Going through all my old boxes full of books and papers turns up lots of surprises. Ran across my old bachelor's thesis, on Philip K. Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", for example. This, though, is a thing all its own, written from myself to myself and put to action. It was from a brief period where I wasn't writing dates on stuff so I only know, from the other content of that yellow legal pad, that it came about in midsummer of '03. A good (though kinda freaky!) piece of writing at least, and about where my head was at, at the time. Thank God I'm somewhere even nicer now. The dream itself is followed up by a couple of short analysis paragraphs which are from the same pages.
A beach of broken pebbles and cracked clams leads up to the House of Broken Things. The door is ajar. No board in its floor is unsplintered, no windowpane whole; even the rocking chair on the front porch is missing a leg. Out from under the porch darts a cat. Feral and lightning fast, its yellow eyes seem wise though they see the mouse in me. Tufts of fur missing to scars, tattered ears--is its fur grey?--it pads before me to the door of the house whose windows stand half-open like idiot mouths. The cat's tail twitches as it slides out from under my hand. I don't think I touched it. Brass knob, tarnished, old, turns with both hands and a thunk--I thought the door was ajar?--hinges creak. One comes loose, and I think the door is going to come off in my hand.
It doesn't.
Inside I think there is only one hallway, and there is, but my vision of it shifts and falsifies: I am left with an impression of winding crazed wood angles, locked, open, half-open doorways. A glance in one doorway reveals the unchanging, a gap-toothed piano with metal threads curled up under its wing, dolls with one eye that glares smirking. Another shows an empty bed, mattress stuck with its own rusted springs, cracked leather belts and a tongueless shoe that looks violent, a shadowy closet door. A few steps forward a girl's face peeks out, thin fingers wrap the wood just below the keyhole, cheeks smeared with tear-streaked dust, eyes achingly familiar. She darts back in, covers her retreat with a slam, but by now I know better than to follow. A draft whispers over my toes; I look up to see yellow eyes in the distance. The cat blinks once, twice, and I run to follow. Walls try to whisper their ancient cackles and though I cannot close my ears I don't listen.
The last doorway is locked but not closed. As I stammer, combing fingers through my hair, the cat wanders off, crooked tail slung low. The password comes back to me. Tunnelvision, I say to the dusty wood. It swings open and I hear my heart beat: this, the monster of my dreams. Blank whiteness. Viscous like the goop in a lava lamp, moving, its bulk fills the doorway and tentacles congeal, reach for me. My mouth chock full of a scream that keeps my teeth bound together. Don't encourage it, I tell myself. Out of the whiteness eyes roll down, lidless, and lips writhe into a mouth. Now only the tongue holds its ghost, the purples and greens of a clown face--not colors but hues bent wrong. I remember the dream that freed me from this face; I remember Atreyu between the sphinxes. I step through. So simple to say.
Looking forward, forward, up ahead a narrow chimney climbs up a cliffside, the path freckled with pointed stones, the angle of ascent maybe sixty degrees. I must keep my eyes on the ground so as not to slip or step on a sharp stone and injure my feet. I climb for what feels like hours, panting; soon my only thoughts are of the next step, the next handhold, for which I am distinctly grateful. Grey stone eases its way into russet, another geological age, and overhead I hear the rough voice of a crow. A fiber in my heart loosens. It is safe now to look back, I say almost out loud, and grabbing a handhold, turn to look over my shoulder. Down and down beneath the rockfalls, between the pitted forearms of the stern-faced hillside, a tiny ramshackle thing with a half-shingled roof gapes into the wind. On the stoop a white figure, spangled in what might have been frills but at this distance looks like dirt has its face turned unerringly towards me, foolish hat notwithstanding. I fancy I can see its mouth open at the touch of my eyes, and yet I'm deeply, madly grateful its running is running in place. I turn to face forward. There, the path spikes up and seems to end in the blue sky, the crow wheeling near beneath wisps of cloud. Clambering the last few steps, I fetch up somehow on my feet.
The plateau is a valley in the center of a circle of stones, great mountains that stand in the distance and remember. Behind me I cannot find the path I came by amid the boulders and sparse underbrush, and I decide that this is a good thing. To my right and left and behind me the mountains are gathering up their skirts, evergreens here and there, and on one hilltop a ways away I think a mountain goat springs from one crag to another. Ahead, there is no path, but a wide expanse of stone worn smooth by rain and wind and the passing of many feet. I step forward onto it and see, perhaps a hundred yards off, a circle of monoliths laid on monoliths like the great circle in England. I walk forward unhurried, feeling the wind through my fingers and the sun gently pressing the crown of my head.
There seated by the nearest of the twice eleven gates is a dragon, coiled around and over himself, silver-blue and blood-colored with eyes bright as a distant star. He winks at me, this old wyrm of the earth and sky--old to my eyes anyway. His rumbling voice is like drumbeats, joyous and solemn.
About time, he says.
I got a little hung up, I reply, dashing fingers through my hair. If I was too long in arriving he forgives me, and I am glad.
---
They are fools who think surrender is defeat.
A wise person knows that any endeavor can proceed either around an obstacle or through it, and can survive retreat if it is kept in order and those involved keep their goals firmly in mind. Of course the most glorious surrender is that which marks the transformation of an adversary into an ally--but this is a rare privilege and difficult to describe. I will say that apparent surrender, that is, misdirection, is a valuable tool in clever hands and can be used to thwart even a cunning opponent. But apparent surrender is not true surrender and is no fit replacement for it. This you should bear in mind in love as well as conflict, in friendship as in enmity. For one who consistently substitutes false surrender for true is no fit companion.
---
I began looking for a way, and as I went, the path sprang up around me.
Showing posts with label dreams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dreams. Show all posts
dream log: too much Heroes IV, not enough healthy elephants
Lately my dreams have been both vivid and interesting, but until this last sleep-time there hasn't really been one where I could remember all three acts in sufficient detail to want to log it.
Dream logging started out as part of my determined quest not to be sideswiped by those parts of myself I don't trust very much. But even as I've become more comfortable in my own skull, I still find it fun and challenging to try and glean useful psychological info from the welter of images. My current theory includes, as things no longer really in dispute, the ideas that a) each "act" is the product of one REM cycle within a given sleeptime, and that b) when a dream is remembered fully, easily and in detail, this means the working problem it represents has come to some sort of useful conclusion. In addition, various in-dream actions and structural elements (light levels, indoor/outdoor environments, eating food or conversing in words) are ones which I've identified as important for study, but for which I haven't settled on a single preferred interpretation as yet. And perhaps most interesting to me are the images which recur across more than one dream over a long period of time, with alterations from one dream to the next. These I am certain represent ideas, beliefs, or aspects of the relationships between myself and the universe which are both important to me and changing as I live my life.
In any case, whatever is going on down there in the depths of the Fiatbrain right now, I rather approve of it.
Act one took place in a large building. The place was well-lit, the decor was sort of gray and white and efficient-functional, and it was crowded with large numbers of people milling about in a desultory fashion or standing in line. I had the impression this activity was a continuous, 24/7 sort of thing, so that whenever one visited the place it would be found in roughly the same state.
The purpose of the building was to enable people to get into one of many, many pocket universes. All these universes were similar, more or less patterned on the same plan. Green fields, a map that stretched far and wide across a kind of fantasy landscape, and a conflict of some kind. I don't remember the nature of the action; there was some sort of fairie kingdom, but one which was unusually densely populated and efficiently regulated by a tiny but singleminded queen. Come to think of it the fairie kingdom had a lot of the social elements of a beehive. At any rate, different versions of this universe had slightly different parameters. There were "soft" versions where everyone was always nice and no one was allowed to put anyone in danger, and there were "difficult" versions where everyone you met would attack you on sight. There were ones where you studied the situation from afar, the whole kingdom spread out like a map, and there were places where your perspective was always first-person. Within each universe there were a kind of portals or gates that you could use, once you'd gotten that kingdom's difficulties more or less under control, to move into other mini-universes.
What took me a bit to figure out, and almost got me lost in the process, was that each pocket universe had its own version of the original building by which one entered in the first place. There were kingdoms within kingdoms, fractal, all the way down, and if one wasn't careful it would be very easy to just hop from one universe to another, similar one, without ever getting anywhere or accomplishing anything different. When I realized this I started poking around the nearest entry building, and found something curious. There were portals or doorways all through the building, of course, but people generally only used those to which they'd been directed by the staff. (Not pictured. The building staff was skipped, meaning not manifest, assumed in the frame of the story--even later in the act, when I interacted with them more or less directly.) I was trying out different doorways to see if I could get directly from one building back to its counterpart in the previous universe. And when I used one of the doorways which allowed me to do this, some of the "troops" I'd assembled in that universe came back out with me into the previous one.
They got clobbered at once--there were guards on the exit, y'see--but this was the first time I'd had anything except myself carry over from one place to another. I was mightily interested. Perhaps, it occured to me, with a sufficiently large force, one could bring something all the way out into the original building and make use of it in the real world! So I waltzed myself back out into the original building to see if I could find a staff member who could explain to me what was going on.
My inquiries (skipped, as I mentioned earlier) resulted in me sitting down across the table from a guy who was clearly an experienced player, who was bemused and somewhat pleased that anyone had figured this out. The room itself didn't have any lights on and so was somewhat dim, but clear daylight came in through a smallish window in one wall, so we could see perfectly well. Even so, beyond a general impression of sharp, laughing eyes, of lean and somewhat grizzled competence, the guy's features were pretty much skipped. He explained that there were a lot more places in the pocket universes than anyone from outside normally visited. Those like himself, who'd been there for a great while and were no longer part outside life, tended to stay in the areas that only they knew about. The crowds who muddled in and out of the building tended to travel only to the pre-programmed destinations, never suspecting there was anywhere else to go. And said crowd, since they didn't put much thought into it and were only there to occupy themselves, made awful gamers. He showed me some kind of roster: people like himself from the "old days" were all off in one category, while the more recent roster of those who'd withdrawn from outside life were mostly at levels where they didn't get much done and eventually faded into the background. Which was bad indeed, because there was something that needed doing, something kind of urgent. Something on which people both inside and out needed to collaborate, and this crop of newbies didn't have their head in the game at all, and weren't likely to be very much help.
Act two began as I pondered this, and I went out by the main building entrance. There was a revolving door through which the crowd of people pushed their way in and out. And as I looked at them more closely through the glass of the door I saw what the guy had been talking about. Old, young, male, female, all races, all styles of dress--they all had a bored, defeated look to them. Most were obese, slumped into themselves, distracted by various electronic devices whose cords led back into their purses and satchels, or some combination of all these. Small wonder, I thought, that when they get inside they don't do much of anything, if that's what they're like out here.
