Intenserview with PINK FREUD

This week Lydia chated with Chesed and Clara about their show Pink Freud, which airs on wybc.com on tuesdays from 4:30 to 5pm. 

Lydia: Tell me a little bit about your show

Chesed: On Pink Freud we take dream submissions, analyze them, and make a playlist based on the themes or symbols. Interpreting dreams is just fun for me, but I think our dreams do shed light on parts of ourselves we can’t quite reckon with consciously. Radio is a weird place to pick apart dreams- you’re literally broadcasting thoughts so private you don’t even know what they mean, but there’s this cushion of never knowing who’s actually listening. Our show is like group therapy: everyone’s innermost desires and insecurities are strange and messy, but they’re funny, and shared. Our playlists mirror that too- we play a lot of stuff we’d never put on if handed the AUX, like musicals or country. PInk Freud is about guilty pleasures in more ways than one. Clara and I also know very little about Freudian psychoanalysis. We are theater majors. 

Clara: The idea for the show came from the name itself— we wanted to bring together psychoanalysis and our favorite music, the sacred and the profane, if you will. It’s a send-up of Freud and Freudian analysts, but as our brilliant comedy professor Deb Margolin says, you can’t parody something that you have no relationship with or aspirations towards. So we get to take what we find useful— reading too far into things, finding symbolism and sense in mysteries from our subconscious— and make it our own.

Lydia: What was your most recent set of show songs about?

Chesed: Our most recent show was about a dream where someone was crawling through a playground slide with their brother and saw a girl playing violin with her mom at the end. The core theme of this was our dream donor wanted recognition for their successes- so obviously we played “Payday” by Doja Cat and Young Thug. 

Clara: We picked a pretty eclectic bunch of songs, each reflecting a different moment or mood from the dream: brotherhood, longing, fulfillment, tunnel vision. 

Lydia: How do you pick your guests for your show?

Clara: We pick submissions from dreams our friends tell us about, but anyone can send us a description of a dream they want us to analyze by filling out this form: https://forms.gle/GiN58xPei4cVzQVW6

Chesed: You can submit anonymously or be shouted out, and if we choose your dream we’ll let you know before broadcast! We also email you a playlist with your songs if you include your email on the form. We analyze really long dreams, and also ones that are a sentence long. 

Lydia: tell me about some dreams you’ve been having recently?

Clara: I’ve been dreaming about being late to the airport recently— waking up and having to stuff all my belongings into a suitcase so I don’t miss my flight. Unsurprisingly, I’m anxious! This recurring dream is probably a sign from my subconscious that I’m in fight-or-flight mode, afraid that there’s always something I’m forgetting. I’ve also overslept and been late to class a lot recently, though that’s probably unrelated.

Chesed: In the last dream of mine I can remember I was meeting my friends parents, but their voices were extremely loud and distorted, almost parrot sounding. This is definitely leftover anxiety from parents' weekend. 

Lydia: There have been many psychological debates about the purpose of dreams, why do you both think dreams exist? 

Chesed: I’ll preface this with my qualifications: I took a two week course on psychoanalysis when I was in high school. With that, I think our dreams allow us to sort through our emotions. The best interpretation is when you wake up with a gut feeling about exactly what it meant. 

Clara: Now for my qualifications: I used to be an English major. I think dreams exist to fuck with your head a little bit, as if waking life didn’t already do that enough. If you’re dreaming about something, you can’t look the other way; denying how you feel will just make you dream about it more.

Lydia: do you choose songs for dream submissions live?

Chesed: We pick beforehand. Sometimes I’ll be sitting with a dream submission for a couple weeks before I know exactly what songs I want to play. Other times, a submission will come an hour before the show. 

Clara: We usually get together before the show to finalize the track list and narrow down the longlist into what we’ll have time to play, since the show is a short and sweet half hour long. Sometimes, we’ll both be thinking of the same song that’s independently been haunting each of our psyches, or one of us will include a song that’s new to the other but perfectly encapsulates that week’s interp.

Lydia: Who are your nightmare guests for PINK FREUD?

Chesed: Anyone that will be offended if we say they want to have sex with their mom. 

Clara: Anyone who isn’t down to clown.