What if you got punished when you didn’t get your dreams right? That’s the dilemma our heroin, Leah, has in the second instalment of The Psychology of Dreams 101.
No, I didn’t dream it, and I’m seriously hoping I dot get punished like Leah and Al do if I don’t get it quite right, but The Psychology of Dreams did bubble up from somewhere in my unconscious last week, and I had to share it. The Muse has been back knocking around in my imagination again, so today I’m back with another instalment of a new serial.
The Psychology of Dreams 101, is a romp into the sexy unconscious as Leah Kent takes a Psychology of Dreams adult education class, only to discover that the required Dream Journal leads to some seriously kinky night journeys.
I have no idea how long this little ditty will be, nor where it will lead, but I’m willing if you are. Please, read and enjoy The Psychology of Dreams 101.
The Psychology of Dreams 101: Chapter 2
Blank Pages and Punishment
“I’m not pleased with your dream journal, Leah.” It was so much like the dream, that it took her breath away. She stood before Al Foster’s desk in the empty classroom, him offering her a concerned look over the top of his glasses. It was so much like the dream, in fact, that she gave a quick glance down to make sure she still wore jeans and a pullover and not transparent red underwear.
“I don’t understand,” she said, clasping her bag to her chest to hide the press of her nipples, which didn’t really care if she wore red underwear or not. They seemed more interested in the close proximity of Al Foster.
“Why are you writing down made-up dreams? I can tell when you’re making it up, Leah. I can always tell. Is the technique I shared with you not working? If not, just tell me and we can try something else.”
“I haven’t been using the technique,” she blurted. “I haven’t needed to.” Fuck! That was an unfortunate slip.
“Oh?”
She tried to recall if she’d ever seen bluer eyes than his. Her dreams got it right, even with the glasses that made him look like a sexy nerd, you couldn’t miss the blue. His unkempt blond hair was the color of ripe wheat. Her dreams got that right too. She loved the way it fell down all disorderly and wild over his eyes when he spanked her.
“Leah? Are you all right?”
She jumped at the sound of her name. “I’m sorry. I’ve not been sleeping well,” she said. She didn’t know why she said that. If anything she’d been sleeping too well.
“Oh?” He slid his chair back and came to stand beside her. He was taller than she thought, and she blushed at the sight of his belt, brown leather. It looked soft like swede, but she knew it packed a wallop – at least it did when he wielded it. “Is it because of the dreams?” His blue gaze studying her from behind the glasses made her feel like she was under a microscope or in front of a two-way mirror, made her feel like she was standing there in his classroom in nothing but transparent red underwear. “Leah,” he said, touching her shoulder and gently guiding her to sit in one of the seats in the front row, while he pulled a chair up to face her. “Are the dreams erotic? Is that why you feel you can’t write them down for me? Because everyone has erotic dreams and, in fact, they may well be more likely to if they’re keeping a dream journal for sharing.
“They’re about you.” She hadn’t planned to say that. She’d planned to lie, but she was never very good at lying.
He blinked, and she watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. “About me.”
She nodded.
“Well,” he scooted back ever so slightly and straightened in his chair so that he could study her more 
carefully, “that’s not unusual either.” He smiled, and a soft blush crawled up his neck and onto his cheeks. “I’ve actually had students make up dreams about me. They were surprised when I called them on it. I have to say you’re the first woman to do the opposite, to hide those dreams from me. Oh, it’s not unusual for people to try to hide their erotic dreams, not at all, but I can pretty much guess that if a particularly steamy dream turns up about me, the writer is a woman. She’s made it up, and it’s more a fantasy than any dream she’s likely to have.”
“Oh believe me, it’s better this way,” she managed, still clutching her bag to her chest. “I mean me keeping them from you. I … I could barely write them down for myself.”
“But you did then? You did write them down?”
She nodded, her mouth gone suddenly dry. She hadn’t meant to tell him that either. “Just not in there.” She gestured to her class dream journal laying on his desk.
“I see.” He ran a hand through his hair leaving it standing in spikes and waves, making her ache to straighten it for him, or maybe muss it up further. “Leah, will you let me read the real journal. No one will know what you wrote but you and I, and I understand the psychology of dreams; I understand that we have no control over what happens in the unconscious. I promise I would never –”
“You spank me,” she blurted.
He sucked a heavy breath. “I spank you?”
“Yes, you spank me, and you tell me you’ll keep punishing me until I get my dreams right, until I dream about you, and it’s always the same, with the two of us alone in this room and you taking your belt off and you turning me over your knee and telling me that if you spank me, then maybe the pain in my — ” she made a quick jerk of her neck toward her backside “—will help remind me to dream of you. There’s only the one dream,” she added quickly, “well variations of it.”
After a few fish gasps and another hand through his hair, he squared his shoulders, and shoved his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I see. So, recurring dreams, are they?” He offered her a smile that wavered only slightly.