Then I was on a bus, talking to someone about--of all things!--Scientology. The bus didn't have any other occupants; the day visible through the windows was clear, blue-skied, with diffuse early afternoon light. My conversation partner was one of those dream-people with an entirely skipped apprearance, so I'll use the plural instead of a gendered singular noun. They were standing up and holding on to the straps, as I was, but beyond that I've no idea what they looked like. The bus drove past a large, shiny building. Not quite a skyscraper, as it wasn't that tall and stood pretty much on its own, but with that windows-everywhere look I associate with skyscrapers. We were saying how pointless it was for them to have such a pretty building, when what they actually did in it was so unbelievably dumb. My conversation partner said something sarcastic about some similarity between Scientology and Christianity. I laughed, shook my head, and said something about how it had been a fun challenge at first to get myself into the Scientology organization and move up through the levels, all while resisting their attempts to brainwash me. "But I've been all through it, like, three times in two months," I continued, thinking to myself that this was a slight exaggeration--it was more like three times in three or four months, "and I'm so bored!"
Act three started with a clean scene shift; how I got off the bus etc. was entirely skipped. I was Ice Cube--the young Ice Cube, the way he looks in the movie Friday. There was a woman walking next to me who resembled both of the ladies in that movie who were not attractive as current or prospective girlfriends. She had the body and demeanor of the shallow, jealous one at the beginning, the face and bad fake hair of the one at the end, and a voice that didn't belong to either one of them. She was leading a young boy-child by the hand. I got the impression she was a caseworker of some kind who'd been sent to interview me, and I needed to make a good impression, or at least not antagonize her.
We were walking down an alleyway--an outdoor scene, but with indoor-quality light. The alley was paved in red brick cobblestones. One side was a wall, along which there was some kind of couch. The other side was bordered by a very tall chain-link fence. The section of the alley down which we walked was sort of the middle of the alley; off at either end of the chain-link fence I got the suggestion of other buildings. On the other side of the fence was something like a vacant lot, overgrown with scrubby weeds and volunteer trees which had pushed their way up through the rubble. And in the vacant lot there were baby elephants and fledgling or juvenile crows. Some of the crows were small and looked new-hatched. One was molting, playfully pulling sloughed down out of its chest feathers, which floated away like dandelion fluff. Another looked more mature than the rest, its feathers sleek and shiny; it stood shoulder-high to the baby elephants, and seemed somehow very solid.
The woman turned to me and started asking me pointed questions. As we spoke, she let go of the boy-child's hand, and he drifted over towards the far end of the fence, not to be seen again in the dream. Her questions concerned Pearl's upcoming missions trip to Africa, a dream event which we both knew about, and which was going to happen very soon. We said Africa, in conversation, but the mental picture I got was of one of those pocket universes from act one--one of the interesting, out-of-the-way ones. I said, "At first I was opposed to the idea, but as I've thought it through I've become reconciled to the trip." I began to list some reasons. "One, when she's in Africa, she can get her mind settled, because people she knows here won't be around to mess with it. Two, it's a great opportunity to travel and study in a foreign country, an opportunity that she's getting for free but that otherwise a person would have to pay a lot of money for. And three--"
As I'd been speaking, the woman had moved closer and closer to me. She'd put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me down onto the couch. And just as I was about to get to point three, she got on top of me, straddling me, and started to grind her crotch against mine. We were both wearing jeans, but I was baffled and highly offended, and even through the clothing the heat of her body was very disturbing. I took hold of her upper arms, shifted my body weight under her, and with as little force as possible--since I didn't want to hurt or seriously offend her--shoved her off of me onto the cobblestones and sat up. "What are you doing?" I demanded. "I don't want to do this!" She stood up with a look of irritation, and asked why I stopped answering her questions. I took a deep breath, found my train of thought, and prepared to start speaking. All of a sudden she was on top of me again, smiling and perfectly pleased about it, as though she'd convinced me after all. I shoved her off again, a little more vehemently, and shouted, "I told you already, I don't want this!"
Then without changing location or any sense of movement, the structure of the landscape shifted radically. The cobbles of the alley and the weed-strewn rubble of the parking lot combined into one surface, like a screen or a piece of paper. Myself, the woman and the couch were gone. The crows and elephants were still themselves, but they were also items on a list, with little radio buttons next to them like on a computerized multiple-choice test. Many of the elephants were sick, and had slumped forward, their foreheads resting on the ground. I rushed around briefly pushing them back up onto their feet, because if they were too sick to stand, their buttons on the list wouldn't work. I looked over the list again; it was a puzzle or test, and there was a definite time limit. I figured out how to solve the puzzle pretty quickly, and selected the right buttons and entered the right answers next to the list items. But in order to submit my answer and send it, somewhere in the list there was hidden a big red button, which would calculate and send what I had entered. If I wanted my answer to count I had to find it before the time limit expired.
I ran through all the puzzle parameters again and again, trying with increasing frustration to figure out where the big red button was.
Then I woke up.
*****
Some preliminary notes, now that I've had the day to think on it.
Notes on act one.
Act ones tend to talk about the general theme or the background for the material presented in the dream as a whole.
The pocket-universes and their many fractal interconnections seem to represent how I view the world of ideas, and if you will, the invisible or spiritual side of reality. That images and social memes from computer games I love played a large part in the construction of this image tells a lot about my attitude. In other words, the way I approach invisible stuff, or towards imagination and creativity in general, is very similar to my attitude towards games. I like things that are long-drawn out, have lots of detail and plot, and can be played in many different ways. I like things that have lots of interconnectivity. And when I enter into a game map or a symbol set or a system of beliefs, I do so primarily with the attitude of an explorer rather than a conqueror, even when (like some of the universes in the dream) the scenario seems specifically designed for conquest. If, as often happens when I play Heroes, I have to start a thing all over from the beginning because I missed some small but crucial step, I will do so happily. (After a few token grumbles, of course, which are mostly for show and for the fun of hearing myself make noise.) If, as happened in the dream, I discover an apparent loophole or shortcut, I will investigate it thoroughly before attempting to take advantage of it.
More and more I've been coming to the belief that magic / spiritual stuff / the invisible stuff side of personality construction is all about relationships. As I become better at having real relationships with real people, I will become better at having (possibly) imaginary relationships with (mostly) invisible people. If I am a good friend, I will be a good invisible friend. So, for example, I'm now even more confident that joining my local in-person Dungeons & Dragons group is probably an excellent thing for my continued spiritual development. Be a better gamer, get a better handle on getting my internal mental house in order.
Notes on act two.
Act twos tend to be statements of a specific problem or conflict.
A vehicle, moving, tends to be a symbol of people acting towards a particular goal or purpose in life.
A building tends to represent a long-term personality structure.
One of my rules of thumb about dreams is "there is only one character in a dream." Namely, the dreamer.
Thus me on a bus conversing with an undifferentiated dream-person is me taking a good hard look at a purposeful, goal driven activity in my life. My guess is, the undifferentiated dream-person is coming from the perspective of things that I haven't thought through yet, while my own perspective obviously represents the things that I have thought through and of which I am aware.
Conscious-me talks about Scientology--a so-called "religion" which exploits people and which I find loathsome and laughable. Unconscious-me mentions some connection between this and Christianity. The thing prompting the discussion is a pretty building we see out the bus window. The building looks perfectly nice, but the things happening in it are perfectly stupid. Conscious me says building equals Scientology. Unconscious me says Scientology has something to do with Christianity.
I think what Lassie--er, I mean, unconscious me is trying to tell me here is that those things I dislike about Christianity have to do with the "building." That is, the psychological structures of belief and perception, the mental frameworks for action built by its practitioners. Some of the structures themselves are even quite nice, but the ways in which those structures are used are objectionable and don't do justice to the potential of the structure. The point here is that those aspects of the culture and psychological attitudes of Christianity I don't like are the ones which remind me of Scientology. And it is those things--according to dream-me's comment and silent aside--that I've been through backwards and forwards, if not perhaps as thoroughly as I'd like to think. And with which I'm profoundly bored.
Notes on act three.
Act threes tend to be either the conclusion of a process described in an earlier act, or a pointed suggestion for a further action that should be taken on a previously introduced subject.
Crows are a significant repeating symbol for me. Although this is only the second time they've appeared, making them a relatively new symbol, and unfortunately I didn't log the first one here.
All the location indicators tell me that this action scene is taking place in a part of my mind on which I haven't done a lot of work lately, but which is very important for my personal development. Alleyway = off the beaten path in terms of the channels of conscious thought. (But the cobbles and the "neighborhood feel" make a place where I'm at home and very comfortable.) Vacant lot means an area of my mind where I haven't developed a settled structure--actually quite a positive thing. I have very fond associations with vacant lots with weeds growing up through the rubble. And even though it was an out-of-the-way place it wasn't dirty or grimy at all, just poorly lit and not built up.
I have no idea why my brain chose Ice Cube for my avatar and his unpleasant suitors (suitoresses?) for the antagonist in this scene. Maybe it was just a good match for the emotional dynamics in this scene. Even though I haven't seen that movie in ages! I don't know what the child means. Maybe the lady represents the bad, antagonistic side of the Christian perspective, and the child represents the good, valuable side? That would make sense, especially since he went off in the direction of the vacant lot filled with lovely, lovely animals.
But that little action scene where the other character starts a conversation about one thing, then physically holds me down and tries to jump my bones, is exactly what it feels like to be proselytized. It's a mental image worth holding on to, for those times in life when it comes up. If I ever find myself trying to push my viewpoint onto someone who isn't receptive to it, I will endeavor to think of this dream scene and and control myself. And if I'm on the flip side, I will think of the odious lady with her fake hair and tight jeans and start giggling, instead of feeling dirty and cornered. And I will try to remember that there may be some other, valuable thing which is being momentarily eclipsed by the awkwardness of the situation.
As for the very last bit, where the scene changes into a puzzle--well, I'm puzzled. The puzzle itself bears some resemblance to a pre-employment Excel skills test I'd taken online earlier in the day at the behest of an employment agency. The thing about the "big red button" is probably drawn from my frustration with a fiddly bit of new Kingdom of Loathing game content in the Itznotyezitz Mine. (The mastery of said new content is fortunately not necessary to beat the game. Just part of one of those exasperting sidequests.) Something to do with an extremely complicated machine, calculating numbers in base 7, and decoding bizarre dwarven runes.
Is this how I feel about the personality area in which the scene took place? About the issues represented by the scene itself? Or maybe it was just my conscious worries about money and joblessness reasserting themselves as I swam back upwards into consciousness. Who knows.
