8 Life Lessons in “Winter Dreams”
Life Lesson #1 We can’t bend reality to conform to our fantasy of the perfect life.
Therapist Phil Stutz observes that most people suffer unnecessarily because they don’t live in reality.
He defines reality as consisting of the following:
- Life is pain and adversity. We must battle every day with a self-destructive force that wants immediate gratification.
- Life is uncertain. Our fortunes are random, we never know if our luck will be good or bad at every moment. We therefore should not be lulled into a false comfort by good fortune knowing that our fortunes can change without warning.
- Worthwhile accomplishment requires long-term focus, hard work, and discipline, which means we must sacrifice immediate gratification for our long-term goals and far-ranging purpose.
- None of us are special. We are all subject to the laws of time. Father Time will inevitably hunt us down. If we squander our time here on Earth, our meeting with Father Time will be one of fear and anguish.
- We cannot avoid reality and the aspects Stutz describes. These aspects of reality are unchanging and non-negotiable. No amount of money or wishcasting can change them.
In spite of these aspects of reality, Stutz explains we are encouraged to reject them because of the messages we receive from consumer culture.
The media presents us with mythical happy people. They are physically beautiful and perfect; they are confident; their life narrative is certain; they are connected to love and companionship and the whole world loves them.
They seem special and live outside the five aspects of reality Stutz describes. Because they live outside of reality, they are more like demigods than human beings. These people may be actors, musicians, TV personalities, and influencers. Whoever they are, they exist on a plane of fantasy and therefore are chimeras.
We want to be like these media demigods. We wear their clothes, drive their cars, consume their music and art, eat their organic food brands, take their special nutrition supplements; we do everything in our power to be like them, but we have been duped and have embarked upon a fool’s errand.
Stutz writes that this magical thinking of buying the same things as the demigods to be like them is so pervasive that we don’t even know we’re doing it. He writes, “We all feel a pressure to convince others that we are part of it. This holds true for the poor kid unsure if dinner is coming and the billionaire with six homes. When everyone acts as if a fantasy is real, it begins to seem real.”
Dexter Green is a man on a fool’s errand. He is attempting to break the laws of reality and live in an image of perfection, what Phil Stutz calls an Image Frozen in Time.
This Image Frozen in Time is embodied by Dexter’s “winter dreams” of the perfect life of wealth, power, and the ultimate trophy wife Judy Jones. The pursuit of his fantasy will destroy his spirit, cut him off from life and be proof of Life Lesson #1: You can’t bend reality to fit your fantasy of the perfect life.
Running Away from the Shame and Ugliness of Poverty
The story begins:
“Some of the caddies were poor as sin and lived in one-room houses with a neurasthenic cow in the front yard, but Dexter Green’s father owned the second best grocery store in Black Bear--the best one was ‘The Hub,” patronized by the wealthy people from Sherry Island--and Dexter caddied only for pocket money.”
From Dexter’s eyes, coming from a working-class family is a sign of poverty. And poverty is a cloak of shame, a sign of sin, and he sees his poor caddy co-coworkers leave the rich golf course and live in their tiny hovels. They must toil with the rich and return to their dungeon. They are all prisoners to an ugly life. What signifies their ugly existence is a sickly cow standing in front of their hovels.
Dexter is an aspiring snob who longs to live in a world of beauty. As a fourteen-year-old boy, Dexter is possessed with blind ambition--to never be second best, but to be an Alpha Businessman who can escape the sin and shame of his past.
For Dexter, the notion that poverty is sin is accompanied by wealth is salvation.
For Dexter, life is a zero-sum game. To become a winner means that someone else has to be a loser. He wants to be on top.
As we read “Winter Dreams,” we will see a man who committed his entire life to running away from the shame and ugliness of his poverty and living in the winter dreams of wealth and glamor.
The Trauma and Shame of Poverty
Poverty is not only stressful from an economic standpoint; it is traumatic from a psychological one. To have no money is to be a leper or a pariah in a society that worships money.
For example, when I was in the seventh grade, I didn’t have any extra money for the snackbar during the middle school’s lunch hour. One afternoon when my friends ran to the snackbar to buy ice cream, I ran with them, but stopped when I realized I had no extra cash. At this point, someone shrieked with glee that I didn’t have any money. That some disembodied oracle identified me as the boy with no money made my knees wobble and I had to grab a tree branch for support. To this day, I wake up from sleep hearing that demonic shriek.
I am able to laugh at this episode from my past, but Dexter takes the shame of poverty seriously.
Life Lesson #2: Anxiety-Fueled Solutions Are Worse Than the Original Problem
Dexter’s anxiety and shame of poverty and his low-status working-class origins give is Life Lesson #2: Our anxieties often fuel false solutions that are more self-destructive than the original problem.
In a state of panic, we often make problems worse by not thinking through real solutions but grasping for straws.
Dexter’s facade and blind ambition will disconnect him from others and himself and create for him a life of loneliness and addiction for which there will be no interruption, no wisdom, and no intervention to save him.
He begins the story as a lost young man and as the story progresses he becomes more and more lost, an intensified version of his lost and confused self.
Wealthy Man Cosplay and Alpha Male Fantasies
As a teenager, Dexter spends a lot of his time fantasizing about being wealthy--not just rich but in a position of authority and adulation. He has Alpha Male fantasies.
He is enlivened by autumn. We read, “Fall made him clinch his hands and tremble and repeat idiotic sentences to himself, and make brisk abrupt gestures of command to imaginary audiences and armies.”
When Dexter is not leading imaginary armies, he is humiliating rich golf players by defeating them in epic battles in the “fairways of his imagination” in which he sometimes beats his rich opponents with “laughable ease” and struts like a peacock as he bathes in an imaginary crowd’s adoration.
Dexter’s reliance on grandiose fantasies is a sign of his emotional and spiritual impoverishment. He is lonely and frightened and attempts to overcome his anxieties with fantasies of ostentation--showing off.