“Recurring? Yes, I suppose they are. I never thought of it like that.” If she was going to be brave enough to tell him the truth, then she might as well show him the rest of it too. She dug in her bag for her real dream journal and pulled out the page that she’d torn from the one for class, the page with the note she’d written to herself. “I woke up to find this in my journal after the first spanking dream.” She handed it to him.
To her shock and discomfort, he read it out loud.
You look beautiful when you dream. It was a good dream, the kind you don’t want to wake up from. At last, Leah, you’re doing it right! You can always tell when you do it right by the way your nipples bead beneath the sheet, by the way your lips turn up at the corners, slightly parted as though waiting to be kissed. And, take a sniff, Leah. Your scent is the scent of dreams well dreamed, luscious and ripe. Well done, Leah! Well done!
For a moment they both sat in silence, him staring down at the words on the page, her staring at her feet.
Then he took off his glasses and joined her in gazing at his own feet. At last he raised his eyes back to her and took a deep breath. “Why did you tear this out?”
“Because I don’t remember writing it. It’s not a dream, it’s like, I don’t know, me talking to myself in my sleep or something, and I thought if you read it you’d think … ”
“I’d think what?”
“That I just made it up that I was just being … you know, pathetic.”
“Why would I think that?” He put his glasses back on and looked at the note again. “It seems to me like your unconscious had you pegged pretty well here,” then he added quickly, “of course I don’t know what you look like when you dream or what your physiological responses are, but it makes sense. I … I smell differently when I wake up after a strong dream, and,” he looked away quickly, “I get … hard too, when I’m doing it right.” He blushed and she blushed for him and they were both looking at their feet again.
“But how can there be a right way and a wrong way to dream? I mean I’ve read way ahead in the texts you’ve recommended and done some research on my own. We really sort of just dream what we dream, don’t we?”
“That’s what I thought,” he said, scooting closer to her with a screech of the chair legs on the floor. “But then I started getting … comments like this.” He nodded down to her note, “comments from my unconscious, I assume, and I also have dreams about not doing it right.”
“Did you get … you know … spanked?”
This time it was more than a blush, his whole face redden, and the fine muscles along his cheek bones twitched. “It was rather more than a spanking, I’m afraid.”
“More than a spanking?” Her pulse hammered in her words, as she pushed forward on the edge of her seat.
“Do you know anything about BDSM, Leah?” His own pulse kept beat in his words and thudded in his throat as he pinned her in his gaze.
“A little. I’ve read a few novels, done a bit of research … online,” she added quickly.
“Does it frighten you?”
“A little yes. And it intrigues me.”
“This time I was tied up, flogged and had … implements placed …” He looked away as though he expected to find the words he was looking for floating on the air outside the window in the parking lot. “I had things shoved up my … butt,” he finally managed avoiding her gaze.
“Oh? Oh, wow!” The words were out before she could stop them. And they were followed in rapid succession by, “how was it?”
“Not like I expected.” He forced himself to meet her gaze. “I woke up … aroused,” he gave a little nod and lowered his eyes to the note still clenched in his hand. “I had to masturbate before I could function and, after, I found a note in my dream journal similar to this. One I don’t remember writing. Anyway,” he said looking up at her again. “The person doing things to me, in my dream, she kept saying that I wasn’t doing it right, that I should dream about her and she would punish me until I did.”
“She?” Leah asked.” He nodded, carefully maintaining uncomfortable eye contact. “Was she me?” The words were out before she could stop them. Clearly the internal editor was having a day off, she thought.
“I honestly don’t know. I never saw her face. But I know she was a woman because I felt her breasts against my back when she moved in close to tighten my bonds.” He glanced at the door as though he feared someone might be listening there. “I know you must think me some kind of a pervert telling you this, you being my student and all, but I’ve been teaching this class for ten years – here and in other places; I’ve seen more dream journals than I could possibly keep track of, and most of them are full of dreams that are just exactly what I would expect to surface from someone’s unconscious.” He shrugged. “I get a fair few people, women in particular, faking their dreams, making them up either to impress me or because they’re embarrassed. But you – you started out writing your dreams, and then you suddenly stopped after you’d been so earnest in your efforts with the journal. I knew something was up. I could feel it. I never expected this though.” He nodded down to the note he still held, then handed it back to her.
“The thing is, Leah, no on else has ever had a similar experience, an experience that mirrors my own, until you.”
For a moment the two sat in silence, and then Leah took a deep breath. “You said ‘this time,’ like it wasn’t the first time, like it’s happened before.”
“Lots of times before.”
“And it’s different each time?”
“Not every time, but frequently. What’s always the same is that it involves some kind of erotic punishment, and I never climax in the dream, though I want to. I really need to. I wake up frustrated and unable to do anything until I … take care of it. It’s the same for you, isn’t it, Leah?”