Dream logging started out as part of my determined quest not to be sideswiped by those parts of myself I don't trust very much. But even as I've become more comfortable in my own skull, I still find it fun and challenging to try and glean useful psychological info from the welter of images. My current theory includes, as things no longer really in dispute, the ideas that a) each "act" is the product of one REM cycle within a given sleeptime, and that b) when a dream is remembered fully, easily and in detail, this means the working problem it represents has come to some sort of useful conclusion. In addition, various in-dream actions and structural elements (light levels, indoor/outdoor environments, eating food or conversing in words) are ones which I've identified as important for study, but for which I haven't settled on a single preferred interpretation as yet. And perhaps most interesting to me are the images which recur across more than one dream over a long period of time, with alterations from one dream to the next. These I am certain represent ideas, beliefs, or aspects of the relationships between myself and the universe which are both important to me and changing as I live my life.
In any case, whatever is going on down there in the depths of the Fiatbrain right now, I rather approve of it.
Act one took place in a large building. The place was well-lit, the decor was sort of gray and white and efficient-functional, and it was crowded with large numbers of people milling about in a desultory fashion or standing in line. I had the impression this activity was a continuous, 24/7 sort of thing, so that whenever one visited the place it would be found in roughly the same state.
The purpose of the building was to enable people to get into one of many, many pocket universes. All these universes were similar, more or less patterned on the same plan. Green fields, a map that stretched far and wide across a kind of fantasy landscape, and a conflict of some kind. I don't remember the nature of the action; there was some sort of fairie kingdom, but one which was unusually densely populated and efficiently regulated by a tiny but singleminded queen. Come to think of it the fairie kingdom had a lot of the social elements of a beehive. At any rate, different versions of this universe had slightly different parameters. There were "soft" versions where everyone was always nice and no one was allowed to put anyone in danger, and there were "difficult" versions where everyone you met would attack you on sight. There were ones where you studied the situation from afar, the whole kingdom spread out like a map, and there were places where your perspective was always first-person. Within each universe there were a kind of portals or gates that you could use, once you'd gotten that kingdom's difficulties more or less under control, to move into other mini-universes.
What took me a bit to figure out, and almost got me lost in the process, was that each pocket universe had its own version of the original building by which one entered in the first place. There were kingdoms within kingdoms, fractal, all the way down, and if one wasn't careful it would be very easy to just hop from one universe to another, similar one, without ever getting anywhere or accomplishing anything different. When I realized this I started poking around the nearest entry building, and found something curious. There were portals or doorways all through the building, of course, but people generally only used those to which they'd been directed by the staff. (Not pictured. The building staff was skipped, meaning not manifest, assumed in the frame of the story--even later in the act, when I interacted with them more or less directly.) I was trying out different doorways to see if I could get directly from one building back to its counterpart in the previous universe. And when I used one of the doorways which allowed me to do this, some of the "troops" I'd assembled in that universe came back out with me into the previous one.
They got clobbered at once--there were guards on the exit, y'see--but this was the first time I'd had anything except myself carry over from one place to another. I was mightily interested. Perhaps, it occured to me, with a sufficiently large force, one could bring something all the way out into the original building and make use of it in the real world! So I waltzed myself back out into the original building to see if I could find a staff member who could explain to me what was going on.
My inquiries (skipped, as I mentioned earlier) resulted in me sitting down across the table from a guy who was clearly an experienced player, who was bemused and somewhat pleased that anyone had figured this out. The room itself didn't have any lights on and so was somewhat dim, but clear daylight came in through a smallish window in one wall, so we could see perfectly well. Even so, beyond a general impression of sharp, laughing eyes, of lean and somewhat grizzled competence, the guy's features were pretty much skipped. He explained that there were a lot more places in the pocket universes than anyone from outside normally visited. Those like himself, who'd been there for a great while and were no longer part outside life, tended to stay in the areas that only they knew about. The crowds who muddled in and out of the building tended to travel only to the pre-programmed destinations, never suspecting there was anywhere else to go. And said crowd, since they didn't put much thought into it and were only there to occupy themselves, made awful gamers. He showed me some kind of roster: people like himself from the "old days" were all off in one category, while the more recent roster of those who'd withdrawn from outside life were mostly at levels where they didn't get much done and eventually faded into the background. Which was bad indeed, because there was something that needed doing, something kind of urgent. Something on which people both inside and out needed to collaborate, and this crop of newbies didn't have their head in the game at all, and weren't likely to be very much help.
Act two began as I pondered this, and I went out by the main building entrance. There was a revolving door through which the crowd of people pushed their way in and out. And as I looked at them more closely through the glass of the door I saw what the guy had been talking about. Old, young, male, female, all races, all styles of dress--they all had a bored, defeated look to them. Most were obese, slumped into themselves, distracted by various electronic devices whose cords led back into their purses and satchels, or some combination of all these. Small wonder, I thought, that when they get inside they don't do much of anything, if that's what they're like out here.
Then I was on a bus, talking to someone about--of all things!--Scientology. The bus didn't have any other occupants; the day visible through the windows was clear, blue-skied, with diffuse early afternoon light. My conversation partner was one of those dream-people with an entirely skipped apprearance, so I'll use the plural instead of a gendered singular noun. They were standing up and holding on to the straps, as I was, but beyond that I've no idea what they looked like. The bus drove past a large, shiny building. Not quite a skyscraper, as it wasn't that tall and stood pretty much on its own, but with that windows-everywhere look I associate with skyscrapers. We were saying how pointless it was for them to have such a pretty building, when what they actually did in it was so unbelievably dumb. My conversation partner said something sarcastic about some similarity between Scientology and Christianity. I laughed, shook my head, and said something about how it had been a fun challenge at first to get myself into the Scientology organization and move up through the levels, all while resisting their attempts to brainwash me. "But I've been all through it, like, three times in two months," I continued, thinking to myself that this was a slight exaggeration--it was more like three times in three or four months, "and I'm so bored!"
Act three started with a clean scene shift; how I got off the bus etc. was entirely skipped. I was Ice Cube--the young Ice Cube, the way he looks in the movie Friday. There was a woman walking next to me who resembled both of the ladies in that movie who were not attractive as current or prospective girlfriends. She had the body and demeanor of the shallow, jealous one at the beginning, the face and bad fake hair of the one at the end, and a voice that didn't belong to either one of them. She was leading a young boy-child by the hand. I got the impression she was a caseworker of some kind who'd been sent to interview me, and I needed to make a good impression, or at least not antagonize her.
We were walking down an alleyway--an outdoor scene, but with indoor-quality light. The alley was paved in red brick cobblestones. One side was a wall, along which there was some kind of couch. The other side was bordered by a very tall chain-link fence. The section of the alley down which we walked was sort of the middle of the alley; off at either end of the chain-link fence I got the suggestion of other buildings. On the other side of the fence was something like a vacant lot, overgrown with scrubby weeds and volunteer trees which had pushed their way up through the rubble. And in the vacant lot there were baby elephants and fledgling or juvenile crows. Some of the crows were small and looked new-hatched. One was molting, playfully pulling sloughed down out of its chest feathers, which floated away like dandelion fluff. Another looked more mature than the rest, its feathers sleek and shiny; it stood shoulder-high to the baby elephants, and seemed somehow very solid.
The woman turned to me and started asking me pointed questions. As we spoke, she let go of the boy-child's hand, and he drifted over towards the far end of the fence, not to be seen again in the dream. Her questions concerned Pearl's upcoming missions trip to Africa, a dream event which we both knew about, and which was going to happen very soon. We said Africa, in conversation, but the mental picture I got was of one of those pocket universes from act one--one of the interesting, out-of-the-way ones. I said, "At first I was opposed to the idea, but as I've thought it through I've become reconciled to the trip." I began to list some reasons. "One, when she's in Africa, she can get her mind settled, because people she knows here won't be around to mess with it. Two, it's a great opportunity to travel and study in a foreign country, an opportunity that she's getting for free but that otherwise a person would have to pay a lot of money for. And three--"
As I'd been speaking, the woman had moved closer and closer to me. She'd put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me down onto the couch. And just as I was about to get to point three, she got on top of me, straddling me, and started to grind her crotch against mine. We were both wearing jeans, but I was baffled and highly offended, and even through the clothing the heat of her body was very disturbing. I took hold of her upper arms, shifted my body weight under her, and with as little force as possible--since I didn't want to hurt or seriously offend her--shoved her off of me onto the cobblestones and sat up. "What are you doing?" I demanded. "I don't want to do this!" She stood up with a look of irritation, and asked why I stopped answering her questions. I took a deep breath, found my train of thought, and prepared to start speaking. All of a sudden she was on top of me again, smiling and perfectly pleased about it, as though she'd convinced me after all. I shoved her off again, a little more vehemently, and shouted, "I told you already, I don't want this!"
Then without changing location or any sense of movement, the structure of the landscape shifted radically. The cobbles of the alley and the weed-strewn rubble of the parking lot combined into one surface, like a screen or a piece of paper. Myself, the woman and the couch were gone. The crows and elephants were still themselves, but they were also items on a list, with little radio buttons next to them like on a computerized multiple-choice test. Many of the elephants were sick, and had slumped forward, their foreheads resting on the ground. I rushed around briefly pushing them back up onto their feet, because if they were too sick to stand, their buttons on the list wouldn't work. I looked over the list again; it was a puzzle or test, and there was a definite time limit. I figured out how to solve the puzzle pretty quickly, and selected the right buttons and entered the right answers next to the list items. But in order to submit my answer and send it, somewhere in the list there was hidden a big red button, which would calculate and send what I had entered. If I wanted my answer to count I had to find it before the time limit expired.
I ran through all the puzzle parameters again and again, trying with increasing frustration to figure out where the big red button was.
Then I woke up.
*****
Some preliminary notes, now that I've had the day to think on it.
Notes on act one.
Act ones tend to talk about the general theme or the background for the material presented in the dream as a whole.
The pocket-universes and their many fractal interconnections seem to represent how I view the world of ideas, and if you will, the invisible or spiritual side of reality. That images and social memes from computer games I love played a large part in the construction of this image tells a lot about my attitude. In other words, the way I approach invisible stuff, or towards imagination and creativity in general, is very similar to my attitude towards games. I like things that are long-drawn out, have lots of detail and plot, and can be played in many different ways. I like things that have lots of interconnectivity. And when I enter into a game map or a symbol set or a system of beliefs, I do so primarily with the attitude of an explorer rather than a conqueror, even when (like some of the universes in the dream) the scenario seems specifically designed for conquest. If, as often happens when I play Heroes, I have to start a thing all over from the beginning because I missed some small but crucial step, I will do so happily. (After a few token grumbles, of course, which are mostly for show and for the fun of hearing myself make noise.) If, as happened in the dream, I discover an apparent loophole or shortcut, I will investigate it thoroughly before attempting to take advantage of it.
More and more I've been coming to the belief that magic / spiritual stuff / the invisible stuff side of personality construction is all about relationships. As I become better at having real relationships with real people, I will become better at having (possibly) imaginary relationships with (mostly) invisible people. If I am a good friend, I will be a good invisible friend. So, for example, I'm now even more confident that joining my local in-person Dungeons & Dragons group is probably an excellent thing for my continued spiritual development. Be a better gamer, get a better handle on getting my internal mental house in order.