The Libido Ostentando
In Latin, the term libido ostentando refers to the pathological need broken people have to show off and constantly seek attention.
These broken souls operate under the magical thinking that if people adulate them enough they will find happiness.
Dexter Green is a tragic figure who can never free himself from the libido ostentando.
This need to show off causes people to do stupid things. For example, in 2004 I had a student who wrote about her boyfriend who raced his Subaru WRX STi against other WRX owners. To lighten his car and make it faster, her boyfriend took out the passenger seat so that where there was once a seat cushion there was now only a sharp protrusion unsuitable for sitting. That this boyfriend expected his girlfriend to sit on this sharp protuberance revealed his true priorities. She was disgusted by his true nature and appropriately broke up with him. Between love and the libido ostentando, her boyfriend had made his decision, and now he was without a girlfriend. This now ex-boyfriend is chained to the libido ostentando, a sign of his impoverishment and depravity.
“I don’t want to caddy anymore.”
At fourteen, Dexter abruptly quits being a caddy because of the job’s low status, which does not square with his Alpha Male fantasies.
He could not be seen as a caddy because of an eleven-year-old girl named Judy Jones. She is described as a heartbreaker:
“The little girl who had done this was eleven--beautifully ugly as little girls are apt to be who are destined after a few years to be inexpressibly lovely and bring no end of misery to a great number of men.”
In Dexter’s eyes, Judy Jones is the ultimate trophy figure for a man who is possessed by the libido ostentandi. He can show her off as his own. She represents the glamor that an aspiring Alpha Male craves; however, he can’t bear to see her as a servant or a caddy, so he must quit his job and only allow her to see him as an Alpha Male.
Life Lesson #3: Shows of Strength Are Too Often Signs of Weakness and Impoverishment
Dexter’s commitment to the libido ostentando brings us to life lesson #3: When we try too hard to impress with shows of strength and ostentatious pageantry, we are exposing our weakness, insecurity, and impoverishment.
Because Dexter is surrounded by toadies and sycophants who grovel at his knee like peasants before a king, he becomes convinced of his own hollow act and fails to see the foolishness of his ways.
Judy Jones Is a Termagant and a Cipher and an Unworthy Obsession
When we look at the way the rich Judy Jones bosses and bullies her entourage, we see that she is both a termagant and a cipher. A termagant is an ill-tempered bully with no grace or patience. A cipher is a shallow person of no substance. The word cipher literally means zero.
How could someone of such low character become Dexter Green’s lifelong obsession?
Because he projects his fantasies of the Ultimate Trophy Woman onto Judy Jones. What he desires is not reality; it is the result of his magical thinking: to flaunt a Trophy Woman and be adored as his misguided quest for happiness.
Judy Jones Is a Chimera
Because the Judy Jones of Dexter’s imagination is not real, she is a chimera. A chimera is a mirage that we chase. This mirage or chimera destroys us.
Life Lesson #4: We Too Often Fall in Love with Projections of Our Wish-Fulfillment Fantasies, Not Real People
Dexter projects his fantasies of absolute power and glamor onto Judy Jones. As a result, he dehumanizes her and sees her more as an abstraction than as a human being.
His quest for Judy Jones is based on a projection from the cesspool of his diseased and toxic imagination for power and glamor rooted in his emotional impoverishment.
Dexter Green Has No Self-Agency
Beholden to the libido ostentando and fantasies of being an Alpha Male, Dexter lacks free will, self-agency, and self-possession. Instead, he is driven by compulsions that he doesn’t completely understand.
When he quits his job as a caddy, for example, he does so as a compulsion, not as a well-thought decision. His is compelled by a “perturbation,” which means uneasiness and anxiety, not the powers of reason:
We read:
“The enormity of his decision frightened him. He was a favorite caddy, and the thirty dollars a month he earned through the summer were not to be made elsewhere around the lake. But he had received a strong emotional shock, and his perturbation required a violent and immediate outlet.”
The Unconscious Force of Winter Dreams
The story’s narrator is not content to explain Dexter’s decision to quit as a mere compulsion. It is Dexter’s unconscious chasing of a magical place where glamor and veneration shower him into a sense of fullness and happiness. He cannot see the myth or falsehood of his unconscious desire.
We read:
“As so frequently would be the case in the future, Dexter was unconsciously dictated to by his winter dreams.”
Autopsy, Not Story
We must not read “Winter Dreams” so much as a short story. It is more of an autopsy. “Winter Dreams” is the study of a spiritual death caused by magical thinking.
Magical Thinking Vs. Reality
In the realm of love, magical thinking makes us have the stupid fantasy that the object of our love will meet all our needs, protect us from pain, and give us a life of nonstop pleasure and beauty. When they fail to meet our fantasy, we dump them and find a replacement.
What is reality? Reality is to acknowledge that life is pain, uncertainty, and constant work.
Knowing the difference between magical and realistic thinking brings us to life lesson #5, which is an offshoot of Life Lesson #1:
Life Lesson #5: People who embrace reality find more happiness and success than people who embrace magical thinking.
Slow Death by Magical Thinking
There is no character arc or character transformation in “Winter Dreams.” There is only intensification of the character flaw that already exists.
“Winter Dreams” chronicles a slow, excruciating death of someone beholden to magical thinking. It could be observed that the majority of people die a slow spiritual death in the same manner.
In a critical thinking class, we attempt to replace magical thinking with critical thinking.
How do we define “winter dreams”?
Because winter dreams inform all of Dexter Green’s behavior, we should understand what they are. We can define winter dreams as glamor, dominance, greed, and status.
The character trait that informs all of the above would have to be vanity.
But to go deeper, there must be something that fuels vanity. Based on the story’s beginning, the fuel of Dexter’s vanity is the fear of shame.
The fear of shame is the essential fuel of Dexter’s winter dreams. He is beholden to the magical thinking that if he bathes in the glory of winter dreams--wealthy, beauty, glamor, and status--he will be safe from the shame of his impoverished past.
