The Dream Before Language

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy’s only published nonfiction essay, “The Kekulé Problem,” and his strange, brilliant exploration of dreams, the unconscious, language, and the ancient animal mind beneath our speaking selves.I share a little about reading McCarthy while I was in therapy and discussing this essay with my own psychotherapist, who approached dreams through a Jungian depth psychological lens. From there, I explore why dreams may matter—not because they give us easy answers or mystical certainty, but because they can sometimes carry emotional realities that ordinary language has not yet found a way to hold.I also think about this through my work with men in psychotherapy, especially men wrestling with anger, anxiety, depression, disconnection, and the difficulty of naming what hurts. Sometimes a dream becomes a doorway. Sometimes an image arrives before the words do. And sometimes the unconscious may be trying to reconnect us with parts of ourselves we have lost contact with: joy, freedom, grief, longing, vitality, and the deeper life beneath our explanations.