Notes on act two.
Act twos tend to be statements of a specific problem or conflict.
A vehicle, moving, tends to be a symbol of people acting towards a particular goal or purpose in life.
A building tends to represent a long-term personality structure.
One of my rules of thumb about dreams is "there is only one character in a dream." Namely, the dreamer.
Thus me on a bus conversing with an undifferentiated dream-person is me taking a good hard look at a purposeful, goal driven activity in my life. My guess is, the undifferentiated dream-person is coming from the perspective of things that I haven't thought through yet, while my own perspective obviously represents the things that I have thought through and of which I am aware.
Conscious-me talks about Scientology--a so-called "religion" which exploits people and which I find loathsome and laughable. Unconscious-me mentions some connection between this and Christianity. The thing prompting the discussion is a pretty building we see out the bus window. The building looks perfectly nice, but the things happening in it are perfectly stupid. Conscious me says building equals Scientology. Unconscious me says Scientology has something to do with Christianity.
I think what Lassie--er, I mean, unconscious me is trying to tell me here is that those things I dislike about Christianity have to do with the "building." That is, the psychological structures of belief and perception, the mental frameworks for action built by its practitioners. Some of the structures themselves are even quite nice, but the ways in which those structures are used are objectionable and don't do justice to the potential of the structure. The point here is that those aspects of the culture and psychological attitudes of Christianity I don't like are the ones which remind me of Scientology. And it is those things--according to dream-me's comment and silent aside--that I've been through backwards and forwards, if not perhaps as thoroughly as I'd like to think. And with which I'm profoundly bored.
Notes on act three.
Act threes tend to be either the conclusion of a process described in an earlier act, or a pointed suggestion for a further action that should be taken on a previously introduced subject.
Crows are a significant repeating symbol for me. Although this is only the second time they've appeared, making them a relatively new symbol, and unfortunately I didn't log the first one here.
All the location indicators tell me that this action scene is taking place in a part of my mind on which I haven't done a lot of work lately, but which is very important for my personal development. Alleyway = off the beaten path in terms of the channels of conscious thought. (But the cobbles and the "neighborhood feel" make a place where I'm at home and very comfortable.) Vacant lot means an area of my mind where I haven't developed a settled structure--actually quite a positive thing. I have very fond associations with vacant lots with weeds growing up through the rubble. And even though it was an out-of-the-way place it wasn't dirty or grimy at all, just poorly lit and not built up.
I have no idea why my brain chose Ice Cube for my avatar and his unpleasant suitors (suitoresses?) for the antagonist in this scene. Maybe it was just a good match for the emotional dynamics in this scene. Even though I haven't seen that movie in ages! I don't know what the child means. Maybe the lady represents the bad, antagonistic side of the Christian perspective, and the child represents the good, valuable side? That would make sense, especially since he went off in the direction of the vacant lot filled with lovely, lovely animals.
But that little action scene where the other character starts a conversation about one thing, then physically holds me down and tries to jump my bones, is exactly what it feels like to be proselytized. It's a mental image worth holding on to, for those times in life when it comes up. If I ever find myself trying to push my viewpoint onto someone who isn't receptive to it, I will endeavor to think of this dream scene and and control myself. And if I'm on the flip side, I will think of the odious lady with her fake hair and tight jeans and start giggling, instead of feeling dirty and cornered. And I will try to remember that there may be some other, valuable thing which is being momentarily eclipsed by the awkwardness of the situation.
As for the very last bit, where the scene changes into a puzzle--well, I'm puzzled. The puzzle itself bears some resemblance to a pre-employment Excel skills test I'd taken online earlier in the day at the behest of an employment agency. The thing about the "big red button" is probably drawn from my frustration with a fiddly bit of new Kingdom of Loathing game content in the Itznotyezitz Mine. (The mastery of said new content is fortunately not necessary to beat the game. Just part of one of those exasperting sidequests.) Something to do with an extremely complicated machine, calculating numbers in base 7, and decoding bizarre dwarven runes.
Is this how I feel about the personality area in which the scene took place? About the issues represented by the scene itself? Or maybe it was just my conscious worries about money and joblessness reasserting themselves as I swam back upwards into consciousness. Who knows.
mister fox, what time is it?
What do those women expect? When you sign a contract with Fox, you know you're gonna be betrayed and humiliated.
~Bart Simpson
Ah, so many of the blogs I follow seem to be taking time to look at complex social and political issues. Things larger than themselves. I salute them for it. But as for me and my blog, I will keep it up with the diary entries. Because that's what I need it for right now.
Today's topics: job search, money stuff, psych stuff, and American Idol.
Still applying for jobs over the internet. Not with the same manic intensity as in the first few days, but I've kept it up and hopefully will stay in the habit this time. There's a snag with my state of Illinois applications, though, which may delay my ability to be hired by the state. Apparently when I was filling out my online form, I checked "Yes" for "did you graduate" but "No" for "do you have a degree." This was because of my apparently not-uncommon situation: I've earned enough credit hours to be awarded a degree, but it can't be released to me because of an unpaid institutional loan. The state worker who emailed me said I need to go back and check "No" on both questions. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure this means I'll have to wait thirty days to re-apply with the corrected version of my application. Arrrgh. Such are the Catch-22s of modern poverty. Have to get the job to be able to afford to wait long enough to get the job. Have to get the job to pay for the loan to get the degree which will get me the job. Et cetera.
Next week, Dave and I will be heading over the the DHS for our appointment where they determine if, and how much, we can get in terms of welfare and food stamps. Props to Dave for taking the initiative and filling out the online application for us. We should have done this months ago. Apparently none of the aid they give you can be used to pay rent, which is a bummer. Looks like we'll still be going through the apartment to find things to sell. But if I'm not spending my precious, precious unemployment bucks on, say, utility bills and groceries, that leaves more to pay rent. Not enough to catch up, but enough to remain at the same level of behind-ness.
Due to various reasons, the two of us are now on the same meds. I'm finishing up week two; he's working up to a full dose while transitioning off the first one. With pretty much the full dosage in my bloodstream, I'm feeling more like my normal self. And the early side effects have pretty much cleared up, which is good.
On a possibly related note, we've both been having vivid, complex dreams, and I want to write down a couple of mine. I would log them in detail, but they're kind of...obvious. So I'll summarize. There was one where, at the beginning, a sort of evil shadow dog/seal type thing (like a Kingdom of Loathing seal, only in 3D) was standing in front of me, and every time I moved it would sidle forward and bite me. It really hurt. Later, I was wandering around through various buildings. In each one, at some point I'd turn a corner and there'd be a closed metal gate with a shadowy monster behind it. It would scare me, but it'd be behind the gate, so I could keep going. Basically this one is all about how deep down, I'm convinced Bad Things is definitely about to happen, and that fear is repeatedly hurting me and stopping me from moving forward. But on a conscious level I'm able to stop myself from being constantly aware of it.
Then I had one, last sleeptime, where I tried to buy some iced coffee and a chocolate-covered strawberry, but the strawberry (from which the chocolate had somehow fallen off) was super expensive and more than I had in my account. When my debit card was declined, the card reader shredded it. I had to leave the coffee and the strawberry behind, but I kept casting longing looks at the coffee over my shoulder on my way out. Needless to say I made myself coffee as soon as I got up. Yay coffee.
Today and tomorrow are registration for American Idol, and auditions are Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Registration and auditions are all being held at the United Center. Which I can see from my apartment. It is literally walking distance. Which is the only distance that I am currently able to afford to go, at least for any non-job-search-related reason.
But my feelings are profoundly mixed. I don't really like or enjoy the show; I just follow along with it while Dave watches it. Which has given me a lot of time to think out all the Boolean algebra in my mind. But I've never really written it down, so here goes.
If I don't get selected for the first round, I have to live with the letdown of having my voice and persona judged unmarketable by four highly famous professionals, and the frustration of having wasted two days of my life standing in lines. That's actually not so bad; I could even work out the self-esteem thing in therapy.
But if I do get selected for the first round, I'd have to go to Hollywood. Since the initial Hollywood rounds, before America gets to vote, are not done live, I have no idea if this would be an immediate trip or something that happens this fall. Either way is really bad. If I leave now, I'm not here looking for a job, applying for welfare, and selling off my stuff to try and catch up on rent. Meaning we'll lose the apartment, and Dave and our families and friends will have to move our stuff and our cat and put it somewhere while I'm off in California singing covers with a bunch of crazy teens. If I leave in the fall, in order to do it I'll have to likely quit a job that I've had for at most a couple of months and that I desperately need to keep. Because, c'mon, what's Fox going to do, pay my rent for me? Give those of my peeps who can leave Chicago an apartment in Hollywood so they can be in my audiences? Not for the friggin' first round.
So, okay. Best case scenario. I get selected for the first round, we somehow in an orderly fashion move everything and everybody out of this apartment and that all works. I make it through group week somehow, and get to the part where America gets to vote. You know what that means? That means being part of the Idol "family." For starters, that means being contractually obligated to show up to any Idol-related event at which they want X-place contestants to show up. Having all the fame and none of the money, if I'm one of the early eliminations. Finishing anywhere in the top ten means having to be in the Idol tour next summer, at minimum. In any case it means losing my anonymity everywhere except on the internet. And I like anonymity! A lot!
The good part, the only real good part about it, would be getting a recording contract and getting to record my own stuff on somebody else's nickel, with the help of a professional band. Sure, I'd be paying for it by giving away a lot of my privacy, by giving control over the use of my face and voice and big chunks of my time to Fox. But it's not like I'd be taking all that time away from a lucrative career and a house with a mortgage on it and a bunch of babies. Just people I would really, really miss and who would miss me. And I'd be putting my geeky self out on television where, if I make a fool of myself, it'd be a matter of public record. And anyone who knows me knows I have a knack for making a fool of myself.
Those are all my doubts and misgivings. They are rational and valid and all of that stuff.
But as people close to me have pointed out repeatedly, I might as well go and try. If I don't, I'll regret it, and wonder what might have been. So I'm pulling yet another all-nighter--my second of the week!--so I can go stand in line for when registration opens. Probably I'll head over there in a couple of hours. It's been rainy and chilly tonight, so only the die-hards will be out in front of me. Hopefully I'll be awake enough to read all the fine print before I sign anything.
I don't know whether or not I want anybody to wish me luck, even. I just hope that whatever happens, I'll be able to appreciate the irony.
~Bart Simpson
Ah, so many of the blogs I follow seem to be taking time to look at complex social and political issues. Things larger than themselves. I salute them for it. But as for me and my blog, I will keep it up with the diary entries. Because that's what I need it for right now.
