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Don's Fever Dream: Analysis?

I'd like to put Don on the therapist's couch and really psychoanalyze his fever dream. So, everyone, get out your pads, and start jotting down notes. On the one hand, it's pretty obvious that his nightmare is about trying to control or erase both his past and his carnal nature. Those two things threaten his new marriage. Unable to get rid of fever-dream-Andrea, the embodiment of all this (she just keeps coming back)--he kills her, but the body remains, and so he stuffs it under the bed.

Freud would love this. Symbolically he's hidden his past affairs under the his and Megan's marital bed.

That's the main gist of the nightmare. But what about the other elements? Like how Don switches from being one of the "nurses" with Andrea repeatedly entering his bedroom as the murderer did, to being the murderer? And what about that remaining shoe, echoing the scary Cinderella story? Gingsberg says, "She wants to be scared" and the shoe men love that. Did Gingsberg's scary fairytale also enthrall and arouse Don? Maybe in a way he didn't like? Or does the shoe say something else?

And what about Megan? This dream has a lot of elements that speak of fear of exposure--like the fact that Don goes from dressed to naked. Don has exposed himself to Megan in a way he never did with Betty. Is fever-dream-Andrea just his fear of his past, his fear of his implosive libido--or could he also be afraid of Megan? The woman who, as in his dream, he lets into his bed?

So, Herr Doctors? What do you think? What did your notice? And what is your analysis?


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