- He compulsively quits his caddy job.
- He rejects an affordable college and burdens himself with one he can barely afford because it is more famous.
- He calls off engagements with other women whenever he thinks he has a chance at getting back with Judy Jones.
- He climbs the economic ladder hoping to reach a point where his wealth makes him irresistible to Judy Jones.
His compulsions are the result of his winter dreams.
We read:
“But do not get the impression, because his winter dreams happened to be concerned at first with the musings on the rich, that there was anything merely snobbish in the boy. He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people--he wanted the glittering things themselves. Often he reached out for the best without knowing why he wanted it--and sometimes he ran up against the mysterious denials and prohibitions in which life indulges. It is with one of those denials and not with his career as a whole that this story deals.”
What is this denial? This denial is Dexter’s fantasy of happiness based on the acquisition of Judy Jones, who is not the real Judy Jones but a fantasy or chimera inside of Dexter’s imagination.
Even the rich cannot bend reality to their fantasies. They must be denied.
Regardless of our income, we all find that sooner or later magical thinking will fail us when reality comes knocking on our door.
Dexter Lives the American Dream
We read that Dexter gets rich. “He made money. It was rather amazing.” By the time he is only twenty-three, people are already gawking at his amazing wealth. At twenty-seven, he owns the largest laundry business in the country.
Alpha Dexter Meets Judy Jones 9 Years After First Encounter
Nine years have passed since the fourteen-year-old Dexter quit his caddy job because he couldn’t let the eleven-year-old Judy Jones see him as poor. Now he meets the twenty-year-old Judy Jones as a member of the “rich man’s club” at the golf course.
Dexter doesn’t just think Judy is beautiful. He recognizes the other rich
men desiring her. This makes him covet her more as a trophy. He is overcome by his libido ostentando.
The Trickster Is a Demon
In stories of moral disintegration, the character often falls prey to a Trickster. For the theme of this essay, this Trickster takes the form of magical thinking: Dexter’s false belief that acquiring the chimera Judy Jones will give him absolute happiness and perfection, an Image Frozen in Time (to use a term by Phil Stutz).
The Trickster takes us through
four levels of emotion:
- Mundane or Earthly
- Angelic
- Mystical
- Demonic
Like instructions on the back of a shampoo bottle, “rinse and repeat,” the Trickster process occurs over and over in an endless doom loop, and in the case of Dexter Green, slowly crushes him.
Projection Is a Form of Magical Thinking
In psychology, there is a term called projection that is used in two ways. The first is when we project our secret inner lives onto other people so that we assume, often erroneously, that they have the same problems and aspirations as us.
The second definition of projection is when we unconsciously project our fantasies and desires on another person, become blinded by their humanity, and reduce that person into an abstraction or a symbol for some absolute manifestation of our happiness.
Dexter Green commits the second form of projection. He projects his fantasies of happiness and alpha male power onto Judy Junes. In the process, he is blind to the fact that she is a shallow, capricious cipher.
When she invites him to dinner on an impulse, he takes her invitation as some sign of destiny when in reality her invitation is no more significant than a hiccup.
We read:
“His heart turned over like the flywheel of the boat, and, for the second time, her casual whim gave a new direction to his life.”
Twice his capricious encounters with Judy Jones have caused him to elevate his existence into some fantasy of significance. The first time he quit his job as a caddy. Now he sees her as a viable candidate to be his life partner when in fact she has the emotional development of a twelve-year-old and her moral development is even worse. But it doesn't matter. He rides on his projection.
Living under the dictates of projection is a sign of magical thinking.
Dexter’s Pride Makes Him Blind
Dexter is haughty and proud to the extreme. He sees himself as better than others because of his perceived Alpha Male status. As a result, he is blind to his emotional and spiritual impoverishment that informs all that he does.
When Dexter goes to rich dinner parties, he scans the room and comforts himself with the belief that he is better than the other men. To reinforce his sense of superiority, he wears clothes made from “the best tailors in America” and develops mannerisms that exude his superiority. In other words, his entire life consists of affect (ostentatious cultivation of an image). He is fastidiously curating an outer image while his soul withers into nothing.
In other words, Dexter ignores the pain inside of him while committing himself fully to the libido ostentando.
No matter how hard he tries to puff up a grand facade, he is deep down a broken misfit toy doomed to a life of loneliness, anxiety, and depression.
Duping Others
By duping others with his grand facade and making them slobber over him because of his wealth, Dexter does not have friends. Instead, he has sycophants.
Knowing that they grovel before him because of his power, he has contempt for them. Accepting their social circle and having nowhere else to go, Dexter must on a certain level have contempt for himself. By duping others, he has failed to find the roadmap to success, so in fact, he has duped himself.
This leads us to Life Lesson #6.
Life Lesson #6: Fame Is a Toxic Drug That Makes Us Loathe Both Our Worshippers and Ourselves
Fame creates a toxic symbiotic relationship with the famous and their slobbering sycophants. On one hand, the famous have an addictive craving for celebrity and attention. But on the other hand, they know this attention is a sign of stupidity and depravity from their worshippers. Therefore, they have contempt for the people who feed their addiction. At the same time, they know deep down this affection is hollow and since they are addicted to this hollow affection, they have contempt for themselves.
We can conclude, then, that celebrity culture is a sick culture.
Think of the social influencers who buy expensive football jackets and say they’re going to the Super Bowl on their social media platforms. Their Instagram subscribers don’t know that these influencers return all the sports clothing to the stores the same day to get a refund and often fake going to the Super Bowl to get traffic and likes. These influencers surely despise the stupidity of their followers who believe in their chicanery. And enjoying this shallow attention, these influencers deep down despise themselves.
“Who Are You?”
In the middle of the story, Daisy asks Dexter, “Who are you, anyhow?”
Dexter answers, “I’m nobody. My career is largely a matter of futures.”
As a magical thinker, he does not know how to live in the present. He can only imagine a perfect image fixed in the future upon which time he will be a “somebody.” This is Dexter’s illusion.
