The Dream of The Broken Horses

by William Bayer

  A year or so into the marriage, her pleasure in having sex with A began to diminish. By the second year, each had discreetly taken on a lover, accepted practice in their circle.^5

  Together she and A had three children, two sons and a daughter. Then, eight years into her marriage, her three-year-old daughter, Belle, was snatched by her live-in au pair. The au pair turned up dead, and although the little girl was never seen again, Mrs. F was convinced she was still alive.

  Mrs. F was frantic. She made immense efforts to find her missing daughter, including, when law-enforcement officials admitted they were stymied, hiring private investigators, fortune-tellers, psychics, anyone she thought could help. She was also racked with guilt, blaming herself for Belle's abduction. “If I'd been home taking care of my children the way a decent mother should… if I hadn't been so spoiled by A's money that I entrusted my children to that horrible woman… if I hadn't been spending so much of my time screwing everything in trousers…” Resigned, she added: “Well, I guess I got what was coming to me. You know. Punishment for my sins.”

  When asked whom she thought was punishing her in this way, she had no ready answer. “I don't know. God, I suppose.” When asked if she genuinely believed that the tragedy of her daughter's disappearance (and presumed death) was commensurate with the sins she thought she'd committed, she shrugged off the query. “Rationally, no, of course not.” But still, whenever she mentioned the event, which she termed “the central tragedy of my life,” she spoke of it in such a way as to suggest she believed the crime had been directed personally against her.^6

  It was approximately six weeks after the abduction that Mrs. F had a certain vivid dream for the first time, a dream she described as “a sex dream” and which she came to call “The Dream of the Broken Horses.” She dreamt this dream in several variations over a period of five years. It was the repetition of the dream, its haunting quality, and her belief that it contained an encoded message pertaining to the whereabouts of her abducted daughter that had, she said, brought on her decision to undergo psychoanalysis. It was her hope, she said, that analysis might lead to the decoding of her dream or at least to an interpretation that would free her from its terrifying power.

  THE DREAM: Mrs. F recounted the dream during her first session. Later she would recount it in other variations. In each case, though, the matrix would remain the same but certain particulars (such as genders, locales, colors, times of day) would be changed and even reversed. When asked about these variations, Mrs. F insisted that this was the way she dreamt, i.e., sometimes she would be wearing a red lower garment, at other times would be naked, etc.

  *5 “We weren't swingers or wife swappers or anything tacky as that,” Mrs. F explained, “but in our crowd we all had covert affairs outside our marriages. This added spice and the sneaking around was fun, all the hushed phone calls and secret meetings in out-of-the-way places. My husband enjoyed it as much as I, and when he and I had sex, it was always in the background. I'm pretty sure it added to his excitement. I know it did to mine.”

  *6 In one session, Mrs. F related her fantasy that Belle, still alive, was working as a child sex slave in a whorehouse catering to sailors. “She could be paying for my sins even as we speak,” she added tearfully.

  This was so odd that the possibility had to be considered that Mrs. F was unconsciously inventing these variations to screen the essential dream and thus render it opaque. It also suggested a great richness of meanings, strata that would have to be explored level by level before the essential underlying meaning would be revealed.

  In a footnote to the famous The Case of the Wolfman, Freud wrote: ‘It is always a strict law of dream interpretation that an explanation must be found for every detail.’ But the founder offered no practical approach to interpretation of a dream such as the one under discussion here, in which the details appear to be in a state of flux. This taking both views into account, I determined that Mrs. F's first rendition was the most important, the die or mold, so to speak, from which all the later recounted variations were cast:

