"Twin Peaks"

I miss those days when there was an old-school TV box with only a few channels to choose from. If you wanted to watch your favourite show, you had to be there on time—like 9 PM on Tuesday, no pausing, no skipping, just you, the show, and the ad breaks giving you just enough time to grab a sandwich or take a piss. You might say Netflix is better, and I won’t even try to convince you otherwise. Sure, you can watch anything, anytime, and never miss an episode. So maybe you’re right. But if you weren’t there in the ’90s, you’ll never quite get it. And if you were, then you know what I’m talking about.

There was a TV show that defined those days for me: Twin Peaks. I must’ve been around five years old when I first saw it—far too young. I watched it with my older brother, and it messed with my head in a way I still can’t shake off. I had dreams about it, where I walked through One-Eyed Jacks and touched those wooden corridors like I’d actually been there. I still do get those dreams, despite many years passed. In a way, I never dreamed about the characters, but the places. It reminds me of Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, where he wrote about how certain places—whether real or imagined—settle deep in our consciousness. And so, I believe Twin Peaks did to me. As if it wasn’t a story that I watched but a world I entered; a space that—as Bachelard might have said—became part of my inner geography. Whereas for some, Twin Peaks will always just be that weird TV series about a girl who got murdered, for others it became something else entirely. Who killed Laura Palmer? was the question that kept people awake at night—or worse, it became part of their own nightmares. It didn’t just glue you to the screen; it could possess you.

As if David Lynch didn’t just create a TV series—rather, he opened a portal to the strangest, unmapped corners of the mind. He projected a living model of the unconscious and made it a show, with Dale Cooper as the wandering consciousness at its centre. The series feels like a dream analysis, where Cooper isn’t just solving Laura Palmer’s murder but confronting the depths of his own psyche. From Bob’s terrifying appearances to Louise Dombrowski’s mesmerizing dance, Twin Peaks brings to the surface what usually hides beneath our feelings. In a sense it exposes the undercurrents that fundamentally shape who we are.

The hypnotic way the story unfolds blurs the line between dream and reality, revealing the hidden machinery of the mind—a vision of what Freud once called “the uncanny”: the return of the familiar made strange, or the strange made suddenly intimate. The uncanny in Twin Peaks lives in the woods that feel known but aren’t, the homes that seem warm until the lights flicker. The familiar world returns warped—and what we thought we’d buried rises again in eerie disguise. There’s the home video of Laura and Donna dancing at the picnic, caught in a loop of joy that’s already gone. Laura laughs and reaches toward the camera—as if still alive, still here—but we’re watching her from the other side of death. These moments stick not because they’re surreal, but because they feel almost real—like they came from a place inside us we pretend isn’t there. That’s the uncanny: not fantasy, but memory misremembered. Familiarity laced with dread.

The show plays out like an essence of a psychoanalytic session, where repressed returns in symbolic form. Laid out in front of you—almost as if on a silver tray—is a vivid reflection of everything that makes us twisted in a different way. It’s everything psychoanalysis tries to touch—but here, it simply is, no interpretation required. The series, in a poetic way, touches on the death drive, the Oedipus complex, and all those things that make psychoanalysts twist their tongues, outdoing each other in finding ever more bizarre ways to describe the same old stuff: why we are the way we are.

David Lynch poses the ultimate question—which isn’t Who killed Laura? but Who killed you? The question that sent Harold Smith into a breakdown. In other words, the question of who hurt us, shaped us, split us in a way that no matter how far we run, we cycle back—drawn to the primal crime scene that defined our fate. I was five years old, watching something I didn’t understand—but somehow, I knew it understood me.

"West End"

I like that scene in Good Will Hunting – when Matt Damon says the joke about the pilot who leaves his mic on and blurts out that thing about a blowjob and a cup of coffee. After not posting for so long, maybe I should just crack a joke too, to break the silence. Only that I am probably the worst person to tell the joke. I could make a stand-up audience sit down.

What I was thinking though, it's the play I watched the other day in West End. Never mind which one. What stuck with me though, wasn’t the story but the performance - precision and confidence of the actors. I like sitting in the front rows, watching them up close, spitting on everyone whilst taking, like they own the audience. Every line, every movement - deliberate and untouched by hesitation or even a tiny bit of a self-doubt. Impressive. Watching good play, one may forget the world - and only then you know you got your money’s worth. Being so close to a performance so good - as good as it gets, because where else if not the West End? - brings imagination to life. And while what I see undoubtedly gives me thrill of entertainment, it also stirs something deeper, that I can’t quite name; something in my gut goes off and stinks. No matter how good the performance, it only plays at real feeling but never truly embodies it. It’s a bit annoying - if you think about it - or maybe I was just having a bad day. So, I am sitting there, all dolled up for the occasion, second or third best seat in the house, like a perfectly folded pierog with a suspicious filling. I get a little sceptical - like the Muppet hecklers - I feel like I'm watching perfection fucking with itself and instead of admiring it, I feel like I need to unravel it. I wonder how many times they’d rehearsed alone - talking to themselves at home, speaking to the wall or imagined partners. The result is hypnotizing. But fake. Like an edited version of reality, stripped of everything that makes real human interaction what it is. Onstage, silences are intentional rather not awkward, even if they meant to be awkward. Every response lands exactly on spot, as if life itself was just a performance. Or, the other way around.