Meanwhile, his words are true: He is a nobody.
Sacrifice at the Altar
We all have goals, and to achieve those goals we make sacrifices. But to sacrifice our life to someone who is spiritually and morally bankrupt doesn’t make any sense. It is reckless and is evidence of moral blindness.
Sadly, this moral blindness drives Dexter Green. We read that when he decides to pursue Judy Jones, he essentially sells his soul to the devil:
“Dexter surrendered a part of himself to the most direct and unprincipled personality with which he had ever come in contact.”
Judy Jones has no moral compass, no depth, no empathy, no social grace. She is a manipulator and a bully. She is capricious, back-stabbing, dishonest, and two-faced. That Dexter wants her more than anyone in the world speaks to his madness.
Physical attraction is only one ingredient in Dexter’s sacrifice to Judy Jones. She is a “brand,” an unconscious representation of “having made it,” the dream of absolute success, and the desire to dominate his competition.
By getting Judy Jones, Dexter can say to his competition, “I have the thing that you want and having it makes it impossible for you to have it and this makes me glad.”
Dexter’s orientation to dominate is not a sign of his strength. Rather, it is a sign of his weakness and impoverishment. He is a broken misfit toy who never feels he really belongs and has to find ways to compensate.
Dozens of Men Buzz Around Judy Jones All the Time
We read that Dexter really never has Judy exclusively. She is constantly dating at least a dozen men who are intoxicated by her. We read:
“Each of them had at one time been favored above all others--about half of them still basked in the solace of occasional sentimental revivals. Whenever one showed signs of dropping out through long neglect, she granted him a brief honeyed hour, which encouraged him to gag along for a year or longer. Judy made these forays upon the helpless and defeated without malice, indeed unconscious that there was anything mischievous in what she did.”
We can infer that Judy is like a drug to these men, and that these men are in a state of helpless addiction.
We can further infer that for Dexter, his “winter dreams” are the pursuit of a potent opiate for which to seek oblivion from his inability to be a true human being. In many ways, Dexter behaves in the story like a drug addict in search of his next fix. As a result, he squanders his entire life on the mindless oblivion of a pharmaceutical pill named Judy Jones.
Judy Jones Like Dexter Green Is Also an Addict
We learn in the middle of the story that Judy Jones is drawn to manipulating dozens of men mostly for the sense of power. This power feeds her narcissistic desire to control others. As we read:
“She was entertained only by the gratification of her desires and by the direct exercise of her own charm. Perhaps from so much youthful love, so many youthful lovers, she had come, in self-defense, to nourish herself wholly from within.”
Both Judy Jones and Dexter Green are constantly on the hunt for “nourishment,” a narcissistic kick of power. In a way it makes sense that the dead-souled Dexter seeks the dead-souled Judy. The dead seek each other. They are both vampires.
One could argue that “Winter Dreams” is a vampire story. It is the dead feasting off of others.
See No Evil, Hear No Evil
Judy is not loyal to Dexter and her infidelity torments him, but he consoles himself with the notion that these dalliances with other men eventually bore her (“Judy was yawning”) and that he is the true mate for her. Additionally, he fears that if he expresses his anger to her over her infidelity, she will leave him, so in his mind it’s best to pretend he doesn’t know anything.
Choosing Imprisonment Over Freedom
We learn that at twenty-four years of age Dexter “found himself increasingly in a position to do as he wished.” But it’s at this point in his life that he shackles himself to Judy Jones, not the person, but as the idea of ultimate power.
He is a man imprisoned by a bad idea.
Judy Jones Replacement Therapy
We learn that after eighteen months of madness with Judy Jones, Dexter is desperate to escape his drug addiction. Judy “treated him with malice, with indifference, with contempt. She had inflicted on him innumerable little slights and indignities possible in such a case--as if in revenge for having ever cared for him at all.”
As a Trickster, she takes him to heaven, to hell, back to heaven, and back to hell again. As we read: “She had brought him ecstatic happiness and intolerable agony of spirit. She had caused him untold inconvenience and not a little trouble. She had insulted him, and she had ridden over him, and she had played his interest in her against his interest in his work--for fun.”
In other words, she toys with him like a cat plays with a mouse.
Exhausted, abused, angry, and desperate to break free from Judy Jones, Dexter makes a lame swipe at Judy Jones Replacement Therapy by getting engaged to Irene Scheerer.
The author’s choice of Scheerer for the last name seems to suggest the verb to shear, as to cut off with a pair of scissors. So desperate is Dexter to cut off his addiction to Judy Jones, he seeks, not a human being, but the embodiment of a pair of scissors--Irene Scheerer.
Her description: “Irene was light-haired and sweet and honorable, and a little stout, and she had two suitors whom she pleasantly relinquished when Dexter formally asked her to marry him.”
Irene is not someone Dexter adores and loves. Rather, she is a stopgap measure, someone to be with, until Dexter’s addiction to Judy Jones subsides.
As we read:
“He knew that Irene would be no more than a curtain spread behind him, a hand moving among gleaming teacups, a voice calling to children . . . fire and loveliness were gone, the magic of nights and the wonder of the varying hours and seasons . . . slender lips, down-turning, dropping to his lips and bearing him up into the heaven of eyes. . . . The thing was deep in him. He was too strong and alive for it to die lightly.”
In other words, Dexter and Irene will be playing house, living a facade, curating an existence of domestic nest-building while the true fire inside Dexter burns and consumes him secretly.
To mix metaphors, Dexter is using Irene as one would chew on a stick of Nicorette gum to quit smoking.
But Dexter’s attempts to free himself from Judy Jones are in vain.
A True Drug Addict Knows His Poison
Dexter Green is not stupid. He knows he has an addiction problem regarding Judy Jones. He knows she is a liability. He knows she is a scoundrel. He knows she is ruining his life. We read:
“When autumn had come and gone again it occurred to him that he could not have Judy Jones. He had to beat this into his mind but he convinced himself at last. He lay awake at night for a while and argued it over. He told himself the trouble and the pain she had caused him, he enumerated her glaring deficiencies as a wife. Then he said to himself that he loved her, and after a while he fell asleep.”
