FREUDIAN SLIPS AND NIGHTEES

Every night he suffered from the same nightmare and every morning he awoke with the same shame. Everyone told him that there was nothing to worry about. Everyone had bad dreams. Every single person on this planet goes through a bout of recurring nightmares that would shock the horns off the devil's head, his mother had told him, lying through her teeth.

Every night his sleeping self woke to the same scene: he adjusts a brazenly red pair of pantees on a display model in the middle of a shop There is pounding all around him. Located on the crotch in tiny letters is a quote from Freud: "Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity." The pounding continues around him.

He moves towards a rack of sexy stockings which also have quotes from Freud written down the sides: "The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety." He tries to concentrate on these quotes as the pounding becomes deafening.

Turning around he finds a rack of teddies that are coated completely in text from the Interpretation of Dreams. His heart pounds in tune with the banging around him.

Finally he looks up from the literate lingerie to face the pounding around him: all the women in his life from co-workers to cousins and previous girl-friends to great-grandmothers are pressed against the four glass walls of the lingerie shop. They have fists full of money and they are screaming silently through the glass. Focusing on their lips, their words become apparent: we're not wearing anything underneath. They just chant this over and over.

He realizes that he will have to clothe their skin and that's when his sleeping self passes out into consciousness.

Once again he woke up with a face that turned beat red. Once again his body was filled with stress. Once again he failed to find the obvious answer.