Today's topics: job search, money stuff, psych stuff, and American Idol.
Still applying for jobs over the internet. Not with the same manic intensity as in the first few days, but I've kept it up and hopefully will stay in the habit this time. There's a snag with my state of Illinois applications, though, which may delay my ability to be hired by the state. Apparently when I was filling out my online form, I checked "Yes" for "did you graduate" but "No" for "do you have a degree." This was because of my apparently not-uncommon situation: I've earned enough credit hours to be awarded a degree, but it can't be released to me because of an unpaid institutional loan. The state worker who emailed me said I need to go back and check "No" on both questions. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure this means I'll have to wait thirty days to re-apply with the corrected version of my application. Arrrgh. Such are the Catch-22s of modern poverty. Have to get the job to be able to afford to wait long enough to get the job. Have to get the job to pay for the loan to get the degree which will get me the job. Et cetera.
Next week, Dave and I will be heading over the the DHS for our appointment where they determine if, and how much, we can get in terms of welfare and food stamps. Props to Dave for taking the initiative and filling out the online application for us. We should have done this months ago. Apparently none of the aid they give you can be used to pay rent, which is a bummer. Looks like we'll still be going through the apartment to find things to sell. But if I'm not spending my precious, precious unemployment bucks on, say, utility bills and groceries, that leaves more to pay rent. Not enough to catch up, but enough to remain at the same level of behind-ness.
Due to various reasons, the two of us are now on the same meds. I'm finishing up week two; he's working up to a full dose while transitioning off the first one. With pretty much the full dosage in my bloodstream, I'm feeling more like my normal self. And the early side effects have pretty much cleared up, which is good.
On a possibly related note, we've both been having vivid, complex dreams, and I want to write down a couple of mine. I would log them in detail, but they're kind of...obvious. So I'll summarize. There was one where, at the beginning, a sort of evil shadow dog/seal type thing (like a Kingdom of Loathing seal, only in 3D) was standing in front of me, and every time I moved it would sidle forward and bite me. It really hurt. Later, I was wandering around through various buildings. In each one, at some point I'd turn a corner and there'd be a closed metal gate with a shadowy monster behind it. It would scare me, but it'd be behind the gate, so I could keep going. Basically this one is all about how deep down, I'm convinced Bad Things is definitely about to happen, and that fear is repeatedly hurting me and stopping me from moving forward. But on a conscious level I'm able to stop myself from being constantly aware of it.
Then I had one, last sleeptime, where I tried to buy some iced coffee and a chocolate-covered strawberry, but the strawberry (from which the chocolate had somehow fallen off) was super expensive and more than I had in my account. When my debit card was declined, the card reader shredded it. I had to leave the coffee and the strawberry behind, but I kept casting longing looks at the coffee over my shoulder on my way out. Needless to say I made myself coffee as soon as I got up. Yay coffee.
Today and tomorrow are registration for American Idol, and auditions are Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Registration and auditions are all being held at the United Center. Which I can see from my apartment. It is literally walking distance. Which is the only distance that I am currently able to afford to go, at least for any non-job-search-related reason.
But my feelings are profoundly mixed. I don't really like or enjoy the show; I just follow along with it while Dave watches it. Which has given me a lot of time to think out all the Boolean algebra in my mind. But I've never really written it down, so here goes.
If I don't get selected for the first round, I have to live with the letdown of having my voice and persona judged unmarketable by four highly famous professionals, and the frustration of having wasted two days of my life standing in lines. That's actually not so bad; I could even work out the self-esteem thing in therapy.
But if I do get selected for the first round, I'd have to go to Hollywood. Since the initial Hollywood rounds, before America gets to vote, are not done live, I have no idea if this would be an immediate trip or something that happens this fall. Either way is really bad. If I leave now, I'm not here looking for a job, applying for welfare, and selling off my stuff to try and catch up on rent. Meaning we'll lose the apartment, and Dave and our families and friends will have to move our stuff and our cat and put it somewhere while I'm off in California singing covers with a bunch of crazy teens. If I leave in the fall, in order to do it I'll have to likely quit a job that I've had for at most a couple of months and that I desperately need to keep. Because, c'mon, what's Fox going to do, pay my rent for me? Give those of my peeps who can leave Chicago an apartment in Hollywood so they can be in my audiences? Not for the friggin' first round.
So, okay. Best case scenario. I get selected for the first round, we somehow in an orderly fashion move everything and everybody out of this apartment and that all works. I make it through group week somehow, and get to the part where America gets to vote. You know what that means? That means being part of the Idol "family." For starters, that means being contractually obligated to show up to any Idol-related event at which they want X-place contestants to show up. Having all the fame and none of the money, if I'm one of the early eliminations. Finishing anywhere in the top ten means having to be in the Idol tour next summer, at minimum. In any case it means losing my anonymity everywhere except on the internet. And I like anonymity! A lot!
The good part, the only real good part about it, would be getting a recording contract and getting to record my own stuff on somebody else's nickel, with the help of a professional band. Sure, I'd be paying for it by giving away a lot of my privacy, by giving control over the use of my face and voice and big chunks of my time to Fox. But it's not like I'd be taking all that time away from a lucrative career and a house with a mortgage on it and a bunch of babies. Just people I would really, really miss and who would miss me. And I'd be putting my geeky self out on television where, if I make a fool of myself, it'd be a matter of public record. And anyone who knows me knows I have a knack for making a fool of myself.
Those are all my doubts and misgivings. They are rational and valid and all of that stuff.
But as people close to me have pointed out repeatedly, I might as well go and try. If I don't, I'll regret it, and wonder what might have been. So I'm pulling yet another all-nighter--my second of the week!--so I can go stand in line for when registration opens. Probably I'll head over there in a couple of hours. It's been rainy and chilly tonight, so only the die-hards will be out in front of me. Hopefully I'll be awake enough to read all the fine print before I sign anything.
I don't know whether or not I want anybody to wish me luck, even. I just hope that whatever happens, I'll be able to appreciate the irony.
Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol. 50: adventures in medicine, with dream log
"I hide behind curtains 'cause I have a fear of being stabbed."
~ Chief Wiggum as Polonius, when the Simpsons did Hamlet
So today is a big day in my personal timeline: I have lost my med virginity. Meaning that today, for the first time ever, I took psychoactive meds prescribed to me by a psychiatrist.
And yes, there is a big difference between taking meds prescribed for you by a doctor and taking recreational mind-altering substances you procured yourself, even considering the very limited extent to which I have done the latter. Leaving aside things like side affects and potentials for addiction, the difference is largely one of intent and expectation. With recreational substances, the intent is to escape from consciousness of self and everyday reality. With a prescribed substance, the intent is to more fully experience those realities. People I know have experienced both sides of that coin with one and the same substance, for example in the case of aderol. And the really cool documentary Hoffman's Potion (link to video) asserts the same is true of LSD: used correctly with a doctor's supervision, it can be beneficial. Used irresponsibly in the wrong situation, it can do a lot of damage. It's one I haven't tried, but the documentary kind of made me wish doctors were allowed to use it.
As for my new pills (these ones), it'll be at least a week before I know what effects they will have. My mind completes the chain of thought without needing to be asked:
Pill delivers chemical to bloodstream.
Bloodstream transports chemical to brain.
Brain alters balance of various hormones used in the signaling of emotional states.
Emotional states of the preferred type become chemically easier to enter into, improving the personality's overall ability to confront external reality.
It is a good thing, to do this. Lots of people I know, love, and/or respect are now or have been psychiatrically medicated at various times. Family members. Friends and friends on hiatus. I don't attach a negative stigma to seeking out psychiatric care, and I like to think I don't attach a negative stigma to taking doctor-approved pills.
The fact that it feels like such a big deal to me, though, makes me feel in turn like I'm some kind of wuss. Because most of the people I know have had far more exciting adventures in psychiatric medicine. (Although some of those adventures had unpleasant results, which is part of what makes me so suspicious.) Because I'm getting growly about trying out a very small dose of one of the least harsh SSRIs on the market at the late, late age of 27. Because I can refer back, in my mind, to the Rolodex of disordered postcards I call a memory, and wonder if there may have been other periods of time in my life when a stint on the smiley pills might have done me some good.
But I don't like it and it is galling!
When dealing with my own psychology has principally to do with cognitive stuff, that is comfortable territory for me. Or comfortable discomfort, at worst. I know there's bad scary things in my personality, parts of me that don't like the rest of me or anybody else. For the most part I know where they are, to a certain extent how they got there, and increasingly, as the work progresses, how they work and what I can do to make them function properly. Oh, I complain a lot, but my intent is for it to be the useful sort. The kind where you break off in mid-sentence to say, "...hey, wait, that could actually work." If I have a disturbing dream, like I did the sleeptime before last, it usually only takes me a few days to figure out which issues my brain was trying to tell me about.
As for the dream, this paragraph should suffice. If you know Pearl and she's ever told you about her Grape Escape dream from way back in the day, or if you watch this video and use your imagination (commercial for Grape Escape), it started out a little like that. Only with Lego people and different torture devices. *shudders* Dangit, in real life you can't feel Lego people's pain or hear them screaming when they get horribly killed. That dream eventually did have a good ending, although the landscape had to be reformatted like three times to get there. At first I just watched, helpless, while bad stuff happened. There was a brief interlude where pushy, sales-skills-having people who conformed to the ideals of corporate successfulness were faxed to heaven on a giant fax machine. Then there kept being dream-people in awful situations, and when I saw them I would want something to happen to them. As soon as I did, my perspective would switch to inside that dream-person, and I'd experience the results of my decision. After this, the landscape would change to a different situation. If I'd made different choices the dream could have been a lot worse. Instead, the Amish c-section was successful and the mother survived (barely) as well as the baby. The technicians escaped from the evil building of death and deactivated the monstergate on the way out. The boss of the spikey spheres level was defeated and the key to the door at the end was recovered before the boss respawned. Me and Dave rescued the fluffy little dog from the woods and gave its fur a spiffy new hairstyle instead of shooting it because we'd been sent to kill coyotes. And when we returned to base camp, the fashion instructor complimented my spiffy new hairstyle. Oh, foolish brain. It hasn't been enough days yet to put it all together, but soon I will figure out exactly why it is I'm so afraid to admit that I'm a freaking adult.
Changing that mutable mental landscape with chemicals, though, feels like taking the problem out of my hands. Meds are a tool I don't myself know how to properly wield. I am deeply distrustful of letting anybody else wield a tool which directly impacts my mental state and which I don't myself know how to use. I think that's the principal reason why it feels like such a big deal. That, and resorting to the use of this tool to bludgeon at the big stupid rock of my own brain means that the tools I already possess have proved insufficient to the task. So my pride is ouched, not merely my sense of excessive caution.
