A Mid-Pleistocene Night's Dream

Jon wistfully recounts an erotic dream to his cat, who mocks him in return. Before we get to the nature of what Garfield is up to, consider that we cannot understand, or at least confirm, that Garfield is being a wise-ass until the punchline. The strip is built so that the strange possibility exists that Garfield is actually recounting a parallel dream that reveals his hitherto unspoken feelings about Liz. Because we know Garfield better than that, it is fairly plain that he is taunting Jon. Though the human cannot hear the cat's thoughts, were Jon to glance behind him and observe Garfield's perfect mimicry of his posture and expressions, he would likely get the gist.

Jon's moony account centers around a dream. From his speech, Jon understands dreams in the Disneyland/Martin Luther King, Jr. mode, as a sort of fond fancy which is not yet manifest in reality, and/or a shimmering goal toward which one might aspire. Whether Jon considers the dream might have any psychoanalytic weight — Freudian, Jungian, or pop psycho-spirituality — is harder to discern. He likely understands the dream as a basic wish-fulfillment scenario, but he so starry-eyed that he fails to connect the dots and read the darker implications for his waking life. Enter Garfield.

Garfield, too, claims to have had a dream. (To head off Comment section wiseacres it doesn't particularly matter if Garfield actually had this dream or not; either way, his purpose is to submarine Jon.) Garfield's dream account begins identical to Jon's, but concludes differently.

Jon finds his dream "romantic," while Garfield does not. The cat's first point is that the dream is potentially entirely meaningless. With equal possibility, we may all dream of our waking-life lovers, movie stars, nonexistent people, and mortal enemies. Garfield does not have feelings for Liz, yet had a similar dream. Dream-Liz expressing her love is not the same thing as Jon's girlfriend saying she loves him in waking life.

Garfield both denies and and supports the argument for the wish-fulfillment dream (he is a cat toying with his prey, after all). We know it is unlikely that Garfield yearns for Liz's love, because we have deep knowledge of Garfield's character: his stunted empathy, displacement of libidinal energy onto food, a sadistic streak, etc... And, informed by that jumbled pathology, that is exactly how Garfield's dream plays out. Garfield's gluttony, pride, predatory instinct, hedonism and showboating converge in a dream of excess, power and consumption of another life. By placing his own fantasy next to Jon's, Garfield parodies Jon's desires, and also implies that he dreams bigger and better than his owner.

Dozens of mammoth carcasses in various states of preservation have been discovered over the last several centuries; the flesh has always been far too decayed, reeking and foul for consumption. Should a housecat attempt to eat of these specimens, he would likely become seriously ill. Other than these museum-case sources, Mammuthus primigenius is long extinct and unavailable for hunting or meat harvest.

Finally and most importantly, Garfield is illustrating to Jon that we dream of those things that are simply, completely, utterly, forever impossible in the real world. Among those things, says Garfield, is human love.

A Dream is a Whisker Your Heart Makes

Jon's recurring anxiety dream explained in panels one and two are fine illustrations of Dr. Freud's explanations of the unconscious' dream-work. The "day residue", in which conscious thoughts from the waking day crop up in the dream, of Jon's dream is both literal - Jon really does find himself locked outside without his pants - and a dream element that manifests his unconscious desire to be more a outgoing and openly sexual person. In the special case of nightmares repressed wishes from formative years which the id wishes to see fulfilled are straining against the more recently developed adult ego which tries to sublimate the infantile urges. The polymorphous perversity of running around without one's pants would probably be too literal for Freud's liking, but the id's extra touch of locking the front door to thwart Jon's ego is funny. In an inventive only-in-Garfield riff on postmodern storytelling and Freud's dream-work, Jon's ego's attempts to censor the infantile drives are the framing of the comic strip itself, which protects all views of the depantsed dreamer far off-panel.

Presumably the end of the joke today is that Jon is not dreaming, though this is never made explicit. Either way, Jon indicates that when he has the pantsless dream, Garfield is normally present, as the cat's presence does not confuse or startle the dreamer. Garfield's role in Jon's dream must be closer akin to Jung's archetype of the Shadow: a dream figure for the irrational, unpleasant urges the conscious mind tries to repress, in some aspects we might say the opposite of the dreamer's. The tidal wave of indulgence in bad behavior that Garfield represents seethes in the collective unconscious, taking pleasure in the perpetual anxiety dream existence of the Jon Arbuckles of the waking world.

BIDDITTY

Oh boy, folks, looks like Garfield's world has changed forever! He's... sleeping.

The ill-chosen colors of wall and tablecloth today have created the temporary illusion that Odie and Garfield are sleeping on the lawn. They still may be, but "outside" is usually indicated by grass blades and/or a swirly shape representing the sun.

I guess the joke is supposed to be that Garfield fell asleep too close to Odie's butt and got kicked in the face. There's a second level in which Odie's Dream Garfield Avatar inadvertently screws over his real-life counterpart. In Garfield the wish your heart makes is to punt someone in the skull: our great aspiration is to kick a man when he's down. Even the Dream-field in the final two panels indicates with his devilish expression that he knows the seemingly innocuous act of throwing a ball he found, that someone, somewhere, even on another plane of consciousness, is getting screwed over. And it makes him happy.

Title Panel: I'm probably the only person in the world who is concerned that the creepy title panel resembles John Lennon's cartoon contribution to the early queer anthology The Gay Liberation Book. It showed a guy in a turban riding a flying carpet and enthusiastically masturbating.

Nightmares and Dream-cakes

All those who wanted me to count all the candles and make positive that there were twenty-eight may rest easy. I did, and there are.

Comedy/Tragedy: The only celebration in Garfield that warrants this kind of week-long buildup are major holidays... and sometimes not even those. But every year we have lots of time to get ready for the gala celebration of Garfield's "birthday", which is the symbolic representation of the strip's debut on June 19, 1978. On major anniversaries, sometimes the prelude-to-a-cake strips will go on for weeks before the blowout... all a gala celebration for an event that Garfield hates because it reminds him of aging and thus death. The most celebratory time in the strip is potentially when the title character is at his most miserable. Which only serves to remind us why Garfield's birthday is worth celebrating!

Comedy/Weird: Okay... so... Garfield-the-character's birthday is supposed to coincide with Garfield-the-strip's birthday. That would be fine, but the logic is extended to mean that Garfield's age is the same as the comic strip. Which means in the very first strip, Garfield had been born earlier that day. He should have been a tiny kitten, slick with afterbirth. Ponder it!

Personal aside: One thing that's cool to me about Garfield (among many, many things), is that because the strip was created in the same year as my birth, I can always remember how old Garfield is turning. More often though I use Garfield to remember how old I will be later in the year.