waking person who has dreamed from childhood on, …who no more thinks about what dreaming is than the gatekeeper ponders the mystery of the wheelbarrow.