bards of bruley

"It might be more plausible to interpret Bruley as commenting on Freudian psychoanalysis -- a topic not very far removed from many of her works. Sigmund Freud, especially in his dream analysis, continually asserted that what clearly and obviously seemed to be an X in a dream was not really an X, that it was an X only patently, on the surface, but not latently or deeply, that the X in the dream represented or was a metaphor for some other thing, Y. The dream-image train is really a penis, for example. So when Bruley draws "A Shower on Deck", what she means is that it may be possible to think that it is only an image that stands for something else, that the phenomenal reality of the elephant trunk obscures or hides the true reality lying underneath. The difficult question, if we go this far, is whether Bruley intended to provide support for or to illustrate sympathetically Freudian dream analysis -- the treachery of dreams -- or, instead, was mocking it. In this humble writers opinion, it could only be mockery and nothing else!" -Les Enfants