  It's dusk. I'm riding a black horse, a stallion. I'm wearing red jodhpurs with nothing underneath, feeling the warmth and muscularity of my horse in my sex. At first I'm riding alone on a prairie with mountains in the background. Then other riders join me from behind, hooded men in black garments whose face I cannot see. We become a kind of posse, with me in the lead, though soon I notice two of the other riders gaining on my flanks. I try to escape them. All our horses are frothing from the exertion. I want to be the lead rider. Then suddenly I realize we are not a posse; they are the posse and I am their quarry. Terrified, I drive my heels into the flanks of my horse, slash at his shoulders with my crop, and surge ahead. Soon I'm flying fast. My horse if foaming at the mouth. When I touch him I can feel his sweat and can also feel my own wetness in my crotch. I turn to see the posse falling behind. Then, suddenly, the horses in the posse begin to break up. Legs snap and crumble, heads fall off at the neck, riders are thrown to the ground as the horses, which now no longer appear to be living creatures but rather made of something hard and brittle like clay or bronze, tumble and crash, breaking apart like fallen statues. At last, free of the threat, I feel released and victorious. But then I discover that my own horse is breaking apart too. This is when I always wake up, sexually aroused, panting, heart beating rapidly, nightgown and sheets drenched with sweat.”

  Variations recounted at other times: * Mrs. F, rather than wearing red jodhpurs, wears flesh-colored ones, or rides bottomless, or rides topless while wearing red jodhpurs; * Rather than being pursued by a posse, a sole faceless, hooded horseperson is in pursuit, revealed to be a woman when the wind blows the hood back from the pursuer's face, revealing in turn that the hood is lined with flaming red fabric; * The pursuit takes place in a Western desert, or along a dangerous narrow winding path up into hills, or on a dangerous steep descent; * The dream takes place against a sky blood-red from the setting sun with very long shadows cast up the sands, or upon a moonlit rocky landscape at night; * There is someone riding ahead of her, someone she, in turn, is pursuing, someone frightening whom she cannot see except for occasional glimpses from the rear; * She has an orgasm at the moment her own horse breaks apart.

  ANALYSIS: Before discussing Mrs. F's associations to this rich lode of dream material, it might be well, in terms of clarification, to anticipate certain questions.

  In response to my query "Why do you believe this dream has anything to do with your daughter's disappearance and present whereabouts?" Mrs. F repeated that she'd dreamt it for the first time shortly after Belle's abduction. “Also, it's so mysterious I always assumed there was a connection; after all, finding Belle was the only thing that mattered to me then.” When asked in a follow-up whether she believed dreams contain hidden messages, she replied with a question of her own: “Isn't that what you analysts believe?”

  In the ensuing discussion about the nature of dreams, their relevance as internal messages, windows into the unconscious processes of the dreamer as opposed to coded messages from an external source, Mrs. F showed herself fully aware of the difference. But she stated that although she had never thought of herself as particularly superstitious, the crisis of Belle's disappearance had opened her to such paranormal notions as telepathy. “I guess maybe I'm like a terminal cancer patient holding out for some kind of miracle cure. I so need to find Belle if she's still alive that I'll hang on to anything that offers me the slightest hope.”

  With this in mind, despite doubts that the actual dream content (as opposed to the emotional crisis state in which the dream was dreamt) had anything to do with Belle, I nevertheless told Mrs. F, in hopes of motivating her to work hard on the interpretation, that her dream, properly interpreted, might convey some message pertaining to Belle, a message from her unconscious that she already knew but hadn't yet been able to face. To this Mrs. F responded with a knowing nod. “If my dream tells me I must give up my search, I'm prepared to accept that. But
first I must be convinced.”

  Mrs. F's numerous associations to the dream material poured out of her over several sessions in what can only be described as a torrent. The dream's central image – the transformation of the horses from creatures of sinew and blood into brittle, breakable horse statues – reminded her, she said, of the broken agonized horse in Picasso's great painting, "Guernica," which had transfixed her when she'd first seen it in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Every time I'm in New York, I go to see it again. I don't know why I'm so fascinated by it, because the Spanish Civil War context doesn't interest me much. I think it's just that horse, his pain, you know… since I love horses and always have. Yes, that's what kills me – his agony, his pain.”

