Dreams of Taylor Swift

The other night, somewhere in its dark middle, I woke from an unusual dream. Deep in that imaginative but unconscious landscape, my mind had conjured an unusual evening for me: In a small concert hall, while a band of some kind played on the stage in front of me, I was hanging out with Taylor Swift. It was not a long dream, and there’s no point bothering you with the rest of it, but it was not the first time for Tay Tay and me. A few months ago - I can’t remember exactly when - I dreamt that I was watching Taylor walk into an enormous arena. She had security guards with her but, as she strode towards the stage, she quickly morphed into dozens of identical Taylors - so many that it was impossible to know which one of them was Tru-Tay.

Let’s not get into what you think these dreams mean to me (that would make me uncomfortable; who knows what you might say?). Clearly Taylor symbolises something that my unconscious thinks I should be paying attention to (many Taylors…it can’t be hard). The more interesting question is Why Taylor? More pressingly, how many of us are dreaming about her?

The experience sent me to my bookshelf to retrieve Kay Turner’s edited collection, I Dream of Madonna (1993). In the late Eighties and early Nineties, women all over the planet were dreaming regularly of the Queen of Pop. And why not? She was an international juggernaut, one of the most famous and recognisable people on the planet. She was, they said, ‘a feminist icon’, although it was never clear which kind of feminism they were ascribing to her. But it made sense that women, looking at Madonna, would see something in her. I know I did and in the early Nineties I dreamt about her too. It was the Brando-esque leathers for Justify My Love that got my attention, I confess. In the bathroom of Pepper’s Pizza in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, you could have a quiet pee while Madonna, almost life-sized, curled her lip around that delicious-looking cigarette and squeezed her boobs above you. Madonna, like Michael Jackson, or Nelson Mandela, or Pope John Paul II, was instantly recognisable around the world. Why wouldn’t she migrate to the dream-worlds of those who experienced her ubiquity in that global culture?

U.S. Presidents have always found their way into the dreamscapes of their own and others’ citizens. Former President Barack Obama was often a welcome, if confusing, addition to a night’s sleep - I certainly dreamt about him a lot during his tenure. More recently, it has been That Fucking Guy, the current occupier of the Oval Office, who has invaded dreams the world over. It was such a feature of his first term, the New Yorker wrote about it, reminding us that Germany dreamt of Hitler throughout the Thirties and into the Second World War.

Carl Jung is known for his theory of the collective unconscious - a realm of archetypes, memories and knowledge shared, somehow innately, by all human beings. For Jung, these show up in every culture’s unique folklore, fairy tales, creation myths and parables. They demonstrate a psychic, almost spiritual connection between all humans - a shared imaginary of stories and character types that help us describe and understand ourselves. In his writing, Jung argues that our dream-worlds are the access point for the knowledge to be found in the collective unconscious.

I’ve always found the notion of the collective unconscious appealing but not because I’m a fan of fairytales. I’m more interested in what humanity is thinking and feeling at any given moment, what is influencing those feelings and thoughts, and how they are expressed. In my twenties, I often recorded my dreams. Living in Sydney in the late Nineties, I kept dream diaries in preference to my usual journal. I still have them, of course. Looking back at them now, reading these dream-world encounters, they help me recall real-life events from the time. Some of those dreams spring vividly to mind at their description. I remember, for instance, dreaming about singing with Bono and U2, but I also remember the humdrum dreams where the cast of characters included my real-life Australian work colleagues and friends.

But critically, throughout my dreaming life, I have slipped into conversations and encounters with some of the world’s most famous people. These cultural figureheads (whether I admired them or not) have strolled into my dreamscapes to converse, sing, argue, or hang out - always unbidden. Records of Madonna dreams, Reddit queries about the meaning of Obama in the dream-world, dream encounters with popes, prime ministers and film stars recalled on social media or in the pages of our most esteemed journals of psychology, all speak to this as a wider phenomenon - a modern, culture-driven collective unconscious.

But really, when we think about it, the cast list is reducing. How many truly global figures remain? Our national cultural lives are barely holding together as we squint and hunch over the blue-light of our individual devices. Internationally, only a tiny few break through into global recognition. In decades past, it was possible for Madonna to live in the minds of billions. Trump lives there now - mostly because we cannot bear to deprive him of the thing that he most craves and partly because all U.S. presidents are, in the end, figures of global influence for good or ill. But who else? Beyoncé? Cruise? Putin? Beckham?

But then there’s Taylor. She’s been there for a decade and a half, of course - and every die hard fan has rolled their eyes and sighed as the rest of the world catches up with their idol - but there she is, quite suddenly ubiquitous, discussed, admired, gazed upon. And there she is, entering the collective unconscious - entering mine.

Unbidden - but oddly welcome.