One of the tormenting themes of “Winter Dreams” is that we can intellectually understand the poison that kills us, yet want the poison anyway. As the adage instructs us: “The heart wants what it wants.”
This part of the story points us to the seventh Life Lesson.
Life Lesson #7: Knowing We Are Addicted to Poison Doesn’t Free Us from the Poison
This is perhaps the most painful life lesson in the story. We can know we are diseased, that we crave that which is self-destructive and poisonous to us, and yet we want this very poison more than we want the good things in life.
Sometimes we crave what is called “crazy love,” a sick kind of love that defies all logic and common sense.
Free Will or Hard-wiring?
In Dexter’s case, the private scandalous world with his paramour Judy Jones is the world he prefers over the duties and respectability of public life. Even in the absence of Judy Jones, he lives in a parallel universe, one of fantasy and longing, for his forbidden paramour. He doesn’t so much choose the life of scandal, debauchery, and private depravity as much as he is hard-wired for such a life. At the same time, he doesn’t so much choose to reject the life of respectability, honor, and duty as much as he is repelled by such a life.
There is a 2007 documentary about this sick kind of love titled Crazy Love, about an attorney who hires two criminals to throw poison in the eyes of his former girlfriend causing her to go blind. He continues to stalk her and eventually they get married.
A Year of Tranquility
Knowing he’s an addict, Dexter desperately stays away from Judy for a year during his engagement to Irene Scheerer. During this time, he is playing the role of the stable man engaged to the “sturdy and reliable” Irene. Being away from the toxic drug Judy Jones is good for him. We read:
“For the first time in over a year Dexter was enjoying a certain tranquility of spirit.”
But Judy Jones is not yet done with him.
Judy Exists to Torment Dexter When He Is Most Vulnerable
When Judy finds out that Dexter is engaged to Irene Scheerer, she knows this is her grand opportunity to flex her muscles, so she hunts Dexter down, has a dalliance with the helpless drug addict, and asks him to marry her.
In that moment, he realizes he never loved Irene, and he cancels the engagement, causing a big scandal.
We can call Judy Jones a chaos agent.
In literature, the central conflict is typically order vs. chaos. To use Greek mythology, we place the god of order, Apollo vs. the god of unrestrained chaos, Dionysius.
Domesticity or nest-building is a Apollonian force in the story. Unbridled passion is Dionysian.
The chaos agent Judy Jones persuades Dexter to call off the engagement and then she calls off the engagement with Dexter. He is too brain-numbed to despair over the situation: “He was beyond any revulsion or amusement.”
Leaving the Country and Returning to Shattered Winter Dreams
So desperate to flee his addiction, Dexter joins the army and enters World War I.
When he returns to New York at the age of thirty-two, he meets Devlin, a business associate, who shatters Dexter’s winter dreams.
Dexter realizes Judy is married and now goes by the name of Judy Simms. She is an abused housewife at the mercy of a jealous, cheating, drunken husband Lud Simmons. Rather than an object of glory, she is an object of Devlin’s pity.
The House of Lud
Lud is not a flattering name. The husband’s name is about as glorious as the sickly cow mentioned in the first paragraph of the story. Judy is married to Lud. It sounds like she is a prisoner to the stark brutality of a mundane existence. She lives in the House of Lud.
The very chimera Judy Jones who was supposed to save Dexter from a life of ugliness and shame lives in a world of ugliness and shame, a world where she is considered, at twenty-seven, too old and washed-up.
“Too Old”
Devlin goes on to say that Judy at twenty-seven years of age is “too old” to leave Lud and suggests that she is washed-up with her better days behind her. “She was a pretty girl when she first came to Detroit.” He goes on to say that “Lots of women fade just like that.” We can infer that being imprisoned by an abusive husband has taken a toll on her. She is a pallid ghost of her former self.
Upon hearing that Judy is no longer an object of beauty and desire, Dexter is flabbergasted, outraged, and in a state of disbelief. How could the force that has had power over him most of his life be so plain and vulnerable?
Upon hearing this, Dexter craves alcohol to find oblivion. Judy’s downfall makes him feel like his whole life was built on a lie, and this is too much for him to process.
Dexter can imagine being married to Judy and watching her fade right before his eyes. He realizes the very thing that was his life essence, the very thing that animated him to get out of bed in the morning, the very thing that consumed his imagination was dead. As we read: “The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him.”
Without his winter dreams, he stands before an abyss. You hear of cult members who when they leave their cult, they don’t know what to do next because they have nothing left to stand on. This is Dexter’s condition.
This leads us to our eighth life lesson:
Life Lesson #8: While It’s True That Chasing a Chimera Will Kill You, Not Chasing a Chimera Will Kill You As Well
We chase a variety of chimeras of varying qualities. Oftentimes, they destroy us, but they also give us drive, passion, and purpose.
Chasing a chimera can be a mixed bag. It can uplift us and destroy us at the same time.
The King of Bodybuilding, Ronnie Coleman
Take perhaps the greatest bodybuilder of all time, Ronnie Coleman. He is featured in the 2018 documentary (currently on Amazon Prime) Ronnie Coleman: The King.
To pursue his obsession, being the world’s greatest bodybuilder, Coleman abused his body. He achieved greatness but at a price. He must undergo dozens of back surgeries and he lives in constant, excruciating pain.
His fellow bodybuilders say he didn’t have to train so heavy and abuse his body the way he did, but it could be argued that his drive for greatness is what made him Ronnie Coleman. In other words, his passion for greatness brought him his achievement and his suffering simultaneously.
Without a Chimera, Dexter Returns to Ugliness
Dexter spent his whole life trying to escape the ugliness of his shame and poverty by living in winter dreams, and with those dreams crushed into dust, he returns to see the stark ugliness that is his life.