  Since even a cursory look at a reproduction of "Guernica" suggests the twisted broken horse is female^7 (no visible external genitalia), this gender confusion, so reminiscent of Mrs. F's distress when her riding instructor, G, referred to the filly she was riding as ‘him,’ suggested the possibility that much of the dream might be connected to G, perhaps to relations between them that Mrs. F had repressed.

  When asked to free-associate to her vision of red jodhpurs, Mrs. F replied immediately that this was her sex. “That's why I'm sometimes bottomless bottomless in the dream,” she said. “For me being bottomless and wearing red jodhpurs (and I've never seen jodhpurs that color) amount to the same thing. And of course riding a horse makes me feel sexy, not just in the dream but in real life too. I adore horses and all that, but I think the reason I still ride is the sexy way it makes me feel.”

  After more discussion, I pointed out that red was the only vivid color in her dream. Everything else – hooded men, horses, the terrain – was either muted or black. But not only were her jodhpurs red; in one of the variations, the pursuing posse consisted of a woman wearing a flaming red lined hood and in another variation the sky was blood red. To this Mrs. F responded: “So red must stand for blood. I wonder…,” she said, again associating the dream with something G had said, “… might that be blood from my ‘wound’?”^8

  Associating to the concept of a woman's sex as a wound, Mrs. F recounted more about how her mother had conveyed revulsion when warning her of the agonies of menstruation. “She always called it ‘the curse’ and told me it was a punishment for sexual thoughts and acts. Of course, I knew a lot about it already. There was endless talk about it at school. I also remember when I was little and came across her tampons and asked her what they were, she made up some cover story that I knew was phony. That told me there must be something disgusting about those things, and I knew that if Mom thought something was disgusting it either had to do with going to the bathroom or with sex.^9

  Was this why she called her dream “a sex dream”?

  *7 Many commentators have interpreted the broken horse in the painting as a symbol of the suffering of the Spanish Republic, a feminine entity.

  *8 In an earlier session, Mrs. F described a dream in which she saw herself lying on a snow-white sheet covered with hundreds of droplets of blood. Though, in my view not connected to the recurrent dream under discussion, this second dream seemed most curiously to prophesy her own death scene in that she was killed by pellets fired from a shotgun while lying with her lover on a motel room bed.

  *9 Again, this is reminiscent of Mrs. F's presenting symptom: “I feel injured in my sex.”

  “Yes,” she replied, “and also because I sometime come just at the climax of it. And even when I don't come and am terrified when I wake up, still after dreaming it I almost always feel aroused. Like I said, riding arouses me. I like to have sex that way too – you know, sitting on the man, riding him. That's always been my favorite way of having sex. And of course in the dream I'm on a stallion.”

  What about some of the other imagery in the dream, the references to the pursuing men gaining on her ‘flanks’ and of her driving her heels into ‘the flanks’ of her horse.

  Yes, she agreed, that imagery too was sexual, as was the riding crop.^10 In fact, she said, she'd recently posed for what she called ‘an art photograph’ in riding attire bowing a riding crop between her hands. “I was bare-breasted in it, too,” she added with a giggle, “just like I am sometimes in the dream.”

  At this point, she stated that in her opinion the dream was totally about sex and nothing else. Talking it over with you, I see that. Everything in it is about sex. Everything! The faceless men – often when I have sex with a man I don't see his face. I may be looking at him, staring right into his eyes, but while in the act I don't ‘see’ him at all.”

  There was also the matter of the men's horses breaking apart. “Those are their orgasms,” she said. “They lose their seats, topple over. Once they come they're finished. So am I the horses breaking up beneath them? No, I don't think so. I think they are the horses breaking beneath me. I ride them till they break to bits!”

  What about the sensation of being part of the posse then the sudden frightening realization that she's the one being pursued?

