On the Personal Dreams of the General Public by Toye Oladinni

“I kept having such horrible nightmares that blood was coming out of my mouth,” Candace Bushnell admitted to dream analyst Lauren Lawrence in the early 2000s. Bushnell’s Sex and the City column later became the basis of one of prime time’s most popular shows. Through her alter ego, Carrie Bradshaw, Bushnell and her lifestyle are adored by millions. Lawrence didn’t interpret the dream the way you or I would; his reading may be colored by his own flattery. Scary? No: the dream is “hot and bold.” The gore that comes out of Bushnell’s mouth is a blessing meaning his writing is “pure and true” and, happily for his career, it repeats itself every night implying that he “will never run out of creative ideas.” This is all wonderful news, but there’s one problem: The dream was clearly a nightmare. Lawrence never addresses Bushnell’s subconscious horrors. For all he knew, it probably didn’t exist.

The dream was one of dozens collected in Lawrence’s 2002 coffee table book, Personal Dreams of the General Public. There is a paradox here: once they were published en masse, of course, the dreams ceased to be personal, but the appeal of such exposure was the main selling point of the compilation. Even though it comes from a phantasmagoric world, Personal Dream follow a clear format. Each celebrity was placed into a category (“Society Dreamer,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” “Entrepreneurial Dreamer”). Each dream is followed by Lawrence’s analysis. Lawrence, who has an MA in psychology, built his career in the field of public dream interpretation, as a dream columnist for the magazine New York Daily News and on the A&E show entitled Celebrity Nightmares Decoded.

Lawrence solicited dream entries straight from stars like Paris Hilton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Cyndi Lauper, Kate Moss, and vice presidential runner-up Joseph Lieberman. Donald Trump rejected it. (“I have no time to sleep let alone dream,” he says in the Declination section. “I am too busy rebuilding my kingdom.”) In it he adds several dream descriptions taken from Mode, heand, for Martin Luther King Jr., the History Channel. I’ll never quite figure out how Lawrence got on America’s A-list to achieve success in his book, but a late and casual reference, in an analysis of one of his dreams, to being “driven around town in my Rolls-Royce” and doing “major damage to my husband’s American Express card” filled in some of the gaps. In 2002, the price list Personal Dream—now out of print—cost thirty-five dollars, but in the introduction, Lawrence promises something priceless: This book will transcend “the phallic lens of the paparazzi…which purports to marry the intangible form of fame.” This will actually allow us to “climb into bed with celebrity thoughts and lean into the glittering, brightly lit unconscious.”

Lawrence’s lurid prose makes it clear that this is a fantasy he hopes his readers will share. In the early 2000s, he could talk about fame in these frankly intimate terms, not as a crazed fan or supporter, but in a mass-produced glossy book that invited the public to sleep with the celebrities he felt comfortable with. In Yukio Mishima’s novel Starthe sex symbol narrator, let down by his rabid fans, confesses that he would “rather have a girl masturbating somewhere in my photo than actually trying to sleep with me.” Personal Dream exchanging similar exhaustion for a more face-to-face form of intimacy. Gay Talese calls the safe parasocial book a “playful invasion of privacy,” in a blurb on the back cover.

The photos in this book are pure projections of power and status. Juliette Binoche is the cover girl. His eyes were closed, his head was tilted back, and his hands were in his hair. The lip gloss was so perfect that I thought it might rub off on my fingers when I took the book out of its packaging. Logically I know that I must have come across photos like this before, but I don’t remember them. Artifacts from this early period contain no connection at all. I can only see it anthropologically, like the carvings of pharaohs on the walls. Placing a truly strange and vulnerable dream story next to this incredibly brilliant image produces a strange effect that only a celebrity can understand. Star 9/11 trauma dream interior decorator Mario Buatta printed on a photo of himself on a messy table, radiant, surrounded by lush fabrics. In his recurring nightmares of another attack on New York, the second time around was even more apocalyptic: “bombs exploded” and “large water bugs” swarmed the city. “For Buatta,” reflects Lawrence, “a world-renowned interior decorator whose livelihood was based on creating beautiful interiors, the destruction of the exterior facade was especially threatening because it was seen as an attack on his sense of aesthetics.”