“‘Long ago, he said, ‘long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.’”
Anhedonia
Having given his life to a false idol and seeing that idol crumble before him, Dexter is beyond depression and sadness. He is in such a bad state that he is incapable of any joy or happiness--he is in a state of anhedonia.
This grave misery is the reward for his magical thinking.
Specific Examples of Magical Thinking
The Pretend College Student
A college student spends over three thousand dollars on a Macbook Pro thinking that the device will make him a better student when he ends up using the laptop as a nonstop entertainment device, becomes brain-dead, and drops out of college.
The Man with the Biggest Lexus Loses
An engineer with a Lexus GS notices his neighbor just bought a bigger, more luxurious Lexus LX. Seething with envy, the GS owner works long hours to get the superior Lexus RS so that he can “crush” his neighbor. Working obsessively for 80 hours a week, the aspiring RS buyer neglects his wife and ignores her pleas for valuable family time. At last, a year has passed and the GS owner buys his prized Lexus RS only to find that his wife is having an affair with the LX owner. His marriage is ruined, he is expelled from his own, and must live and sleep in his new Lexus RS.
The Short Man with an Inferiority Complex
One of my students was obsessed with being short. He was convinced that everyone had a low esteem of him due to his short stature. He wore elevator shoes, lifts, and even walked on his tiptoes. Eventually, his attempts to be taller destroyed his spine, he required surgery, and the surgery left him two inches shorter than when he started his machinations.
The Mother Who Protected Her Son from Mold
A mother has forced her family to move to five different houses because of perceived mold, which she is convinced is the root of her son’s problems. She goes to her son’s classrooms at school and monitors “the mold situation.” Her magical thinking is that she must protect her son from danger when in fact her “protection” is ruining his life evidenced by the fact that the boy is nervous and socially maladapted.
A Man Frozen in Time Dies from a Bee Sting
A perfectly sculpted man at the beach is playing Frisbee with two beautiful women when he steps on a bee. He cannot violate his perfect image by telling them that he is in pain. His foot swells and he soon dies of anaphylactic shock. His perfectly curated image is interrupted by death.
The Landlady Who Died in the Sun
An American father and son are walking the hot streets of Buenos Aires, Argentina, one summer afternoon when they come across a bazaar where goods are sold outdoors. There they see a 75-year-old greedy landlady who must show her superiority “over the riff-raff” by wearing her expensive full-body mink coat in the sweltering summer heat. Overcome by exhaustion, the landlady collapses. The father and son rush to her aid, the father kneels and attempts to rip the coat off of the landlady, but she spits in the father’s face and says, “Get away from me, mijo,” before giving up her last breath. Her belief that having better things than others made her a better person resulted in her death.
Distracted by Two Large TVs
A couple constantly fights over the TV to the point that a divorce is imminent. The wife wants soap operas. The husband wants ESPN. On the verge of losing all hope for their marriage, they see a therapist. Their therapist recommends that they get two TVs in the living room. The husband wears bluetooth speakers and watches ESPN while his wife sitting right next to him watches soap operas. They spend the rest of their lives without conflict or acrimony.
Phil Connors from Groundhog Day
Phil Connors lives in purgatory where he repeats the same day over and over. He’s trapped in magical thinking that separates him from the nature of reality: self-pity, delusions of grandeur, nihilism, hedonism (pleasure-seeking), seeking validation of others, manipulating others to assert his will over them--all of these magical thinking behaviors fail him. He doesn’t escape purgatory until he learns how to build a work ethic, to connect to the community, and to learn how to love.
What is the opposite of magical thinking?
Reality
Phil Stutz aims to reorient us to reality, which is comprised of the following:
- Life is pain and adversity. We can accept this fact and engage with adversity with strength and courage, or we can deny this fact and retreat into a posture of fear, self-pity, and trepidation.
- Life is uncertain. Good and bad events come to us in a random fashion. We should therefore not be lulled into a false comfort by good fortune knowing that our fortunes can change without warning.
- Worthwhile accomplishment requires long-term focus, hard work, and discipline, which means we must sacrifice immediate gratification for our long-term goals and far-ranging purpose.
- We are not special. We may be fixated on our magical thoughts, but life and the human race move forward, with or without us. Father Time will inevitably hunt us down. If we squander our time here on Earth, our meeting with Father Time will be one of fear and anguish.
- These aspects of reality are unchanging. No amount of money or wishcasting can change them.
We Resist Reality
In spite of these aspects of reality, Stutz explains that popular culture encourages us to disavow reality because popular or consumer culture is selling a fantasy. The media presents us with mythical happy people. They are physically beautiful and perfect; they are confident; their life narrative is certain; they are connected to love and companionship and the whole world loves them. They seem special and live outside the five aspects of reality Stutz describes.
Because they live outside of reality, they are more like demigods than human beings. These people may be actors, musicians, TV personalities, and influencers. Whoever they are, they exist on a plane of fantasy and therefore are chimeras.
We want to be like these demigods. We wear their clothes, drive their cars, consume their music and art, eat their organic food brands, take their special nutrition supplements; we do everything in our power to be like them, but we have been duped and have embarked upon a fool’s errand.
Stutz writes that this magical thinking of buying the same things as the demigods to be like them is so pervasive that we don’t even know we’re doing it. He writes, “We all feel a pressure to convince others that we are part of it. This holds true for the poor kid unsure if dinner is coming and the billionaire with six homes. When everyone acts as if a fantasy is real, it begins to seem real.”
Buying Chimeras to be Happy
For example, a lot of podcasters I listen to advertise AG1, Athletic Greens. There is this fantasy that if you take AG1, you will partake in the demigod-like magic of these influencers. These greens cost about $100 a month. There is no research to support the claims made by the manufacturer. Eating real vegetables is more affordable and more bioavailable than green powder supplements. Taking green powders can cause bloating and gas. However, people eagerly spend money on these green powders because they emulate the influencers who sell them.
