Censoring Your Dreams

In Forbidden Planet—that superb Freudian mishmash of sci-fi Van Dykes, Venusian décolletage and Leslie Nielsen straining not to laugh—professor Morbeus makes a tactical error.  A murderous force created from his own id bashes into his bunker sanctum as he screams nah, it can’t be happening, he’s shielded by “Solid Krell metal, 26 inches thick!”  So it goes with censorship—that mischievous id will always batter down them protective moral walls.
Even Weena would agree—don't get trapped in that faux sanctum.  Censorship don’t work.  Literature is a dream—and you can’t censor dreams.  Sure, you can corral those hump male spacemen and lock your daughter in that shielded Krell playpen—but dreams will crash in.  And just like that dream last night where you flew over Cleveland, gutting preschools with your destructo laser eyes, brzzzt brzzzt,the words on pixels or paper are someone’s else’s dream handed to you.  Lit is a dream of pretend, of arranging selves and futures like some carnie’s shell game—it’s a dream of play.  Lit is what if extrapolated from what is.  While in the throes of some luscious nightshade fantasy swarming with lips and damp lace—do you really want some Morbeus popping up and yelling “Everyone in the sanctum!  They’ll neverget us here.”
The argument for censoring Lit, music, art, whatever ain’t changed for millennia.  It’s always a variation on Listen, Gomer—you’re too dumb to know what warps you.  Just let us pick what gets into your seething brain and you’ll become a better husband / mother / economic serf.  Those who wield power have a total jones to police their flocks’ dreams.   Sure, there’s always a rational excuse—that there artwork incited murder, hatred, or my favorite—offense.  As we’ve seen with both Salman Rushdie in Britain and Wendy Doniger in India, offending some hick theocrat’s atavistic cosmology can get you yanked out of print. 
My fave example of Lit as a dream is the Marquis de Sade.  Not cause I fancy his output—you don’t need 100 days of Sodom to get corn-holed by de Sade’s sheer dreary boredom—but because his clumsy exploration of the forbidden, the taboo, the wild  thought caught red handed is what dreams do.  They juggle our taboos while we bathe in a nice, refreshing pool of amoral goo.  Look at those fuzzy cattails!  Go on, stroke them.  A lot.  You dream you shiv your boss, date your cat or crash the Titanic into a second and third iceberg for the sheer thrill of it—that’s just how kids play.  You already got to be Godzilla—I’m Godzilla now!  I will smear all of Tokyo into mammalian paste, mwah ha ha.  Don’t get in the way—your dream mind is trying on costumes and parading before your soul’s mirror.  True, most of the costumes suck—they’re silly or vicious or fuglier than a weasel on Sudafed.  But you gotta try them all on.