Wearing a light blue cowboy shirt, Madonna cradles a horse’s snout alongside a nightmarish description of killing her unborn child. “You pushed too hard, and the baby died,” said Madonna’s doctor. The psychic camera panned, and from inside her womb Madonna watched as “the baby broke away from the placenta and floated in my belly.” Chris Kattan dreams that his mother doesn’t notice her parked car rolling down a mountain with him in it—a metaphor for the anxiety of losing the spotlight. Lawrence concluded his analysis by promising: “Mr Kattan, we will never get tired of watching it.” Chris Kattan’s latest big role is as the voice of Alligator #1 in the 2023 Netflix film Leo. But when I read his promise, I believed him.

Meet Personal DreamA combination of brilliant greed and incredible sincerity, I was surprised that these two qualities defined celebrity culture at the time the book was released. Later, the cult of the rich and famous occupied a central place in mass culture. A quarter century later, much of the corporate media built on the logic of celebrity worship and terrorism has collapsed or become irrelevant. The public that these magazines and tabloids rely on has been algorithmically cut to ribbons, and the fame that comes with it, distributed, in small fiefdoms, to streamers and influencers. Celebrities often desire an unmediated relationship with fans, which results in strategic banality. We may discover freely expressed dreams just by scrolling through their feeds: they no longer seem so far away. Personal DreamThe underlying logic is that voyeuristic joy—now no longer guilt-free, no longer pleasurable—takes on a kind of luster that no longer exists.

Sometimes Lawrence applies conventional wisdom to the dreams he analyzes. About Tyson Beckford’s basketball dreams, he notes that “almost all men’s dreams of putting the ball in the hole usually have a sexual meaning.” Sometimes the dreams themselves follow convention: George Plimpton’s entry is simply “In fragments of my dreams there will be trials or examinations which I have forgotten.” You can’t squeeze much out of that. More often, however, Lawrence directs his analysis to the dreamer’s profession, or to what he knows directly about the dreamer’s personal life or character. This gives the book a glimpse of real intimacy. The first line of Elvis’ entry reads:

I dreamed that the Presley Brothers were performing. My twin brother Jesse and I were on stage, both wearing white jumpsuits with guitars slung over our shoulders. He’s a lot like me, only he can sing better.

This is the first time I’ve heard of Elvis’ brother being stillborn. The account was accompanied by a blurry, signed image of the singer flanked by friends wearing brown trousers; it felt like a ghost. Lawrence’s analysis focuses on “the spiritual quest: to become one with a celestial being in the hope of joining one’s twin on the other side.” A spiritual quest! I felt hiding behind the booth during Elvis’ Catholic confession, that I should close the book. The guitars slung over his and his brother’s shoulders, he says, are “symbolic wings” that, along with the white jumpsuits, express his desire for “wisdom and spiritual purity,” whose youthfulness feels almost indecent. I can’t help but see his dream as a tragic desire to return to innocence, something that comes out of the final act of the Mob movies, especially in contrast to the Vegas narcotics and geriatric masculinity that I associate with Elvis in his later years. The dreams, photographs, and analysis somehow combined to produce in me a deeply intimate encounter with one of the most ubiquitous cultural figures of the 20th century.

The dead appear more glamorous in Andy Warhol’s dream of Marilyn Monroe. He was allowed to return to earth for a day; they went to see the show. She fretted because she was wearing a metallic green dress and that it was a “beauty mistake”—in the strong theater lighting, the dress cast “a green light all over her skin” (“Marilyn was still the center of attention,” Lawrence said). Andy urges him to gossip heavenly about the famous deceased. He refuses. Instead, she tells him she’s saving it for a book. Andy was angry: “I said, Look Marilyn, you’re only here for one day! How can you write a book?” He didn’t budge. At home, he looks for a mirror to determine his age, so he can find out what year it is. His phone rings, and he wakes up.

Warhol’s concern about Marilyn committing “beauty mistakes,” even when she was dead, even when she was asleep, is pure gold. His subconscious is the same as in the films: he has a strange, gentle neurosis, an equally damp arrogance. Lawrence sees his search for self-reflection as an indicator that his “self-knowledge is failing.” But the moment in the dream when Andy was most recognizable to me was when he lost all sense of who he was—or rather, who he was supposed to be. It takes an audience to remind him, even if it’s just one audience. We never find out if he’s old or not, which is perfect. He remains a human symbol in a symbolic world, a collection of art, intrusion, and anxiety. He remains a celebrity.

Toye Oladinni is a writer from London. His short stories and essays have appeared in BestowThat London Review of Books, Degradation Readerand elsewhere.