Just as Dexter Green from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Winter Dreams” pursues Judy Jones as if she were a ticket to the dining hall of the gods, AG1 promises to give us entrance to the emporium of modern-day health, strength, and beauty. AG1 is the Judy Jones of health supplements.
Moments Frozen in Time Vs. Daily Events
Dexter Green is a sucker for the consumer fantasy of perfection. He doesn’t know how to become a full human being by living through life’s daily events. Rather, he is fixated on mythical representations of perfection. He is both hollow and superficial as he waits to be saved by a moment frozen in time.
This moment is embodied by Judy Jones, a myth he has created in his head. This moment does not exist. Meanwhile, life is passing him by.
To become a full human being, we have to renounce and let go of mythical representations of perfection by seeing them as both stupid and dangerous.
We have to move into a new direction. Stutz writes, “The first step is to realize that life is a process. Our culture leads us to forget this fact and makes the destructive suggestion that we can perfect life and then get it to stand still. The ideal world with the superior people is like a snapshot or a postcard. A moment frozen in time that never existed. But real life is a process, it has movement and depth. The realm of illusion is an image, dead and superficial. Still, these images are tempting. There is no mess in them.”
In contrast to those whose lives are squandered as they wait for frozen moments in time, fully-realized human beings live in the messy world, which consists of a flow of events, one after another, which push us forward. Moving forward is living. Being stuck in a frozen moment is death.
Regulating Our Mood With Magical Thinking
We should not look to pharmaceuticals, applause, pleasure, or wealth to feel better. Stutz writes, “Believing that things outside you will make you happy is false hope. The Greeks considered it the ‘doubtful gift of the gods.’ In reality, there can be only two outcomes. Either the hoped-for thing does not happen, or it does and its effect quickly wears off. Either way, you are worse off than before because you have trained yourself to fixate on outer results.” Stutz observes that we “can never be happy by the material world” because we are spiritual beings. As such, we need to have deep connections with others to be content.
Dexter Green is in pursuit of a dead image that he thinks is life. As a result, he will be stagnant as the world passes him by.
Centripetal Vs. Centrifugal Motion
“Winter Dreams” is not a story about a character growing into a more evolved being (centrifugal motion). It’s about fixation, intensification and stagnation (centripetal).
The more magical thinking Dexter invests in Judy Jones, the more difficult it is for him to let go--even though he is disintegrating and becoming more and more miserable.
“Winter Dreams” is a cautionary tale. It is warning us to give up hope in frozen moments of time--images of perfection.
Moreover, we need to give up hope in the idea of feeling good or pleasure-seeking as the answer to our miserable condition. Rather, we must see our addictive pursuits as part of the cause of our misery and depression.
Stutz writes, “Each time depression recurs, it is a reminder that you cannot rely on the outer world. This awareness is the first step in overcoming depression.”
Summary of “Winter Dreams”
Growing up in a working-class family, Dexter Green is obsessed with the shame of his humble origins and with magically transforming himself into an upper-class Alpha Male.
He studies the lifestyles of the rich, imitates their behavior, and absorbs their egotism and vanity.
His journey begins as a teenager working as a caddy on a golf course, where he rubs elbows with the rich and famous.
It is while working as a caddy that he sees Judy Jones upon which he projects all his fantasies about fame and happiness onto her. He becomes obsessed and fixated with the idea that “having” Judy Jones will make him happy. His life will be one of success, Alpha Male status, and nonstop pleasure and happiness.
In fact, Judy Jones lacks character, charm, wit, substance, and intelligence. She is a blank slate for whom Dexter has projected his most crazed fantasies. Because she is a phantom in Dexter’s imagination, she has power over him.
Over the decades as he becomes a wealthy businessman, Dexter pursues her relentlessly, sacrifices friendship and love to be with this woman of no character. She commits infidelity against him repeatedly, but because he has no dignity and pursues her the way a junkie pursues his drug of choice, he debases and humiliates himself in his pursuit of her.
Whereas the goal of life is to learn from our mistakes and grow up to become mature, seasoned adults, Dexter is a study in perpetual stagnation and immaturity. He is the picture of a man who squandered his entire existence on magical thinking.
Critiques of ChatGPT
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Example of a Personal Introduction Followed by a Thesis
Worst College Student Ever
Of course, I was the worst college student ever. Even though I got straight As in high school, my high school was dumbed down to the point that getting a 4.0 GPA was meaningless. One of my classes, for example, was called “Money Matters.” We learned how to balance a checkbook and plan a budget so that we were saving more than we were spending. At best, you’re looking at first-grade math, a workbook full of simple percentages and fractions. Busy work like this was proof that our school didn’t want to educate us so much as keep us contained all day in an institution so our parents could work enough to afford living in the suburbs and get a break from the headaches of parenting.
Another class was called “Popular Lit.” There were no lectures or tests. For the semester, you read any three books you wanted from the library and wrote three one-page book reports. You didn’t have to read the book. You could present chicken scratch on the book report form or make up some crazy dream you had. It didn’t matter. As long as you turned in the book report, you got an A. The teacher was a woman in her sixties who told us to do “quiet reading” while she sat at her desk reading magazines, paying her bills, and clipping her fingernails. She was ghoulishly pale, she had long, uncombed dyed black hair, overly dark lipstick, and puffy bags under her eyes. No matter the weather, she wore wool coats that smelled of old sweat and bodily decay. Had you not told me she was a teacher, I would have assumed she was a homeless person scavenging the school for discarded cafeteria food from the high school’s trash cans.
My classes were so dumb I felt like I was in continuation school for juvenile delinquents. Clearly, the teachers weren’t preparing us to become members of the professional class. They wanted us to learn to follow rules so we’d stay out of prison and be satisfied with a blue-collar job or some minimum-wage gig in the service industry. As I heard one teacher say out of the side of his mouth in the corridor to one of his colleagues: “We’re training them to become burger-flippers.”
