The New Yorker

The interpretation of dreams, according to Freud, is meant to teach us about individual dreamers’ states of mind, not about the people and things that populate our fantasy lives; those are symbols. Teeth, swimming pools, nuns—they stand in for basic human desires and anxieties. When Sheila Heti, a novelist in Toronto, learned that her friend Margaux had recently dreamed about shopping for Tupperware with Hillary Clinton, however, she began to wonder: what if the recurrences of Presidential candidates in people’s dreams were meaningful in the aggregate?

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