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.