But I have made my decision. Hopefully, like the ones I made while fast asleep, it will prove to have been the right one.
Here's to happier days and better living through chemistry.
~ Chief Wiggum as Polonius, when the Simpsons did Hamlet
So today is a big day in my personal timeline: I have lost my med virginity. Meaning that today, for the first time ever, I took psychoactive meds prescribed to me by a psychiatrist.
And yes, there is a big difference between taking meds prescribed for you by a doctor and taking recreational mind-altering substances you procured yourself, even considering the very limited extent to which I have done the latter. Leaving aside things like side affects and potentials for addiction, the difference is largely one of intent and expectation. With recreational substances, the intent is to escape from consciousness of self and everyday reality. With a prescribed substance, the intent is to more fully experience those realities. People I know have experienced both sides of that coin with one and the same substance, for example in the case of aderol. And the really cool documentary Hoffman's Potion (link to video) asserts the same is true of LSD: used correctly with a doctor's supervision, it can be beneficial. Used irresponsibly in the wrong situation, it can do a lot of damage. It's one I haven't tried, but the documentary kind of made me wish doctors were allowed to use it.
As for my new pills (these ones), it'll be at least a week before I know what effects they will have. My mind completes the chain of thought without needing to be asked:
Pill delivers chemical to bloodstream.
Bloodstream transports chemical to brain.
Brain alters balance of various hormones used in the signaling of emotional states.
Emotional states of the preferred type become chemically easier to enter into, improving the personality's overall ability to confront external reality.
It is a good thing, to do this. Lots of people I know, love, and/or respect are now or have been psychiatrically medicated at various times. Family members. Friends and friends on hiatus. I don't attach a negative stigma to seeking out psychiatric care, and I like to think I don't attach a negative stigma to taking doctor-approved pills.
The fact that it feels like such a big deal to me, though, makes me feel in turn like I'm some kind of wuss. Because most of the people I know have had far more exciting adventures in psychiatric medicine. (Although some of those adventures had unpleasant results, which is part of what makes me so suspicious.) Because I'm getting growly about trying out a very small dose of one of the least harsh SSRIs on the market at the late, late age of 27. Because I can refer back, in my mind, to the Rolodex of disordered postcards I call a memory, and wonder if there may have been other periods of time in my life when a stint on the smiley pills might have done me some good.
But I don't like it and it is galling!
When dealing with my own psychology has principally to do with cognitive stuff, that is comfortable territory for me. Or comfortable discomfort, at worst. I know there's bad scary things in my personality, parts of me that don't like the rest of me or anybody else. For the most part I know where they are, to a certain extent how they got there, and increasingly, as the work progresses, how they work and what I can do to make them function properly. Oh, I complain a lot, but my intent is for it to be the useful sort. The kind where you break off in mid-sentence to say, "...hey, wait, that could actually work." If I have a disturbing dream, like I did the sleeptime before last, it usually only takes me a few days to figure out which issues my brain was trying to tell me about.
As for the dream, this paragraph should suffice. If you know Pearl and she's ever told you about her Grape Escape dream from way back in the day, or if you watch this video and use your imagination (commercial for Grape Escape), it started out a little like that. Only with Lego people and different torture devices. *shudders* Dangit, in real life you can't feel Lego people's pain or hear them screaming when they get horribly killed. That dream eventually did have a good ending, although the landscape had to be reformatted like three times to get there. At first I just watched, helpless, while bad stuff happened. There was a brief interlude where pushy, sales-skills-having people who conformed to the ideals of corporate successfulness were faxed to heaven on a giant fax machine. Then there kept being dream-people in awful situations, and when I saw them I would want something to happen to them. As soon as I did, my perspective would switch to inside that dream-person, and I'd experience the results of my decision. After this, the landscape would change to a different situation. If I'd made different choices the dream could have been a lot worse. Instead, the Amish c-section was successful and the mother survived (barely) as well as the baby. The technicians escaped from the evil building of death and deactivated the monstergate on the way out. The boss of the spikey spheres level was defeated and the key to the door at the end was recovered before the boss respawned. Me and Dave rescued the fluffy little dog from the woods and gave its fur a spiffy new hairstyle instead of shooting it because we'd been sent to kill coyotes. And when we returned to base camp, the fashion instructor complimented my spiffy new hairstyle. Oh, foolish brain. It hasn't been enough days yet to put it all together, but soon I will figure out exactly why it is I'm so afraid to admit that I'm a freaking adult.
Changing that mutable mental landscape with chemicals, though, feels like taking the problem out of my hands. Meds are a tool I don't myself know how to properly wield. I am deeply distrustful of letting anybody else wield a tool which directly impacts my mental state and which I don't myself know how to use. I think that's the principal reason why it feels like such a big deal. That, and resorting to the use of this tool to bludgeon at the big stupid rock of my own brain means that the tools I already possess have proved insufficient to the task. So my pride is ouched, not merely my sense of excessive caution.
But I have made my decision. Hopefully, like the ones I made while fast asleep, it will prove to have been the right one.
Here's to happier days and better living through chemistry.
True Story Thursday vol. 7: navigation fail; then, navigation success!
Last Tuesday I attempted to attend an open mic here in the city. The previous week I hadn't gone, due to having a terrible cold. Dave was still extremely sick last week, so I went alone. I thought I remembered the route well enough: take the train thus far, then take the bus to the appropriate street. What I didn't realize was that two completely different buses pull in at that train station, one heading north-south, the other heading east-west. Last Tuesday, I took the wrong one. I rode for several miles, guitar wedged awkwardly between my knees, hopeful but nervous. Increasingly more nervous, as street after street went by and the neighborhoods become less and less recognizable.
When I finally realized I was going the wrong way, I took the same bus back in the opposite direction, thinking that had been the problem. But looking out again at block after block of unfamiliar buildings, I knew somehow I was still going the wrong way. By this time it was about an hour after the event was supposed to have begun, and I gave up. Got off the bus, walked into a local Burger King and got myself some food.
I was so angry with myself I could barely have spoken, if there'd been anyone around to talk to. So I sat at a table in the Burger King and started to write in my Anatomy of Trust notebook, which in a pinch doubles as a "random thoughts" journal if I'm stranded without other sources of blank paper. Part of what I wrote was:
I chose to get fixed on trust and personality because I believe, believe now and believed then, that those were the avenues by which the things I feared arrived at me. [...] I could understand the people well enough to get by. But I knew I'd never be free from the things I feared until I understood the relationships.
And still self-sabotaging after all these years.
What does it mean when I get myself lost?
Only when I'm on the way to do something I really want and which will be really good for me. Only then.
Here I sit in a damn Burger King, miles from the pub, because it seemed my visual memories of having made a bus & train trek there once before were sufficient.
Relationships that scare me?
How about my relationship with me?
Getting around in Chicago is, in fact, a pretty straightforward endeavor. The whole city is laid out on a grid with the occasional diagonal street for ease of navigation. Madison is zero north and south, State is zero east and west, and address numbers increase in every direction as one travels away from those axes. Every major intersection is labeled with the address of each street, and every minor intersection with the names of both streets. The only way you can get lost is by forgetting where you're going, or by not knowing where you are--whether you're north or south, east or west.
The interior of the mind is a little more fluid, though. Any understanding we have of ourselves is framed in the form of a story, a story arc. "First this happened to me; I became like this because of it" or "I did this in that situation, and discovered that this was a part of me." Ursula LeGuin once wrote that the fantasy story reflects the journey into the self; the language of fantasy is the symbolic language understood by the unconscious. There is no grid. There are no streets with numbers, no buses that declare which direction they're going and their ultimate destinations in a soothing recorded voice every time they pull up to a stop. Just a story, with as much exposition and character development as you're able to pack into the limitations of the frame.
After my experience of navigation fail I was pretty upset. I cried on Dave's shoulder a bit when I got home. He hugged me, made me tea, and told me not to be so hard on myself. It was still tough for me to calm down. The navigation fail itself wasn't so bad; all I lost was a few hours of my time, time which could have been much better spent, and the cost of some bus fare. What scared me was the self-sabotage. I've worked hard to break that habit, to re-train all the parts of myself that depended on it. Clearly that work is not finished. But it was frustrating and infuriating to me, because I do feel like I've made a lot of progress. I even have lots of nifty aphorisms and catchphrases to encourage myself when confronted with an unpleasant personality-construction problem. There's that wise saying by the late Douglas Adams, "The more something is designed never to break, the more difficult it is to get at when you need to repair it." Or my personal favorite of the catchphrases I've come up with: "If you feel stupid, it means you just got smarter." That one's my motto.
But what I'm trying to do, in seeking out local open mics, finding opportunities to play my songs in front of new people, is something new for me. The goal is to get out of my existing comfort zone and into the larger world. One small step in a very positive direction. Whatever fearful, pessimistic parts of me are tied into those old bad habits, perceived that this act is the thin edge of a wedge. There's creative work kept secret, and then there's creative work brought to the attention of others. Once I gain the confidence to step out in front of an audience, to make a small little place for myself in my local musical community, who knows where it might end? It's a categorical shift, from singing in my apartment to singing in a local bar. So once the shift is made, once I'm comfortable in front of a small, casual, local audience, whatever hard work and effort is required to get a bigger audience is only a matter of degree. At least, that's the way I perceive it--so by the same measure, that's the way my unconscious fears perceive it.
I had a dream last week that I think bears on this subject. I was standing around on a sidewalk in a dingy neighborhood, part of a group of local people. Some of us smoked cigarettes, others spoke of inconsequential things in low tones. But we were all weighed down by fear: this neighborhood was ruled by some evil, authoritarian government, and anyone even suspected of opposing them would be dealt with severely. So instead of going anywhere or doing anything, we all just stood around hoping nothing bad would happen.
So, in my dream, I got mad. I started smacking myself in the forehead with the flat of my palm, the way you do when you realize you've done something incredibly stupid. The thought wasn't one I "thought out loud" to the point of putting it into words, but I felt as though I was in the wrong place, that this wasn't somewhere I was supposed to be.
After a goodly number of forehead smacks, the scene shifted. I was standing in an upstairs room in a large and run-down building. The walls and ceiling were black, not as though they'd been painted that way, but as though they were stained by years of accumulated soot and grime. Debris was scattered all over the floor. Now, in this part of the dream, I had telekinesis. I could move stuff around just by pointing at it and willing it to move. When I looked up at the ceiling I noticed an enormous rectangular vent shaft, like the kind that's connected to a furnace or fireplace to take out the hot air. But instead of leading outside the building, as other ventilation ducts I've seen always do, it curved around sharply. Just a few feet from the room's single, grimy window, it ended in a grille which pointed right back into the middle of the room. I poked around the inside of the ventilation duct with a little telekinetic force and realized that it was almost completely choked off. I was glad I didn't have to physically put my hand in there to clear it out. Who knows what spiky nasty bits were wedged in there along with the soot and ash? But still, it puzzled me, because even if I managed to clear out the vent shaft--an arduous task even with telekinesis!--it would still be blowing all that hot air and soot and ash right back inside the room.
