another mental hygiene episode

Why is it I only seem to post at the office?

And yes, I'm back here again. Boss man asked me to come in today and see what we can see. I'm'a tell everybody here that the interview I went to on Friday was with the actual company, rather than the recruiting agency, and that I got the job, rather than agreeing to interview for the job. Lying is bad for the soul and the time, but I want to cut the cord with my position here that badly. Though this may backfire if they want me to stay here more days this week, since the new thing wouldn't actually start until next Wednesday.

Here's why I always post at the office. Firstly there's always tons more fun things for me to do on the computers at home. Let's not forget, secondly, the laptop keyboard whose "b" and "n" are kaput after the landmark case of Cat vs. Tall Glass of Chocolate Milk. (The cat won. The computer was a civilian casualty but the court ruled it an act of war in the declared conflict of Cat vs. All Foodstuffs.) And thirdly there's very rarely anything I want to do more here at work than get on my blog and add to my dream journal. Or my bitching journal. Or whatever.

Just got several phone calls there. Told coworker that I'd all but landed abovementioned temp job. Got call from recruiting agency saying temp job was full up but there is another, less tempting, temp job that is now possible. D'oh. 'S what I get for lying, eh?

Speaking of dreams. Past few days I've been having long, complicated dreams with no detailed recall--just the awarenes that I had dreamed. This morning I did remember some things, and now I wish I hadn't because they're disturbing. Moreover, I don't know how to describe what was going on. In dreams your unconscious mind layers taig shapes over one another based on emotional content. A place can be a combination school computer lab under construction and MASH surgery room, or a combination abandoned basement and giant pinball machine under construction, to name a couple examples. You sense the emotional content, in the dream, with great clarity. But on waking you no longer have appropriate categories for the mind-made "places" because it wouldn't make sense to build real-life places with those combinations of traits.

I had a dream last week that I didn't write down, but was very important. The part to remember had me and all my peeps (not pictured) on a large battleship moving across the ocean. The ship was rusty, the color of rust all over. There were piles of corpses and sorted out pieces of corpses heaped on the deck, and the implication that the mess continued all throughout the ship. And I was pissed. Really, really pissed. I launched into a raging tirade at the shifty crew-people on deck. Then I chased down a few that I knew were bad guys and didn't belong on my ship, ran them through with my saber, and tossed their corpses overboard. Then I went inside, and the place I was in looked a little bit like the middle room of our apartment, looking down the tall window into the light well. It was dark and cool inside, and there was light outside that felt summery, like a taig with lots of green in it. Right in front of the window was a litterbox, full and nasty, and when I looked out the window, there was another one at the bottom of the light well. Still just as angry as I'd been on the ship deck, I picked up the litterbox in front of the window and started dumping it out into the lower one, screaming "NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW!"

So okay. Ship on seas represents my personality floating on the sea of the collective unconscious or the ocean of emotion. Plain enough. Piles of corpses and evil crewmen represent the same thing as litterboxes filled with nasty waste; parts of me that aren't helping, that disgust me, and that I really don't want. Me screaming, stabbing and throwing, or dumping and screaming, indicates my sincere desire and intention to transform myself by eradicating those things I abhor. The second image/scene, the one with the litterboxes, added an interesting point, however. Though I am cleaning house on an "upper" level, one easier for my conscious mind to access, many of the things I'm getting rid of are merely being shunted "downstairs" into my unconscious mind. I still think it's a net positive, though. Better to consolidate the problems into one area, quarantine them if you will, so they are less likely to be able to escape into other areas of my personality and make me have to start the process all over again.

To return to the dream I remembered this morning, it seems to me that everything felt "under construction" in this dream because whatever work I began in the earlier one is still going on.

Just looking at the taig types seems kind of encouraging. Surgery room turning into computer room seems like a positive thing. This could represent a personality faculty which formerly would have to tear things open or cut them up and get their metaphorical blood'n'guts all over the place to find out what they're made of. The new upgrade to that system, if you will, would be more of a computing type thing, where they can be analyzed more gently, before actually being made to turn into different things. Spooky abandoned basement turning into giant live-action pinball machine seems kind of positive, but it's tougher to be sure.

I wanted to talk about that first because the action is what bugs me. I know a whole lot of other stuff happened at the beginning and that there were more places, but I didn't retain them.

Earliest thing I can think of is me and my peeps were all together in a place I can't recall, and I was hearing that I had an exam--no, make that two exams--coming up in less than a day, and I hadn't done the required reading for either of them. I think one was lit and the other was philosophy or political science, I even remembered thinking "oh, that's Dr. G's class." Had a mental picture of the text (an emotion-image of words on a page and the general mental shape of their contents) and knew it was a lot to read. But for some reason I wasn't worried, I shrugged it off while feeling guilty about not being worried. Like one of those times when you say "oh, I'll take care of that tomorrow afternoon", even though you know perfectly well that you won't because you'll feel even less like doing it then.

