He had a castration dream this evening, and surprisingly it gave him some strange relief. He could remember that he experienced physical pain and visceral horror in the dream, but such negative affects immediately disappeared when he woke up, and he was puzzled to find that he was filled with a peculiar sense of liberation, a liberation that was fake and empty. He tried to explain this bizarre event, and finally came up with the following interpretation. Throughout the afternoon he was trapped in deep depression and afflicted by the uselessness of what he was doing--this anxious state was chronic last several months. And then the castration dream came to affirm this negative feeling. Literally castrated, he was saved from anxiety, because now it became evident that he was indeed incapable, that there was a good reason why he was such an unproductive, meaningless creature. He was freed from the unnerving question of whether or not he was capable of writing. The dream fulfilled his wish of being proven futile and barren. But the trouble was that the dream, or the wish-fulfillment in/by it, didn't change reality at all. In front of him were drafts to be written, edited, and completed, waiting for him to work on. And now he was wondering if he could recover courage, after having declared himself that he was impotent, to once again dive into that bottomless marsh of anxiety, undo the fulfilled wish, and reaffirm his puissance.
