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