Not quite focus on the plot, my mind wanders off. In fact, I find it more interesting to watch a different kind of performance - a little play of a person onstage with themselves. Behind every character is an actor, and behind the actor, a man. And that’s what I find intriguing, that's what I dig the most, and that's why I like to sit close. So I can search for the crack where real feeling bleeds through the craft. And it’s hard to say what makes me like an actor on stage, but most of the time I do. Ironically, it’s hard to resist a good one. And only when I see one I can stop thinking and start feeling. And their performance stops being just a performance, and I actually buy what they’re selling. I am merging into the world of a man on stage, as if some part of me is unconsciously seizing what is up there for grabs. After I leave the walls of the building, for a while, I can move through the world as if I were still on their stage, carrying a trace of their presence.

Winnicott’s idea of the true self and false self has been on my mind lately. I’ve been reading about it, but I’m not sure I get it. The true self is who we are when we’re real – the deepest ingredient of the pierog (pinch of black pepper?) so to speak - unscripted and spontaneous; the false self is the version we create to fit in, to comply with expectations of the world. It’s the McDonald’s double cheeseburger that you see on the billboard. When the false self takes over, we seem just fine on the outside but feel disconnected from who we really are. It is no rocket since, and it’s rather an obvious thing to come up with. Carl Jung came up with concepts of persona and the self, and Freud structured psyche on ego and id - but hey, forget about it, because now, true to his role as the new DJ of psychoanalytic music, Mr. D.W. Winnicott keeps remixing the same old tracks, stretching it over hundreds of pages of the theory that at the end you could mould into anything you like. And as long as you make yourself sound smart, when you explain why you are not yourself to you therapist, you probably get what he meant. Hats off to you. And if you don’t, even better - because it probably means you’re normal.

Nevertheless, some of it makes sense even to me. And it’s undoubtedly something I can connect with. After all, if we can choose what we want to say, why the hell would we pick what truly think about ourselves? Because, what's the truth anyway? But at some point, we may get lost in our own play that we play. I especially like the Winnicott's phrase is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found. How much of life, I wonder, we spent in a similar performance? When you constantly run conversations through your head and rehearse what to say. When you talk to someone else, trying to fit in; and avoid feeling exposed at any cost. I can feel you, me too. And yet, I feel most connected to people most often in those rare moments when they slip out of character - when the act drops, and something real finally shows through. Maybe some of what it means is that is not too bad to sometimes feel bad. Maybe the cracks we try to hide aren’t much of a flaw but the openings through which we become ourselves and connect with the world. The self that hurts, that struggles, isn’t a failure, but a proof that the ideal isn’t what we’re truly after. And the goal, either we like it or not, isn’t to be untouchable in the performance, but rather to touch and be touched. 

So why pay for a West End show when you can just visit friends, go to work, walk down the street and have argument with your wife again, or a homeless bum for a change? Everywhere you look, it’s all just acting - unless... Oh right, now I remember! We pay cause at West End is as good as it gets and in life you just get what you get: same shit different day. But anyway, I almost forget to tell you what happened to me the other day...

“I was on this plane... And I'm sittin' there and the captain comes on and he does his whole, "We'll be cruising at 35,000 feet," then he puts the mike down but he forgets to turn it off. Then he turns to the copilot and goes, "You know, all I could go for right now is a f***in' blow job and a cup of coffee." So the stewardess f***in' goes bombin' up from the back of the plane to tell him the mic's still on, and this guy behind me goes, "Hey hon, don't forget the coffee!"

Dreams: "Runner"

(Adrian - man, age 29)

Dream:

"I was in space, inside a spaceship and I was dressed like a character from a science fiction movie - like Star Wars or Star-Trek. I had a shotgun in my hand. I held it pointed forward just as I was ready to shoot...

“If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens.” - Andrei Tarkovsky

The weapon somehow made me feel stronger. There was a little boy standing next to me, and I was holding his hand. Then behind my back I heard someone talking about me - "look at him, he is trying to be like some kind of a hero or something". These annoyed me because I didn't want to be seen as I am trying to pretend to be like someone. I replied: "not like a movie hero, I want to be like me, but with a gun". Then the little boy who was holding my hand suddenly ran away. I ran after him, but I couldn't find him anywhere."

Dream interpretation:

The dream came the night after one of the monthly meetings at work. At the meeting Adrian disagreed with one of his colleagues. After he took his voice publicly, his boss showed interest in what he was saying and asked him some questions. Adrian then felt nervous as he "had been put on the spot" and found it difficult to follow up and explain the point he made earlier. He said that when he spoke publicly, he felt shy and afterwards felt very frustrated that he could not explain more precisely what he meant. This real (awake) life context may with no doubt be the opening point for the dream interpretation.

Adrian is dressed up as a movie hero. The outfit embodies his Persona i.e., how he would like to be seen. He also has a shotgun, which he associates with strength. The gun in his hand in fact represents the subconscious compensation for how vulnerable he may have felt at the meeting. In his other hand, he holds the hand of a little boy who eventually, runs away from him. The boy is a symbol of what the dreamer perceives as his own weakness but on the other hand is also (and more importantly!) a symbol of creativity. Perhaps the creativity which he lacked when he was trying to express himself at the work meeting. And, quite literally, the creativity imprisoned by himself, or to be more precise, by his Persona. If we follow the dream, we will see that, Adrian dressed as a movie hero (Persona), holds the boy's hand (is holding to a certain idea of strength) and with his gun pointed forward (perhaps ready to verbally counter his colleague). The boys escape from the dreamer's own hands may resemble the essential (unconscious) wish and in fact symbolises the unspoken words during the work meeting.