Blurb:
I can’t tell you how excited I am to have the totally awesome Sarah Blake as my guest today. Sarah is a playwright, theatre director and story teller, and founder of 
“Some day, my prince will come,
The psychologist Carl Jung theorised that all standard fairy tale characters (or ‘archetypes’) – such as the Prince, the Witch, the Stepmother, etc. – actually represent aspects of our subconscious selves. Viewed in this way, every story can be seen as the reflection of a person – and the interplay and conflict that occurs between the characters within the story mirrors the interplay and conflict that occurs within our own minds, as our subconscious traits and desires vie for dominance. In Jungian terms, the Prince/Hero archetype represents our desire to seek out a better way of life and find greater fulfillment – but practically-speaking, what does this mean?
literally, marrying the Prince (or the closest you could get to one) was your only chance to better your circumstances – both practically, in the material sense of having more wealth and security, but also personally, because society judged your worth by your husband – and all too often, society’s external judgements were (and continue to be) internalised within women’s own minds.
The potency of the Prince as a representation of female desire is particularly heightened when we think of him in terms of romantic/sexual fulfillment. Even now, in our far less repressed age, women are still judged for their sexual appetites. They are frequently condemned as ‘sluts’ or ‘whores’ if they exercise their right to sexual liberty, or express their sensuality on their own terms – whereas similar behaviour in their male counterparts is often approved of by society at large, or merely shrugged off with an indulgent “boys will be boys” attitude. Women’s erotic lives are still all too often parcelled up with being looked at – being seen to be desirable, rather than having the autonomy and freedom to enjoy what feels desirable. So the Prince can also represent a woman’s license to roam freely, explore extensively and and enjoy (without fear of judgement) any and every erotic fantasy she can conjure. As long as an imbalance of power continues to exist between men and women, the Prince will always be there, representing a woman’s yearning for empowerment.
film, or within the pages of a romantic novel – what they are actually sighing for is autonomy and self-fulfillment. It might be sexual fulfillment, or intellectual, or economic, or social, or spiritual – or all of the above. The specific details of the desire don’t matter, so much as the desire itself. Whatever a woman yearns for, or feels is lacking in her life – freedom, self-knowledge, self-esteem, romance, adventure, recognition, a sense of connection – is what the Prince is there to provide. Historically, that has always been his role. And psychologically – while we continue to live within a patriarchal society – it remains so.
expectations can place you in a trap, because the Prince was never meant to be real. He is an internal figure – an aspect of your own psyche – and finding your happy ending has as much to do with discovering and developing his characteristics within your own personality, as it has with finding another person to love. For far too long, women have been raised and encouraged by popular culture to view the Prince as a real, flesh-and-blood alpha male, who will swoop in and rescue them from all their troubles and worries. This is not only patronising to women, it is also extremely hard on men – after all, why should one flawed, fragile human be made to carry the full burden of another’s every hope and expectation?
I’m sure everyone has sniggered over the annual list of contenders for the Bad Sex Awards. The little snippets from the poor authors who drew the attention of said awards are always great entertainment, but never in the way they were intended. It’s no secret, authors who write in genres other than erotica often find sex in fiction a challenge, even frightening – no matter how well-known or prolific they are and, fair enough – sex is hard to write well. We can cut them a bit of slack because they’re not erotica writers, but poorly written sex should NEVER be an issue for an author of erotica or romance in which that act of connecting is central to the plot.
And let’s not forget the situation. Angry sex won’t have the same feel as tender first-time sex or a quickie, or bored-now-let’s-get-it-over-with sex. Which leads me to the second thing to remember – timing.
fingers and hands too often and stuck in the word “digits.” My husband is a chemical engineer, he uses digits all the time in his calculations, but he doesn’t run digits through my long flowing locks. You flip pancakes, not a lover, a canal is what you take a boat down in Venice, not the thing you stick a cock in. If you need to use a word twice, use it twice! Use it three times! Hell, fill a whole paragraph with it! Just please don’t throw your reader out of the story by trying not to be repetitive. A little repetition is far less jarring that a word that takes the reader out of the action and back to grade school. Think about the choice of words and phrases you use. If you don’t want to overuse a word, then rephrase the sentence, rewrite the paragraph, consider whether or not you can eliminate some of the sentences with overused words altogether. Of course every reader, every writer, has different pet peeves, different bugaboos and someone is bound to shudder at the use of “cunt” or the use of “boobs,” or the use of … well just about everything. All I’m saying is choose you words carefully. Make them fit the characters and the situation.
She had just started a course on the psychology of dreams. She tried to take advantage of the adult education classes whenever possible. It got her out of the house and forced her to interact with other people – real flesh and blood people. With her job, online shopping, online banking, direct debit, grocery delivery, she never had to leave the house really, and that suited her just fine, but she knew it shouldn’t. She knew it wasn’t healthy. Sometimes going to the classes was more of an ordeal than a pleasure, but that was not the case for the psychology of dreams class.
lying across the page, which read: