larinah’s brilliant post on pies and cake got me thinking about another thing entirely. I’ve been wanting to write a retrospective on the episodes written by Cathryn Humphris for a while now, so I might as well start by Dream A Little Dream of Me, an episode she co-wrote with Sera Gamble in which you can pretty much see their individual hands through and through.
In the episode, Sam and Dean take dream root in order to save Bobby, which allows them to dream-walk first in Bobby’s dreams, and subsequently in Dean’s (because Dean had shared his saliva with a man via the proxy of a beer bottle, which is a theme to which Humphris famously returns to in Sex and Violence).
Dean is reluctant to allow Sam inside his dreams for the obvious reason that he has spent his entire life hiding things from Sam. At the end of the second season he confessed to Sam’s dead body that he had been lying to him ever since his little brother was old enough to start asking questions. In the episodes of Humphris, one of the things Dean was lying to his brother about was his sexuality.
In the episode we get to see two dreams from Dean, although Sam is only privy to one of them. One of the dreams was clearly written by Humphris and the other by Gamble, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you which one was whose.
The first dream, when they first enter Dean’s head, is Lisa Braeden, a woman Dean had spent one weekend with in his youth and whose child he had rescued some months before. She’s seated down on a picnic blanket, dressed in light summer dress that isn’t too revealing, the kind of thing that Jess wore in Sam’s hallucinations. The music that plays is not hard rock, it’s The Mamas and the Papas. She isn’t offering him beer, but red wine. They’ll have to pick up Ben from baseball. Lisa tells him she loves him.
This is the first layer of his subconscious. The episode followed immediately after Malleus Maleficarum, in which Ruby had seriously freaked Dean out about hell, so this, Lisa, is not what is at the forefront of his mind right now. This is what he thinks he’s supposed to dream about. This is the accepted middle class apple pie life, the American dream, that you’re supposed to desire.
The thing to understand is that Dean’s repression runs
deep. Dean’s repression runs so deep that we have seen him actually
re-write his own memories, projecting things that he has done on Sam. Just like in this particular episode he projected on Sam the fact that his wet dreams are of both Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
And this is what he starts dreaming about for the benefit of Sam. He throws this out there, for Sam. Because, like we learn in Dark Side of the Moon, like we learn in season 8 with Amelia, this is what Sam dreams about. This is what, deep down, Sam desires. And because this is what Sam desires, it’s what Dean thinks he’s supposed to desire. Because Sam was the one that got to reach out for the American dream only to have it come crashing down around him.
But when we get to Dean’s other dream, deeper into his subconscious where Sam doesn’t get to see, we get to his real fears, the real Dean. There, we meet his fear of hell, of his father, of his identity, of becoming a demon. There we see what’s really eating Dean Winchester.
But also in this dream, we get a glimpse of the repressed side of his sexuality. It’s easy to miss because Dean is talking to his doppelganger, the dynamic hidden in the mirroring, but upon meeting his own dream self, he greets him with a flirty smile and a “Well aren’t you a handsome son of a gun“. He winks at himself. There’s an erotic current in their circling each other. The dream contains all the aspects of Dean Winchester that Sam never gets to see.
And it’s not demon Dean that was flirting with Dean. It was Dean that was flirting with the demon.
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