Even though I had no preparation for higher education, I capitulated to my mother’s demand to attend college, but I knew I didn’t belong there. I knew I would be the worst college student ever.
I was a terrible student in part because I could not regardless of their achievements admire my professors. I envied them because they were so educated and appeared to have everything I didn’t. They had impressive credentials, world travels, including African safaris, to provide scintillating stories while lecturing; nice clothes, not store-bought but made by celebrity tailors; a well-curated persona enhanced by professional voice lessons; an impressive zip code that made them neighbors of politicians and socialites; membership to various tennis, bird-watching, and yoga clubs and intellectual committees; literacy in multiple languages, mastery of at least three musical instruments, and fluency in gourmet cooking. During lectures, they talked about how they prepared extravagant meals that required lemon zest, capers, and ice baths, and they beamed with pride as they rhapsodized over the pleasures of making homemade puttanesca. I had never met a group of people from one profession who were so in love with themselves.
My Ethics professor, who was also the Dean of Philosophy, had recently dumped his wife for his young secretary. He seemed rather oblivious to the rich irony of his life choices and rode his Porsche convertible over the faculty parking lot, apparently unaware of the way his toupee would flop off his bald head like a flying squirrel every time his Porsche caromed over a speed bump. A lack of self-awareness seemed to serve my Ethics professor rather well. I despised him.
My bitter envy for my professors was only matched by my spectacular ignorance. I was deemed so illiterate that the university was not content with demoting me from Freshman Composition class into the remedial class, more commonly referred to at the time as Bonehead English. To let me know my place in this world, the university made it clear that even Bonehead English was too advanced for a pariah like myself. I was quickly demoted from Bonehead and placed in the Pre-Bonehead class, a level held in such contempt that the classroom was in the Humanities Building basement next to the boiler room. Broad-shouldered maintenance men wearing denim overalls would frequently peek into the room and cackle at us for being at a level of remediation that was such an embarrassment as to be the equivalent of leprosy.
Being envious of my professors and feeling like a college outcast, I was in a constant state of depression and demoralization. This did not bode well as a predictor for my academic success. To add another nail to my coffin, I may have just been plain stupid. I was stupid to judge my professors for having everything I lacked. Had I been smart, I would have humbled myself before them and looked at them as role models so that someday with lots of hard work I would become just like them. I was also stupid for feeling insulted for being placed in the Pre-Bonehead English class. Had I been smart, I would have been grateful for the fact that the university had provided resources for hopeless cases like mine rather than expel me from the university altogether.
Clearly, I was on my way to becoming the worst college student ever.
My failings as a college student were rooted in part in my inability to find a major, and my indecision made me miserable. I took a criminal justice class, but the books were mired in lawyer-speak. As a result, the sentences were larded with provisos, caveats, and contingencies reflected in elongated sentences in which I had to wade through several dependent clauses before I reached the independent clause. These sentences were so tedious and convoluted that I felt I had to go through the obstacle course on American Gladiators before I got to the sentence’s main idea. This drove me into a state of madness.
Then I tried sociology and psychology, but the books were immersed in self-satisfied academic jargon in which self-evident observations were made to look sophisticated and authoritative by virtue of the indecipherable, pretentious and self-indulgent verbiage. Being forced to read these textbooks, I imagined brandishing a machete and slashing through a jungle thick with words like positivity, codependency, external validation, inner child, interconnectivity, facilitate, mindset, marginalization, multi-faceted, dichotomy, and contemporaneously. Hacking my way through this forest of phony language made me tighten my body with so much hostility that I feared I would suffer a self-induced inguinal hernia.
Then I gave history a crack. The sheer volume of facts, dates, and places seemed to have compelled the authors to write in a mundane, almost remedial prose style with no distinctive point of view. The result was that I was bored out of my mind.
Oceanography was mildly interesting; however, the oceanography professor seemed to have a pathological fixation on the words “denitrification,” “liminal zone,” and “viscosity” so that it reached the point that every time he repeated those words I would skyrocket off my seat like a lab rat receiving an electrical shock.
Accounting was even worse. On the first day, the professor bombarded us with algebraic equations, the Index Matrix, the Nullspace, and homogeneous linear systems. Within ten minutes, I made an exit for the door. The professor asked me my name.
“That won’t be necessary,” I said at the doorway. “You’ll never see me again.”
In my first year of college, I dropped accounting, criminal justice, and sociology. I also failed a remedial algebra class. In the late spring of my first year, the university sent me a letter explaining that I was officially on academic probation. I could not drop any more classes and I would need to improve my GPA. Otherwise, I would be expelled. This was the wake-up call I needed. No longer could I use my crappy high school education as an excuse for my failures. No longer could I complain that life wasn’t fair. No longer could I fail to see that my toxic, cynical, self-pitying attitude was the equivalent of shooting myself in the foot.
Once receiving the university’s expulsion warning--which was the necessary kick in my lazy ass--I turned my life around. My recovery was swift and relentless. My GPA spiked to close to 4.0 and the distance between me and that expulsion letter widened more and more. The university seemed impressed with my reformation. Shortly after hiring me in the Tutoring Center, they offered me teaching positions for freshman composition. The university that had once threatened to expel me had now hired me to teach. I was on my way to becoming the worst college professor ever.
The cause of my turnaround was my decision to replace magical thinking with reality: Feeling sorry for myself and making excuses for my failure was sending me to the Shame Dungeon. Developing a consistent work ethic was the only realistic way I could get out of my rabbit hole, and I was young enough to bounce back.
In contrast, Dexter Green from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s depressing short story “Winter Dreams” squanders his entire life on magical thinking. His fixation on Judy Jones reveals that he is a man who is blinded by a chimera of glamor, status, and Alpha Male fantasies that in the end sever him from meaningful connections with other people and eviscerate him spiritually. His failure to wake up from his magical thinking is a cautionary tale for us all. We can break down Dexter’s magical thinking into four main parts____________________, ______________________, ________________________, and ___________________________________.
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