{"id":172268,"date":"2025-11-25T10:00:35","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T15:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=172268"},"modified":"2025-11-24T15:13:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T20:13:08","slug":"on-private-dreams-of-public-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/11\/25\/on-private-dreams-of-public-people\/","title":{"rendered":"On Private Dreams of Public People<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Andy Warhol, 1967. New York World-Telegram and Sun<\/em> photograph by Ed Palumbo, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Library of Congress collections, public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI keep having horrible nightmares that blood is coming out of my mouth,\u201d Candace Bushnell confessed to the dream analyst Lauren Lawrence in the early 2000s. Bushnell\u2019s column Sex and the City was then the basis for one of prime time\u2019s most popular shows. Through her alter ego, Carrie Bradshaw, Bushnell and her lifestyle were adored by millions. Lawrence didn\u2019t interpret that dream in the way you or I might; her reading may have been colored by her own adulation. Terrifying? No: the dream is \u201chot and gutsy.\u201d The gore pouring out Bushnell\u2019s mouth is a blessing that means her writing is \u201cpure and true\u201d and, happily for her career, its nightly recurrence implies she will \u201cnever be drained of her creative juices.\u201d This is all fantastic news but there\u2019s one issue: The dream is obviously a nightmare. Lawrence never addresses Bushnell\u2019s subconscious horror. As far as she\u2019s concerned it might as well not exist.<\/p>\n

The dream is one of dozens collected in Lawrence\u2019s 2002 coffee table book, Private Dreams of Public People<\/em>. There\u2019s a paradox here: once they are mass-published, of course, the dreams are no longer private, but the allure of the expos\u00e9 is the compilation\u2019s main selling point. Despite its origins in the phantasmagoric, Private Dreams<\/em> follows a clear format. Each celebrity is placed into a category (\u201cSociety Dreamer,\u201d \u201cBeautiful Dreamer,\u201d \u201cEntrepreneurial Dreamer\u201d). Each dream is followed by Lawrence\u2019s analysis. Lawrence, who has a M.A. in psychology, built a career on public dream interpretation, as the dreams columnist for the New York Daily News<\/em> and on an A&E show called Celebrity Nightmares Decoded<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Lawrence solicited the dream entries directly from stars like Paris Hilton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Cyndi Lauper, Kate Moss, and the vice-presidential runner-up Joseph Lieberman. Donald Trump turned her down. (\u201cI don\u2019t have time to sleep let alone dream,\u201d he says in the Declinations section. \u201cI\u2019m too busy building back my empire.\u201d) To these she adds some dream descriptions clipped from Vogue<\/em>, Elle<\/em>, and, for Martin Luther King Jr., the History Channel. I was never quite clear on how Lawrence got close enough to America\u2019s A-list to pull the book off, but a late, casual reference, in an analysis of one of her own dreams, to being \u201cdriven around town in my Rolls-Royce\u201d and doing \u201csubstantive damage to my husband\u2019s American Express card\u201d fills in some of the blanks. In 2002, the list price of Private Dreams<\/em>\u2014now out of print\u2014was thirty-five dollars, but in the introduction, Lawrence promises something priceless: The book will surpass the \u201cpaparazzi phallic lens \u2026 intent on mating with the intangible inner being of fame.\u201d It will actually allow us to \u201cget into bed with the celebrity mind and nestle with its glittery, klieg-lit unconsciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lawrence’s lurid prose makes clear that this is a fantasy she expects her readers to share. In the early 2000s, she could talk about fame in these flagrantly intimate terms, not as a deranged fan or stan but in a glossy, mass-produced book that invites the public into bed with celebrities with whom she was cozy. In Yukio Mishima\u2019s novella Star<\/em>, the sex-symbol narrator, exhausted by rabid fans, confesses he\u2019d \u201cmuch rather have a girl masturbating somewhere to my picture than actually trying to sleep with me.\u201d Private Dreams<\/em> trades on a similar exhaustion with more face-to-face forms of intimacy. Gay Talese calls the safely parasocial book an actively \u201cpleasurable invasion of privacy,\u201d in a blurb on the back cover.<\/p>\n

The photos in the book are pure projections of power and status. Juliette Binoche is the cover girl. She has her eyes closed, her head cocked back, and her hand in her hair. Her lip gloss is so perfect I thought it might rub off on my fingers when I took the book out of its shrink-wrap. I know logically that I must have encountered photos like these before, but I don\u2019t remember them. These artifacts from the early aughts contain no affectation of relatability at all. I can look at them only anthropologically, like engravings of pharaohs on walls. Placing accounts of genuinely odd, vulnerable dreams next to these extremely shiny images produces a strange effect, one that only celebrity can cohere. The interior decorator to the stars Mario Buatta\u2019s 9\/11 trauma dreams are printed overleaf a photo of him on a cluttered desk, beaming, surrounded by lush fabric. In his iterant nightmare about another attack on New York, the scene is yet more apocalyptic the second time around: \u201cbombs are going off\u201d and \u201chuge water bugs\u201d swarm the city. \u201cFor Buatta,\u201d Lawrence muses, \u201ca world-renowned interior decorator whose livelihood is based on creating beautiful interiors, the destruction of exterior facades is particularly threatening as it is viewed as an assault on the aesthetic sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a sheer blue cowboy shirt, Madonna cradles a horse\u2019s snout next to descriptions of a nightmare of killing her unborn child. \u201cYou have pushed yourself too hard, and the baby\u2019s dead,\u201d Madonna\u2019s doctor says. The psychic camera shifts, and from inside her own womb Madonna watches \u201cthe baby detach itself from the placenta and sort of float around in my stomach.\u201d Chris Kattan dreams that his mother has failed to notice her parked car rolling down a mountain with him in it\u2014a metaphor for anxiety of losing the spotlight. Lawrence ends her analysis by promising: \u201cMr. Kattan, we will never tire of watching.\u201d Chris Kattan\u2019s most recent big role was as the voice of Alligator #1 in the 2023 Netflix film Leo<\/em>. But as I read her promise, I believed it.<\/p>\n

