Abe Lincoln: Pill Pusher

Big Pharma and Big Brother are trying to breach your dreams.

by Emma Mellon

I 'm rushing to catch a train. Everywhere I look, Abe Lincoln and the beaver seem to be watching me. Their faces repeat along the station's towering walls. They stare up from the floor. I stare back. If I can't break free of their gaze, I'm going to miss my train.

It sounds like a dream, but it's advertising at work.

I'm a psychologist and, at first, I was thrilled to see dreamworld images getting equal time with iPods and Rolexes at 30th Street Station. Cramer/Krasselt's sleep-aid ad brilliantly creates the provocative, incompletely drawn montage that is the signature of dreams. It's not clear that this is an ad for sleeping pills. Like all good advertising — and dreams — this one leaves room for fantasy, and Abe and the beaver had me at first glance.

But later, when I visited the drug's Web site, the full impact of the ad became clear to me. Abe and the unnamed beaver sit in a shadowy kitchen. I click on Abe. He steps onto a new page, hooks his thumb into his lapel and pitches: "If you had trouble sleeping for fourscore and seven years, Rozerem could help ..."

I'd been drawn into a dream and ended up listening to a commercial. Honest Abe Lincoln, 16th president of the United States, depressive, insomniac, renowned dreamer and self-proclaimed dream image ... was selling pills.

Be warned, fellow dreamers: A critical boundary has been breached. The public world of spin is impinging on the final frontier of our humanity. Big Brother wants to sell us our own dreams. This is a red alert. Having run out of places to hang advertisements, the pharmaceuticals seem to be setting up tollbooths on the royal road to the unconscious.

Could this be the first step in a campaign for medicated dreaming? Dreams are mysterious and confusing. Sometimes they're actually embarrassing. We awaken scratching our heads and wondering, "What was that about?" Perhaps the drug companies can help with that. Make the mystery go away. Help us to dream in neat, linear stories so that we can avoid all that uncivilized emotion, all that unknown, all those uncomfortable questions. Perhaps we will someday be able to take a red pill for an erotic dream, a blue one for an adventure with a happy ending and a yellow one if we want to be surprised.

But I hope not.

It's one thing when pharmaceutical companies pester me about medication to prevent osteoporosis. I can live with the drug companies wanting to get into my bones. But when they begin prying open the door to my unconscious, my dreamworld, these bones get annoyed.

It's a fact: The human unconscious is vulnerable to advertising because, like advertising, it communicates through image, symbol and metaphor. That's why the ubiquitous Abe captivates us. But the critical difference between the human psyche and advertising is that your psyche is entirely, truly interested in you. The dreams it spins provide the most instinctive, uncensored and unspun information available about who you are. They give you the view from your core. Your dreams' central genius is that they subvert the daytime, manufactured world, turn it on its head and filter its input down to what you need to know in order to thrive. Yes, some of what Abe says is true. We do need to sleep in order to dream. We might even need sleeping medication from time to time. But that said, no sleeping pill can deliver dreams. If dreams were manufactured, they wouldn't be dreams.

There are places on the planet we instinctively preserve in all their wildness so that we can go there and be refreshed. The dreamworld is one of those places. We need to visit, learn the language, taste the older life that rules there and let it seep into our daytime consciousness. And we need to keep the billboards out.

As for Abe, I think the pharmaceutical company should cut him loose. He doesn't need the work, and he could probably use some sleep.

Emma Mellon is an author and licensed psychologist in Berwyn.