"Next."
Don Draper wants to see "another girl." Ted opens the door and in one walks—beautiful legs, beautiful curves, beautiful hair, all swimming in an exquisite chinchilla coat. A second goes by before Don makes eye contact. Rachel. His former flame turns towards a mirror, breaking a soul-piercing glance to take in her own pose. The fur slides down her shoulder, exposing milk-white skin. Close and out of reach. Don is transfixed. "I'm supposed to tell you you missed your flight," she says, drifting away. Pete, not Ted, opens the door. Don interrupts the exit. "You're not just smooth," he utters. "You're Wilkinson smooth." As Rachel slips out of the room, Pete kills the moment. "Back to work!"
Scene. Eyes open. Pitch black night. A woman on his arm. A dream. Don's perfect moment was a dream.
Matthew Weiner, you cruel creator.
Throughout Mad Men's seven seasons, Weiner has given audiences literal peeks inside his characters' minds. Melodramatic nightmares allow beasts inside to burst out. Introspective drug trips reveal wishful thinking and the deepest fears. Sunday night's premiere, "Severance," goes a step further, blurring the line between dream and reality to create an unsettling atmosphere. A scene where Don's latest catch spills blood-red wine across the carpet recalls the ad man's imagined encounter with ex-gal pal Andrea in season five's "Mystery Date" (minus the death-by-chokehold). Weiner gives us little distinction between Don's experiences—the actual, creepy-as-Hell audition depicted in the opening scene—and fabrications, Rachel's appearance being the only explicit tell. The last time we saw the department store heiress, she reminded Don that their secret love affair was 100 percent over. Rachel is unobtainable, out of Don's life. It takes our brains a second to register this fact, but her mere appearance explicitly tells us, This is not real.
But "not real" isn't how Ian Wallace, a professional dream psychologist and author of The Top 100 Dreams, would put it. When I ring him at his home in Edinburgh, Scotland, hunting for a professional opinion on Don's Rachel encounter, Wallace combats my semantics. They're not "not real." Dreams don't just "happen." Even when we sleep, we're active participants, not psychic receivers. "We create the dream in the same way that we create our waking awareness of consciousness," Wallace says. In order to reckon with these surreal memories, professionals acknowledge the existence of two worlds: an "inner," where ideas, aspirations, and imagined constructions fire through synapses, and an "outer," where we interact with tangibilities—appointment, assignment deadlines, observations from a day's commute. The two halves are intimately connected. "We use the outer world as a way of symbolizing our inner world, and we use our inner world as a way of making sense of the outer world."
Wallace interprets dreams from the inside out, tracing lines from images to a person's "waking life." He doesn't take anything too literally; just because a particular person, place or thing shows up in your dream doesn't mean the dream is about said person, place or thing. If someone has a dream about their partner having an affair, he or she may wake up thinking, "My partner is having an affair." Wallace would see it in reverse, an unconscious red flag that dreamer themselves had lost confidence and trust in their own abilities.
It would be easy to equate Rachel's appearance with Don longing for a specific, long-gone romance (especially with his lust over the diner's Rachel doppelgänger). Too easy. Acknowledging Don's relationship history, Wallace hones in on Rachel as an abstract. "As human beings we all have masculine and feminine aspects to our character," he says. "For a man, our feminine aspects tend to be or do with our creativity or intuition or empathy or instincts and so on. When Don creates a woman in his dream, it's all about his creative self. Rachel was really rich and wealthy. And so, Don has this really rich creativity that he's trying to get back in touch with somehow."
Though each case is personal, there are universal symbols that Wallace has encountered in over 35 years of dream interpretations. They can be big—crossing paths with an ex-lover is the 15th most-common dream—and they can be small. Wallace says Weiner's choice of a chinchilla coat is very deliberate. Fur is a symbol for one's "ability to present a self-image in a way that's quite indulgent and allows a real comfort in fundamental behaviors and being able to show those off." Don Draper loves his indulgences.
Weiner opens the dream sequence on Don's office door, another image that pops out to Wallace. He says the act of opening and closing a door is tied to identity, a personal threshold manifested into a passageway. That it's Ted on one side and Pete on the other speaks to Don's available avenues. "Very often people create dreams where some of the characters are people from their workplace because the characters in the workplace have certain qualities that the dreamer is being drawn to in some way," Wallace says. "They might be really confident, they might be really intelligent, they might be really meticulous, but there's something in that person that the dreamer needs to express so that he can grasp an opportunity." "Severance" hints at what a "Ted" or "Pete" road could mean for Don. Both men recently returned to New York from Los Angeles, though for Pete, the cyclical ride isn't a move forward, it's more like… a dream. Don could really use a third option.
There are no throwaway lines in Mad Men, and certainly not in a Mad Men dream sequence. What to make of Rachel's airplane reference? Don't get too excited, D.B. Cooper theorists: Like the door, it says more about where Don isn't going. According to Wallace, when people dream about the sky, they're wrestling with an idea that could take flight. "The sky tends to be the realm of concepts," Wallace says. "It usually symbolizes some idea's trajectory, some thought that you're trying to get off the ground and land it successfully somewhere." For Don, this could be the Wilkinson campaign. Or it could be the rest of his life on Earth. That Don missed his flight gives Wallace even more to chew on. This is commitment issue 101. "When people create a missing-a-plane dream, they have a concern about this really great idea, but they're not stepping forward. It might be that he didn't commit to Rachel in some way or she didn't commit to him, but it's probably in his waking life that he is not committing to some big idea that's coming up, and he needs to earn it. It resonates with the door part as well: some opportunity opening up for him, here he has to step through that threshold, into that new space, so that he can make the most of the opportunity."
That's never been Don's strong suit. Dreaming is much easier.
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