Freud's "On Dreams" & MGMT's "Oracular Spectacular"

Sigmund Freud’s “On Dreams” poses two salient questions concerned with dreams; why they exist and what their significance is. From the opening  chapter through chapter eight, Freud establishes the concept of the dream work, which is everything inside the dream; the manifest. Chapter eight identifies the most significant “special achievement” of the dream work as displacement which is the “transvaluation of psychical values” from the latent to the manifest (Freud 56). Freud’s concept of repression, an “inadmissibility to conscious” is ostensibly the reason why the dream work includes displacement as a way to distract the dreamer and disguise the vital meaning of the dream resulting in the dream’s distortion (Freud 57). In chapter nine, the theory that dreams show the future is expounded on by further analyzing wish fulfilments in the three types of dreams (logical dreams, where the manifest and latent coincide peacefully, illogical dreams, and seemingly irrelevant and mundane dreams). Freud posits that dreams show us the “future which we would like” in logical dreams, repressed and odious wish fulfillments in illogical dreams, and simple repressed wishes in the last category of mundane dreams. Chapter ten and eleven elucidate that the repressed thoughts from the unconscious move furtively into a dream because the censorship in the conscious is partially relaxed. The alert piece of the conscious creates a compromise with the unconscious to keep the dreamer asleep by appearing to fulfill the repressed wish; the conscious acts with resignation this way. Freud labels dreams as the guardians of sleep due to the conscious and unconscious middle ground. Chapter twelve introduces that most dreams that adults have are erotic wishes after analysis of latent content. The erotic dreams Freud is referring to are disguised by the faculties of displacement and distortion. Common symbols in dreams such as a room represents the  orifices of a womans body. Conversely, Freud claims it is difficult to tell without doubt what content of the dream is to be interpreted “symbolically or in its proper sense” (Freud 73). “On Dreams” ends with the acknowledgement of the dream works important contents and the yearning of further examination to confirm or disprove Freud’s theories.

MGMT’s debut album, “Oracular Spectacular” lyrically and aesthetically reeks of 1970’s psychedelic influence sung through the mouths of two millennials who could not be further from the counterculture of the 1970’s. In Freudian terms, the manifest, which is the actual content of the album represents a particular penchant for an unorthodox lifestyle; an aversion to any aspect of conventionalism. MGMT’s blatant desire to advance unorthodoxy is comparable to Freud’s theory of displacement and repressed wishes. What may seem to be the obvious message of “Oracular Spectacular”  is a distraction from the desires of the unconscious. To further understand the repressed thoughts that contributed to MGMT’s album, an analysis of the latent content that created the album is necessary, just as the previous events and childhood memories are crucial in understanding a dream. The album itself is the first point of analysis. The album title is, “Oracular Spectacular” ironically (or not) denotatively translates to “enigmatic music,” which is a phrase that seems to speak more to the album art than the content. The album cover appears to be a hybrid between Native-American  and cave-dwelleresque attire; certainly a feeling of indigeneity emanates from the art that creates a disconnect in relation to the actual musical content. The disconnect between album art and content may actually be elucidated through common symbols that could be indicative of a certain idea, this is a how Freud makes sense of dreams.The musical content often has lyrics that reject a stable lifestyle for example  “Yeah it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do? Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?” or “..Or even scare the children off my lawn, giving us time to make the makeshift bombs”. Freud would interpret the obvious as a cover for the repressed that lives in the unconscious. The message in MGMT’s album is covered, and underneath are the thoughts which have become inadmissible to the conscious by means of repression and displacement.