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Populär Culture Review
these individual dream-thoughts shows that together they relate a coherent story
that is linked to Mort’s first and third dream. Mort dreams:
He dreamed he was lost in a vast comfield. He blundered from
one row to the next, and the sun glinted off the watches he was
wearing—half a dozen on each forearm, and each watch set to
a different time [...]. Ahead of him, the com on both sides of
the row shook and rustled. Amy stepped out from one side.
John Shooter stepped out from the other. Both of them held
knives. [...] Mort tumed to run, but a hand—Amy’s, he was
sure—seized him by the beit and pulled him back. And then
the knives, glittering in the hot sun of this huge secret garden.
(King, Window 255)
“In relation to the human psyche, the “vast comfield” has to be understood as an
allegorical representation of the labyrinthine unconscious, the home of the
(un)familiar John Shooter on the one hand, and of Mort’s feelings for his all too
familiär ex-wife Amy, on the other” (Reuber, Pop-Screen 34). The comfield is
nothing eise than Mort’s “secret garden”—his unconscious—that not only
harbors his repressed desire, anger, and fear, but in which these sensations can
grow and develop under “the hot sun” (King, Window 255). The fact that Mort
perceives watches set to a different time while stumbling through the comfield
stresses his feeling of helplessness and disorientation in the past, present, and
future. He knows neither what to do, nor where to go, nor how to handle the
divorce. His reaction is panic. Hence he screams: “Please help me!” (King,
Window 34).
The dream continues with Amy stepping forward from one side of the
field and John Shooter from the other. Amy’s appearance in this dream is of an
ambiguous character and far from reassuring. On the one hand, her presence
refers to Mort’s familiär and highly idealized matrimonial past. On the other
hand, her threatening arrival with another man alludes to Mort’s discovery of
her betrayal and the resulting annihilation of the once established marital,
personal, and emotional life.
Amy’s combined emergence with John Shooter also suggests a menace
to Mort’s Professional life. It has to be understood as a threat to everything that
once was familiär and dear to him. In this sense, Amy and Shooter function as
what Sigmund Freud would have called a “collective figure” or “composite
structure,” in which features that “are peculiar to one or other of the persons
concemed but not common to them” (Freud, Interpretation 355) are represented
by the same figure or structure and, thus, form a new and unfamiliar unity.
Amy’s and Shooter’s personification of the contradictory set of ideas
such as marriage versus divorce, emotional stability versus emotional distress,
loyalty versus disloyalty, Professional success versus Professional failure, and
safety versus danger, provokes two reactions: First, it stirs Mort’s psychological