So it was at that point that me and my peeps drifted into the computer lab surgery under construction place. My peeps were using most of the computers and I didn't feel I ought to bug them, so I wandered over to a side of the room that looked even more under construction. That's where I saw stupid dream Eric Cartman again. I am so mad at my unconscious mind for its selection of that as one of my avatars, by the way. I know your unconscious only selects symbols based on the emotional value load they hold for you. It just pisses me off to see evidence that the cartoon character Eric Cartman carries that kind of an emotional value load for me. He represents something about human nature, and about my own nature, that I find both irresistibly attractive and unthinkably despicable.

Anyway. Cartman was half prepped for some kind of surgery, sitting at a thing that was part computer workstation, part surgical pod, and part port-a-john. No kidding. The prep involved (apologies!) some sort of anal suction tube in addition to the usual accoutrements for a person about to be drugged into unconsciousness and operated upon. He was not yet unconscious, however, and I believe bitched to me about some aspect of the the arrangements. No words there, just the sense of an interaction having taken place.

Then I was on the lower floor--same "building", different architecture. This was the basement / giant pinball machine place. Bad temporal sequencing in recall here as well, further evidence that it was deeper into my unconscious than the other location. Me and peeps climbed into, and bounced around in some sort of giant bumper car that seated people more like seats on a roller coaster. I got worried and annoyed that something wasn't safe or wasn't working properly. I went over by the wall and there was a repeat of the weird setup that Cartman had been in on the upper floor, only this time it was active me (not pictured) getting into it. Attempting to apply the anal suction tube thing got the reaction thought that it hurt like blazes and no way in hell was I going to actually use that thing, or go through with the stupid shit surgery thingy, it was a bad idea. No actual pain, just a quick succession of thought forms and emotions. Somewhere in this sequence I noticed there were a couple loose demons in the room, and with the equivalent of an annoyed and longsuffering sigh I went to shoo them into the halls so I could deal with them without disturbing my peeps' good times.

I then left the giant pinball machine room through a door that looked even more under-constructiony than any of the other places in that dream. Had been thinking I was going out into the hall, but when I opened the door, there was our bathroom mirror and sink we have at the apartment. The light from the lightbulbs was yellow, like interior lightbulbs at night. There was wall behind sink/mirror, wall around door, and floor in front of, but dark absence of perception in place of the ceiling and the other two walls. The two demons were on the floor. They were composed of this sort of black cloud, like a hole in the film when a picture is developed, except it "felt" 3D and sort of fuzzy to my mind's eye. Their shape was like if the first two fingers of your hand were held out clawlike, then decided to crawl off on their own, using the pointy white nail tips as combination eyes and feet. I looked at them, and they turned around and looked at me, there on the floor in front of the mirror. I pointed my right hand at one of them and said, "Flame." Fire sprang out of my hand towards the thing and burned it up. The other one, however, took advantage of my attention moving away from it and jumped up towards me. I saw it at the last second and nervously tried to pull up a fire shield, but it fizzled and the thing got through to land on my chest, right over my heart. Where it promptly, of course, disappeared.

Now, since closing the demon factory, I can recall only one other dream where two demons attacked me, I dispatched one, and the other successfully got in. The end result of that process is how I got to be friends with firecat. Once I'd defragged it and taught it a bit of how to behave. Which was interesting dreaming material.

But the architecture of that dream seems to me fertile for analysis. It continues the images from the ship / litterbox dream: cleanup on the upper floor, still dangerous things happening in the basement despite ongoing construction there as well. On the upper level, my avatar grumblingly submitting to an embarassing and highly suspicious transformation. On the lower level, my actual self rejecting said process outright. Me successfully wielding fire in a dream for the first time. Yay fire! Also of interest is the shooing-out thing. My peeps are doing their thing, having fun in the newly constructed funplace in what used to be a scaryplace. I see that some scary things are there, I take them personally to a more private location to deal with them my damnself. Good mental hygiene, that.

Waking up after a dream like that is always iffy. I am exceedingly fortunate, in retrospect, that Dave happened to have stayed up the night so he could beam at me and feed me tea and toast. Felt so much enormously better for that, you have no idea. I did keep looking down at the spot on my chest where the finger thing landed and vanished, rubbing the skin absently, as if I could somehow feel a physical thing there. Alas, you can't pick out metaphorical worms with a physical tweezer, and you can't unwrap a dream-image demon from around your heart by dramatically clasping your hands over your chest.

At least I got one of the little bastards! And I know the other one by sight now, so it'll be easier to grasp and perhaps fling!