  “Isn't that what sex is like It is for me. Men pursue me all the time. Sometimes I'm out with people when suddenly someone in the group decides to make me his sexual prey. Or I decide to make prey of him.” She laughed. “Actually, more often than not, though they may not know it, it's me who pursues.”

  PATIENT'S SITUATION AT THE TIME OF ANALYSIS: At this point, it might be well to break off from the interpretation of the dream and review Mrs. F's personal situation and the background that led to the start of her analysis.

  She approached me at a social gathering held at the school that our sons attended. She and I had met casually on other occasions, but this was the first time we spoke in private.

  She told me she was interested in undergoing psychoanalysis and asked if she could call me at my office the following day for some professional advice. When she called, she stated she'd decided she wanted to undertake analysis with me “rather than with some ‘perfectly competent’ shrink you might refer me to.”

  An appointment was made to discuss the pros and cons of her seeking treatment with an analyst with whom she shared several social acquaintances. At this meeting, she resisted all suggestions that she follow up on my proffered referrals. “I want you! The truth is we barely know one another and our circles barely touch. The only connection is that our sons attend the same school. Should I be deprived of your analytic skills because of that? Or is there something else? Yes, I think there is! You've heard gossip about me… me and some of my peccadilloes. Well, maybe that's why I need you. Isn't a person in need entitled to the therapist of her choice?”*11

  *10 Mrs. F spoke of having assembled a large collection of riding crops, the most prized of which, she said, was a crop her father had given her when she was a little girl and he first set her on a horse.

  *11 What Mrs. F had said was true: I had heard gossip about her. She was well-known in the community because of the notoriety surrounding Belle's abduction, her activities were regularly reported in the social columns of the local papers, and certain aspects of her behavior, regarded by some as scandalous, were widely discussed. For this reason, I deferred a decision until I could consult on ethical and professional considerations with a colleague, my former training analyst who was also president of the local psychoanalytic institute. After a wide-ranging discussion, this colleague recommended that I accept Mrs. F's suggestion. ‘You certainly have my blessing in the matter. After all, why should the lady be deprived? And if problems do arise, my door is always open for consultation.’

  I bring this up for two reasons: to clarify the record as to all ramifications surrounding treatment, and to put the transference and countertransference issues that arose during therapy into better perspective.

  The gossip to which Mrs. F referred concerned her relationship with a certain notorious local personality. This man, C, owner of a high-class restaurant-nightclub that also had a back room for illegal gambling, was widely believed to have underworld connections. It was also
widely believed that Mrs. F was C's mistress, a fact which Mrs. F confirmed in her second session. In the same session, she stated that her relationship with C was “extremely complex” and that she had thought about breaking it off but was hesitant because C “has this terrible temper” and “he's been known to get violent with women when he thinks they're betraying him.” In response to my query as to whether in fact she was betraying him, she smiled demurely, adding “that depends on what you mean by betrayal.”*12

  As these seductive references arose frequently over the weeks during which her key dream was under interpretation, I made numerous attempts to demonstrate connections between this behavior and the dream content.

  ANALYSIS (continued):

  Having established that ‘everything in the dreams is about sex,’ I reminded Mrs. F of her seduction of her college therapist, Dr. L.

  “Do you think I'm doing the same thing with you?” she asked. Then, in the face of my silence, she offered the following extraordinarily perceptive response to her own query: “If it's true I am, and I can see why you might think so, then there must be some connection to the dream.”

  This was the opening I'd been waiting for, an opportunity to explore the dream at a deeper level. "I'd like you to tell me about the horse you're riding, whatever comes to mind."

  “Well,” she said, “as I've told you, he was a stallion, black, black as night.” She broke off her statement and then, after a brief silence, suddenly turned her head around to meet my eyes. “I know just what you're thinking,” she said, aggressively. Resuming her normal position on the couch, she continued scornfully: “You're thinking “black horse” equals ‘Blackjack’ You'd have me having sex with my father in the dream. That's what all you analysts think we want – to screw our fathers, right?”