Picasso Face

In my recurring dream, my older brother is trapped, standing on some kind of torture machine that distorts his face into a giant, two dimensional Picasso painting that shifts counter-clockwise 90 degrees every second or two. His Picasso face begs me to “Find the Key! Find the Key!” that (I suppose) will loose him from his treadmill of pain. I scramble about searching for a key even though I am clueless about what it looks like or what I would do with it if I found it. I am hoping that someone will explain it to me once I obtain the mysterious key, but I never find it and wake in frustration with a start and “Find the Key!” reverberating in my head.

I’ve never made too much of dreams, especially weird ones. In fact, I rarely remember my dreams at all. I usually just have a vague recollection of having dreamt, but the details are lost as soon as I wake. What I do remember of them are just tiny snippets – of flying, or falling, or forgetting to wear some article of clothing in public.

But this one was different. It disturbed my sleep for weeks on end when I was about 12 years old. And I remembered the whole thing after waking, from beginning to end. I still do.

I don’t really dwell on it or stay up worrying about what it might mean. It doesn’t nag at me or impel me to any specific action. It no longer disturbs my sleep. But every now and then it pops back into my head for no apparent reason. And it makes me wonder.

I’m sure Carl Jung might have something to say about it. He seemed to think dreams were somehow significant – that archetypical images contained in them represented certain aspects of our psyche or something (it’s been a long time since I took Psych 101).

If that is the case, I suspect the main images in my old dream are three: my brother, the shifting Picasso face, and the hidden Key.

I suppose a few additional details might be in order if we are to make any sense of this jumble. My brother Stephen is about two years older than me. He was the Firstborn of eight siblings. I was number two. I don’t remember ever having been very close to him. Two years behind him in school, I suspect I was the whiny little brother who wanted to tag along and do all the “cool” stuff he was doing, but Steve had bigger fish to fry than to watch out for an annoying shadow. He had ways of discouraging you from following too close, so I ended up envying from the sidelines mostly, trying to stay out of his way. But oh, he had the grooviest clothes (this was the 60s), the coolest vinyl records, and was the only one of us boys who was brave enough to argue with Dad – a frequent occurrence.

He would have been about 14 when my dreams appeared: about the time his naturally rebellious streak drew him along a path of experimentation with self-destructive behaviors that would eventually lead to the addictions which have dominated his later years.

I really have no idea what the Picasso face represents or why it is in the dream. I remember seeing in my youth many photographs of Picasso paintings, or artistic designs based on his work. I think he was the most celebrated artist alive at the time. The face in my dream was like those in his paintings that look like half a side view portrait and half a front view. (See “Head of a Woman” or any of his paintings of Dora Maar for good examples). These cubist Picasso paintings always kind of creeped me out, but they fascinated me at the same time. They were like puzzles with secret meanings which, if you just looked long enough or at the right angle, you might figure out. I never figured them out. But I looked. I looked long and hard, trying to decipher the mysteries, the secret debaucheries, the hidden anguish behind those distorted eyes.

That leaves only the Key. In my dream, I am looking everywhere for a small gold or silver key like you would use to open a locked door. But I never see a lock anywhere on the torture machine that would accommodate such a key. It never occurs to me that “Find the Key!” could mean “Find the Secret” or “Find the Solution” or some other key definition.

So there you have it. But what does it all mean? I’m sure there are a lot of armchair psychologists out there that could take a crack at making some sense of it. I have no expertise in such things, but perhaps it was a kind of preparation for what was coming.

Even as a kid, I knew that my brother’s “bad” behaviors would cause him trouble someday. He was going to get caught, or get sick, or get addicted or something. It seemed inevitable. The frustration I felt at not being able to influence my older brother to make better choices was real and was reflected in my inability to “find the key.”

I hate that he has suffered so much. His face is not the Picasso of my dream, but there are distortions nonetheless. The pain of his sickness and the violence of the treatments for it have left their marks. His alternating addictions over the years turned his head in unnatural directions, keeping him from finding simple homegrown joys, opting rather for a relentless quest for the new, the foreign and different.

I still harbor some guilt at not reaching out with any consistency, attempting to redeem my straying sibling. As children, Stephen always seemed so self-confident, while I was always a blubbering mass of self-doubt. As I grew older, the path I chose helped bolster my confidence and banish both doubts and fears. Indeed, I eventually found the Key to my own happiness through faith, commitment and service. But I still have trouble accepting that I could somehow help my brother find the same. He was always the leader, even though I didn’t follow. Such a role reversal seems unnatural to me even now.

Perhaps the persistent memory of this once recurring dream is an admonition to just keep trying.

Or maybe it’s just a crazy dream that means nothing at all.

Still, it makes me wonder.

Find the Key.