Encountering Private Dreams<\/em>\u2019s combination of glossy rapacity and utter sincerity, it struck me that these two qualities defined celebrity culture at the time of the book\u2019s release. Then, the veneration of the rich and recognizable occupied a central place in mass culture. A quarter century later, much of the corporate media built on the logic of celebrity worship and terrorization has collapsed or fallen into irrelevance. The public these magazines and tabloids relied on has been algorithmically sliced to ribbons, and fame along with it, parceled out, in tiny fiefdoms, to streamers and influencers. Celebrities often aim for an unmediated relationship with fans, one that generates strategic banality. We might stumble across a freely divulged dream just by scrolling their feeds: their dreams no longer feel so far away. Private Dreams<\/em>\u2019s central logic is the voyeuristic joy\u2014now no longer guilt-free, no longer good clean fun\u2014of piercing a kind of luster that doesn\u2019t really exist anymore.<\/p>\n

Sometimes Lawrence applies conventional wisdom to the dreams she\u2019s analyzing. About Tyson Beckford\u2019s basketball dreams, she notes that \u201calmost all male dreams of putting a ball in a hole usually have sexual significance.\u201d Sometimes the dreams themselves follow convention: George Plimpton\u2019s entry is simply \u201cIn my dream fragment there\u2019s going to be some exam or test that I forget about.\u201d You can\u2019t wring much out of that. More often, though, Lawrence pinpoints her analysis to the profession of the dreamer in question, or to what she knows directly about their personal life or character. This gives the book its flashes of real intimacy. The first line of Elvis\u2019s entry reads:<\/p>\n

\n

I had this dream that the Presley Brothers were performing. My twin brother Jesse and I were on stage, both wearing white jumpsuits with guitars slung around our shoulders. He was the spitting image of me, except he could sing better.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This was the first I\u2019d heard of Elvis\u2019s stillborn brother. The account is accompanied by a blurred, autographed image of the singer flanked by friends in tan trousers; it feels ghostly. Lawrence\u2019s analysis focuses on Elvis\u2019s \u201cspiritual quest: to become one with a heavenly being in the hope of joining his twin on the other side.\u201d A spiritual quest! I felt I was hiding behind the booth during Elvis\u2019s Catholic confession, that I should close the book. The guitars slung over his and his brother\u2019s shoulders, she argues, are \u201csymbolic wings\u201d that, together with the white jumpsuits, express his desire for \u201cspiritual wisdom and purity,\u201d the juvenility of which feels almost profane. I couldn\u2019t help but see his dream as a tragic wish to return to innocence, something out of the last act of a Mob movie, especially set against the Vegas narcoticism and geriatric masculinity I associate with Elvis in his later years. The dream, the photo, and the analysis somehow combined to produce in me a searingly intimate encounter with one of the most ubiquitous cultural figures of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

The dead make a more glamorous appearance in Andy Warhol\u2019s dream of Marilyn Monroe. She\u2019s been allowed back to earth for a day; they go see a show. He frets because she\u2019s wearing a green metallic dress and it\u2019s a \u201cbeauty mistake\u201d\u2014in the theater\u2019s strong lighting, the dress throws \u201cgreen light all over her skin\u201d (\u201cMarilyn is still in the limelight,\u201d Lawrence points out). Andy presses her for heavenly gossip about the famous deceased. She refuses. Instead, she tells him she\u2019s saving it for a book. Andy is incensed: \u201cI said, Look Marilyn, you\u2019re only here for one day! How can you do a book?\u201d She doesn\u2019t budge. At home, he searches for a mirror to determine his age, so he can figure out what year it is. His phone rings, and he wakes up.<\/p>\n

Warhol\u2019s worries about Marilyn having made a \u201cbeauty mistake,\u201d even while she\u2019s dead, even while he\u2019s asleep, are pure gold. His subconscious is just like it is in the movies: he has the same strange, tender neuroses, the same clammy vanity. Lawrence sees his search for his reflection as an indicator that his \u201cself-recognition is floundering.\u201d And yet the moment in the dream when Andy is at his most recognizable to me is the very moment he loses sight of who he is\u2014or rather, of who he\u2019s supposed to be. It takes an audience to remind him, if only an audience of one. We never find out if he\u2019s aged or not, which is perfect. He stays a human symbol in a symbolic world, a bundle of artistry and intrusion and anxiety. He stays a celebrity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Toye Oladinni is a writer from London. His short stories and essays have appeared in\u00a0<\/em>Granta, the\u00a0<\/em>London Review of Books, <\/em>The Relegation Reader, and elsewhere.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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