In a world where psychoanalysis is largely out of favour, it's nice to hear that some people are still inclined to ascribe significance to dreams. Alastair Campbell has tweeted what he rather quaintly refers to as his "first iPhone dream".
My first iPhone dream. Was teaching Bill Keegan of Observer to use one and the keys all fell into an ice bucket as I touched them
— Alastair Campbell (@campbellclaret) May 23, 2012
I don't know how many iPhone dreams the average user can expect to have, but I'm glad he's over the initial hurdle.
As anyone who has ever attempted to jot down a dream knows, it can be extremely difficult to put your chimerical sleep ideas into words. What makes sense as a warpy dream image often evaporates the minute you try to shoehorn it into a readable sentence. To compress a dream into 140 characters is a cunning feat in itself. Campbell's description is admirably succinct: "My first iPhone dream. Was teaching Bill Keegan of Observer to use one and the keys all fell into an ice bucket as I touched them".
While I'd normally be reluctant to attempt to analyse the dream of someone I know little more about than, "likes the Labour party, writes, swears a lot", he did put it on Twitter so he may very well have expected people to say something back …
It's tempting to see this as a technologised version of the classic teeth-falling-out dream. The standard reading of the teeth dream would be that it's a metaphor for castration. (This, of course, is confusing because castration here is a metaphor in itself. It doesn't mean your nanny threatening to chop your bits off if you touch them; it may simply refer to a general sense that things don't quite hang together.) It wouldn't be at all strange for an iPhone user to conflate their phone with a body part. An iPhone is, after all, basically a prosthetic brain. When I left my iPhone in a hotel bed last summer I had to spend the rest of my holiday barred from access to both useful and useless facts (ferry times, names of Jefferson Starship songs) outraged by the limits of the pathetic piece of meat inside my skull.
In this dream, what's particular about the falling teeth/keys is that they tumble into an ice bucket, in the company of the Observer's senior economist. I wouldn't want to leap to any conclusions about the ice bucket beyond noting that it would generally be for white wine, while the Burnley fan's Twitter name is @campbellclaret, and that he famously doesn't drink. But it can't be an accident that the dream features an economist watching something falling apart. Like most of us, perhaps, Campbell's sleep may be less easy in the face of the fact that global finances are not exactly hanging together.
Whether you consider dreams to be random clusters of recently encountered ideas, deeply meaningful formulations concerning the interface between the external world and our unconscious, or even prophesies of things to come, let's hope Alastair Campbell's next iPhone dream is a little less chilling.
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