Later on that week I had an appointment at my local mental health place, and found myself describing this dream to the doctor. (She's not my permanent therapist; I'm still in the intake and evaluation phase. Still, why pass up a perfectly good human sounding board?) And after I'd talked it out, it occured to me: "That's a pretty good image for what I do with my anger. Because I'm not too comfortable expressing or even feeling anger, except towards myself." It's still a problem whose solution I've yet to find.
But having a clear idea what the problem is can be helpful in finding ways to circumvent it, and get good stuff done anyway. Most psychological issues aren't things you can clear up easily or quickly. And while it's true that the mind, like the body, isn't exactly a machine, if you find out something isn't working the way it should, it's nice to know what it is so that you can avoid using it when possible. If your ankle's sprained, you try not to put your full weight on it. And if some part of your motivations are sprained, you try not to lean too hard on your own initiative in that area.
So this Tuesday I went out by myself again. But this time I was a half hour early, and armed with detailed directions. This time, I made it there.
And I had a wonderful time! There was a nice couple there, who'd also come to perform. They lent me a pair of maracas, so I got to accompany everybody who played as a miniature rhythm section. I got invited to two other open mics, and some guy gave me his phone number, saying "we should totally jam sometime." May have been not entirely musical in nature, but hey, at least I made an impression.
One of the open mics to which I was invited was on Thursday, at a small tavern on the south side. Navigation success again! And again someone came up to me and gave me their phone number. Only this time it was a lady, who talked with me for awhile about music and was very encouraging. One of the people from Tuesday night showed up, late in the evening, and I got to introduce him to a couple of the people I'd met. Even though it was my first time at that place, I was already starting to feel at home.
Best of all the guy running the Thursday night open mic came up to me as everyone was getting ready to leave, and told me he'd actually been recording the entire night. He said once he'd gotten a chance to chop up the sound file, he could email me mp3's of the songs I played. Once I get those, I will totally send them to y'all! And/or post them somewhere!
It reminds me of the kind of thing that always happens in fantasy stories.
Step one. Fall into perilous bog. Get covered in yucky mud and almost eaten by crocodile.
Step two. Find way to circumnavigate perilous bog.
Step three. Find hidden ruins which contain treasure.
Step four. Use treasure to buy things. Things you like!
When I finally realized I was going the wrong way, I took the same bus back in the opposite direction, thinking that had been the problem. But looking out again at block after block of unfamiliar buildings, I knew somehow I was still going the wrong way. By this time it was about an hour after the event was supposed to have begun, and I gave up. Got off the bus, walked into a local Burger King and got myself some food.
I was so angry with myself I could barely have spoken, if there'd been anyone around to talk to. So I sat at a table in the Burger King and started to write in my Anatomy of Trust notebook, which in a pinch doubles as a "random thoughts" journal if I'm stranded without other sources of blank paper. Part of what I wrote was:
I chose to get fixed on trust and personality because I believe, believe now and believed then, that those were the avenues by which the things I feared arrived at me. [...] I could understand the people well enough to get by. But I knew I'd never be free from the things I feared until I understood the relationships.
And still self-sabotaging after all these years.
What does it mean when I get myself lost?
Only when I'm on the way to do something I really want and which will be really good for me. Only then.
Here I sit in a damn Burger King, miles from the pub, because it seemed my visual memories of having made a bus & train trek there once before were sufficient.
Relationships that scare me?
How about my relationship with me?
Getting around in Chicago is, in fact, a pretty straightforward endeavor. The whole city is laid out on a grid with the occasional diagonal street for ease of navigation. Madison is zero north and south, State is zero east and west, and address numbers increase in every direction as one travels away from those axes. Every major intersection is labeled with the address of each street, and every minor intersection with the names of both streets. The only way you can get lost is by forgetting where you're going, or by not knowing where you are--whether you're north or south, east or west.
The interior of the mind is a little more fluid, though. Any understanding we have of ourselves is framed in the form of a story, a story arc. "First this happened to me; I became like this because of it" or "I did this in that situation, and discovered that this was a part of me." Ursula LeGuin once wrote that the fantasy story reflects the journey into the self; the language of fantasy is the symbolic language understood by the unconscious. There is no grid. There are no streets with numbers, no buses that declare which direction they're going and their ultimate destinations in a soothing recorded voice every time they pull up to a stop. Just a story, with as much exposition and character development as you're able to pack into the limitations of the frame.
After my experience of navigation fail I was pretty upset. I cried on Dave's shoulder a bit when I got home. He hugged me, made me tea, and told me not to be so hard on myself. It was still tough for me to calm down. The navigation fail itself wasn't so bad; all I lost was a few hours of my time, time which could have been much better spent, and the cost of some bus fare. What scared me was the self-sabotage. I've worked hard to break that habit, to re-train all the parts of myself that depended on it. Clearly that work is not finished. But it was frustrating and infuriating to me, because I do feel like I've made a lot of progress. I even have lots of nifty aphorisms and catchphrases to encourage myself when confronted with an unpleasant personality-construction problem. There's that wise saying by the late Douglas Adams, "The more something is designed never to break, the more difficult it is to get at when you need to repair it." Or my personal favorite of the catchphrases I've come up with: "If you feel stupid, it means you just got smarter." That one's my motto.
But what I'm trying to do, in seeking out local open mics, finding opportunities to play my songs in front of new people, is something new for me. The goal is to get out of my existing comfort zone and into the larger world. One small step in a very positive direction. Whatever fearful, pessimistic parts of me are tied into those old bad habits, perceived that this act is the thin edge of a wedge. There's creative work kept secret, and then there's creative work brought to the attention of others. Once I gain the confidence to step out in front of an audience, to make a small little place for myself in my local musical community, who knows where it might end? It's a categorical shift, from singing in my apartment to singing in a local bar. So once the shift is made, once I'm comfortable in front of a small, casual, local audience, whatever hard work and effort is required to get a bigger audience is only a matter of degree. At least, that's the way I perceive it--so by the same measure, that's the way my unconscious fears perceive it.
I had a dream last week that I think bears on this subject. I was standing around on a sidewalk in a dingy neighborhood, part of a group of local people. Some of us smoked cigarettes, others spoke of inconsequential things in low tones. But we were all weighed down by fear: this neighborhood was ruled by some evil, authoritarian government, and anyone even suspected of opposing them would be dealt with severely. So instead of going anywhere or doing anything, we all just stood around hoping nothing bad would happen.
So, in my dream, I got mad. I started smacking myself in the forehead with the flat of my palm, the way you do when you realize you've done something incredibly stupid. The thought wasn't one I "thought out loud" to the point of putting it into words, but I felt as though I was in the wrong place, that this wasn't somewhere I was supposed to be.
After a goodly number of forehead smacks, the scene shifted. I was standing in an upstairs room in a large and run-down building. The walls and ceiling were black, not as though they'd been painted that way, but as though they were stained by years of accumulated soot and grime. Debris was scattered all over the floor. Now, in this part of the dream, I had telekinesis. I could move stuff around just by pointing at it and willing it to move. When I looked up at the ceiling I noticed an enormous rectangular vent shaft, like the kind that's connected to a furnace or fireplace to take out the hot air. But instead of leading outside the building, as other ventilation ducts I've seen always do, it curved around sharply. Just a few feet from the room's single, grimy window, it ended in a grille which pointed right back into the middle of the room. I poked around the inside of the ventilation duct with a little telekinetic force and realized that it was almost completely choked off. I was glad I didn't have to physically put my hand in there to clear it out. Who knows what spiky nasty bits were wedged in there along with the soot and ash? But still, it puzzled me, because even if I managed to clear out the vent shaft--an arduous task even with telekinesis!--it would still be blowing all that hot air and soot and ash right back inside the room.
Later on that week I had an appointment at my local mental health place, and found myself describing this dream to the doctor. (She's not my permanent therapist; I'm still in the intake and evaluation phase. Still, why pass up a perfectly good human sounding board?) And after I'd talked it out, it occured to me: "That's a pretty good image for what I do with my anger. Because I'm not too comfortable expressing or even feeling anger, except towards myself." It's still a problem whose solution I've yet to find.
But having a clear idea what the problem is can be helpful in finding ways to circumvent it, and get good stuff done anyway. Most psychological issues aren't things you can clear up easily or quickly. And while it's true that the mind, like the body, isn't exactly a machine, if you find out something isn't working the way it should, it's nice to know what it is so that you can avoid using it when possible. If your ankle's sprained, you try not to put your full weight on it. And if some part of your motivations are sprained, you try not to lean too hard on your own initiative in that area.
So this Tuesday I went out by myself again. But this time I was a half hour early, and armed with detailed directions. This time, I made it there.
And I had a wonderful time! There was a nice couple there, who'd also come to perform. They lent me a pair of maracas, so I got to accompany everybody who played as a miniature rhythm section. I got invited to two other open mics, and some guy gave me his phone number, saying "we should totally jam sometime." May have been not entirely musical in nature, but hey, at least I made an impression.
One of the open mics to which I was invited was on Thursday, at a small tavern on the south side. Navigation success again! And again someone came up to me and gave me their phone number. Only this time it was a lady, who talked with me for awhile about music and was very encouraging. One of the people from Tuesday night showed up, late in the evening, and I got to introduce him to a couple of the people I'd met. Even though it was my first time at that place, I was already starting to feel at home.
Best of all the guy running the Thursday night open mic came up to me as everyone was getting ready to leave, and told me he'd actually been recording the entire night. He said once he'd gotten a chance to chop up the sound file, he could email me mp3's of the songs I played. Once I get those, I will totally send them to y'all! And/or post them somewhere!
It reminds me of the kind of thing that always happens in fantasy stories.
Step one. Fall into perilous bog. Get covered in yucky mud and almost eaten by crocodile.
Step two. Find way to circumnavigate perilous bog.
Step three. Find hidden ruins which contain treasure.
Step four. Use treasure to buy things. Things you like!
dream log: dog and crow
(This post is backdated to the date of original transcription.) nb
dream log: dog and crow
Just had a dream that I really need to write down for later reflection and analysis. I've been dreaming a lot lately, oh yes, but what with the situation at my blogspot I have not been logging them. My relatives may be Christians, but that does not stop them from being skilled witches in their own special way. They just like to give all the credit for the things they do to their invisible friends, "God."
There were earlier parts to this dream, or earlier dreams, but only one full REM cycle stayed in my memory. A full REM cycle, as I've learned in my years of dream logging, tends to break down as an episode in three acts. The first act gives background and general information. The second act shows current process and action. The third act shows results of said process, likely or extant conclusions and avenues for further study.
Some background on symbols. A vehicle tends to indicate a willed or motivated lifepath and the worldview that goes with it. I've had many dreams in which I and other characters rode buses together, which is a powerful representation of alliance. I've interacted with a dog once in a dream, and at the time I tagged it as a representation of some very important aspects of my non-conscious self. The house in which I grew up has appeared in many dreams. And like all architectural structures, it represents persistent personality structures, among other things.
The specific referents to these symbols are virtually impossible to adequately describe without true telepathy! But I still hope that me logging my dreams and showing my work may be helpful to you-all as you consider and interpret your own dreams. Everybody's unconscious mind has its own unique symbolic language, but we do all seem to share some conventions of grammar and syntax.
Act one.
I was stepping out of the passenger side door of a very large bus. It was a light bronze or pale copperish color, very large like a Greyhound or touring bus, but each row of seats had its own set of doors. I don't think there were windows on the sides. We had stopped in the middle of a packed dirt road covered with wheel ruts, and everyone opened their doors to get out. I didn't really see the other passengers clearly but I knew what they were doing and who they were. Didn't occur to me to wonder who'd been driving or why we'd stopped. The whole driver's side of the bus wasn't something that occurred to me to think about; it was skipped. Lighting here, and throughout the rest of the dream, was early afternoon springtime, bright and comfortable without being especially warm or cool.
Traffic on the road was very fast. Other cars raced past us at dangerous speeds and didn't show any signs of slowing down, like they weren't even aware we'd stopped. I hid behind the open door and tried to peek around to see if I could spot a break in traffic. But all I could see was the other open doors of the bus, and other passengers also looking for breaks in traffic. I did recognize a man: the father of a cousin-in-law, pastor, nice fellow, didn't know him too well. So instead of peering fruitlessly around the doors, I looked around through the windshield of the bus. Peering down the length of the bus and out the window at the back, I did see a break in traffic coming up.
I ran as hard as I could and took a rolling leap for the grassy edge of the road. It wasn't all that far away, but running was incredibly difficult, and every moment I feared a car would come along and splat me to smithereens before I could get out of the way. Even though I hit the ground rolling and landed just barely on the grassy edge, the grass was thin, and there were still occasional wheel ruts where I was at. So I knew it was vaguely possible a car could still run me over. It was so hard to move, like every motion was pulling against triple strength gravity or like I was already exhausted and about to collapse. But I rolled over a couple more times and managed to get onto the part that was just grass. After that I felt fine.
Act two.
All along the edge of the road were low electric fences meant to separate the deep, wide green goat pastures from the road. I mean, they looked a bit like electric fences, but there was no power running through them. The fence was basically a floppy bit of wire attached to some sticks that ran maybe a foot off the ground, easy enough for any animal to step over. There was a great abundance of goats, and a great abundance of dogs (I keep thinking sheepdogs, even though they looked kind of like Lassie) with very intelligent expressions.
The dogs all had that mixture of confident competence, annoyance and frustration that a good chaperone feels when herding a group of hyper, rambunctious gradeschoolers through a highly public place. Like, "I got this under control, but it sure doesn't look like it, and man is it ever embarrassing." They were there to defend the goats against vicious wolves. But the dogs and the goats and the possibly wolves were all hopelessly mixed together, spread out on both sides of the so-called fence all along the pasture and the road. Sometimes some wolves would show their teeth and start menacing or even killing the goats, and the dogs would drive them off. But all the animals were milling about, new canines were wandering up from further down the road, and it was hard to tell.
A group of wolves came up from down the road, one fellow hanging back and acting sort of embarrassed. It wasn't big and pointy-eared and mean like the wolves it was tagging along with, but it didn't look or act like one of the dogs either. (Now, I just remembered this while typing up the recap at the end, which means it is very important. I had a gun. I thought about shooting this maybe-wolf-maybe-dog. I pointed the gun at it and thought about it, considered whether it really was a danger like the wolves I'd seen attacking goats. Then I decided not to shoot it and lowered the gun.) I went up to it and spoke to it curtly--though I've got no idea what I said it was definitely a command--and it came with me.
Act three.
Then me and the dog were inside the house I grew up in. It was in front of me and wanted to go quickly, but didn't know where to go. Even though it was my childhood home, the house was bigger and had more places in it, and even the places I recognized were different somehow--better lit, or smaller, or they felt backwards somehow even though the orientation of the rooms was exactly the same. All our family cats were there, just kind of wandering about. The dog didn't interact with them, but it did see them and sort of navigate past them so as not to bother them. It kept glancing back at me, as if to say, "are we going this way?" And I'd feel impatient and annoyed, and would point in the direction I wanted it to go and say "Go!", sometimes several times before it understood which way I was pointing.
Finally we ended up on the back porch of the house--a gray wooden porch that faces up against the magnolia tree I used to climb a lot as a kid. The tree was in full bloom. There was a crow sitting in the middle of the tree, a very very large crow, and it was looking at us, very intently. We walked up near the railing, my hand resting on the dog's back right behind its shoulders. I looked at the crow and said, "Crow, this is dog." I might've said something else, but if so it was short, and the bit I remember was the important part. The crow looked at us intently some more, then launched itself off the branch and started to fly away. It flew very slowly, sometimes freeze-framing in the middle of a flap so that it looked like a statue. Every feather in its neck ruff and along its wings was sharp, detailed, black that was almost matte grey in places and shaded to iridescent in other places, like the shoulders and the primary and secondary wing feathers. It seemed almost to be getting bigger as it was flying away, and even when it stopped moving there was no sense that it wasn't flying normally; it made perfect sense that it should stay aloft. The best way I could think to describe it is that it flew away into time.
Then I woke up.
What's weird to me is that I've never seen a crow in a dream before, and yet I was introducing the dog to the crow, as if I already knew it. Crows are an important symbol to me in waking life, always have been. What exactly they symbolize I couldn't say, but in general I like them and am happy to see them, as I would be to see a dog getting walked or a cat prowling its territory. They are shiny and eat anything and have pretty wings and a cool attitude. And even though they're birds and not especially carnivorous, you don't think of them as being flying snacks for other animals. Partly because of their size, and partly because, being carrion eaters, they're not a favorite food of most other animals if the other animal has anything else it can reasonably catch. So yeah. I suppose that sort of gives you the idea of the emotional symbolism going on there. Part of the food chain, yes, but not something that kills to eat or gets killed and eaten quite so often as other things.
The bus could be Christianity. The relative-shaped dream person I glimpsed seems to be a hint in that direction, and the animals and the field seem to bear that out. Also consistent with the fact that this was a very large vehicle that, apparently, no one was driving. And that I was very fearful and fraught with difficulty while trying to escape.
I think it's hilarious that I had dogs, wolves and goats but no sheep. None, like sheep, were so stupid as to need constant herding. All these creatures go places for their own reasons: to be fed (goats), to protect (dogs) and to kill (wolves). And of course sheep being a symbol for innocence, the lack of sheep says something about my view of humans. XD I was certainly mean to the dog in a way I only tend to be mean to myself. And I even thought about shooting the dog at first, thinking it might be a wolf--which is a pretty good image for my lack of trust in myself.
The crow is a new dream element and a thing that's meaningful to me in real life. So a dream like this demands, in my thinking, to be written down.
dream log: dog and crow
Just had a dream that I really need to write down for later reflection and analysis. I've been dreaming a lot lately, oh yes, but what with the situation at my blogspot I have not been logging them. My relatives may be Christians, but that does not stop them from being skilled witches in their own special way. They just like to give all the credit for the things they do to their invisible friends, "God."
There were earlier parts to this dream, or earlier dreams, but only one full REM cycle stayed in my memory. A full REM cycle, as I've learned in my years of dream logging, tends to break down as an episode in three acts. The first act gives background and general information. The second act shows current process and action. The third act shows results of said process, likely or extant conclusions and avenues for further study.
Some background on symbols. A vehicle tends to indicate a willed or motivated lifepath and the worldview that goes with it. I've had many dreams in which I and other characters rode buses together, which is a powerful representation of alliance. I've interacted with a dog once in a dream, and at the time I tagged it as a representation of some very important aspects of my non-conscious self. The house in which I grew up has appeared in many dreams. And like all architectural structures, it represents persistent personality structures, among other things.
The specific referents to these symbols are virtually impossible to adequately describe without true telepathy! But I still hope that me logging my dreams and showing my work may be helpful to you-all as you consider and interpret your own dreams. Everybody's unconscious mind has its own unique symbolic language, but we do all seem to share some conventions of grammar and syntax.
Act one.
I was stepping out of the passenger side door of a very large bus. It was a light bronze or pale copperish color, very large like a Greyhound or touring bus, but each row of seats had its own set of doors. I don't think there were windows on the sides. We had stopped in the middle of a packed dirt road covered with wheel ruts, and everyone opened their doors to get out. I didn't really see the other passengers clearly but I knew what they were doing and who they were. Didn't occur to me to wonder who'd been driving or why we'd stopped. The whole driver's side of the bus wasn't something that occurred to me to think about; it was skipped. Lighting here, and throughout the rest of the dream, was early afternoon springtime, bright and comfortable without being especially warm or cool.
Traffic on the road was very fast. Other cars raced past us at dangerous speeds and didn't show any signs of slowing down, like they weren't even aware we'd stopped. I hid behind the open door and tried to peek around to see if I could spot a break in traffic. But all I could see was the other open doors of the bus, and other passengers also looking for breaks in traffic. I did recognize a man: the father of a cousin-in-law, pastor, nice fellow, didn't know him too well. So instead of peering fruitlessly around the doors, I looked around through the windshield of the bus. Peering down the length of the bus and out the window at the back, I did see a break in traffic coming up.
I ran as hard as I could and took a rolling leap for the grassy edge of the road. It wasn't all that far away, but running was incredibly difficult, and every moment I feared a car would come along and splat me to smithereens before I could get out of the way. Even though I hit the ground rolling and landed just barely on the grassy edge, the grass was thin, and there were still occasional wheel ruts where I was at. So I knew it was vaguely possible a car could still run me over. It was so hard to move, like every motion was pulling against triple strength gravity or like I was already exhausted and about to collapse. But I rolled over a couple more times and managed to get onto the part that was just grass. After that I felt fine.
Act two.
All along the edge of the road were low electric fences meant to separate the deep, wide green goat pastures from the road. I mean, they looked a bit like electric fences, but there was no power running through them. The fence was basically a floppy bit of wire attached to some sticks that ran maybe a foot off the ground, easy enough for any animal to step over. There was a great abundance of goats, and a great abundance of dogs (I keep thinking sheepdogs, even though they looked kind of like Lassie) with very intelligent expressions.
The dogs all had that mixture of confident competence, annoyance and frustration that a good chaperone feels when herding a group of hyper, rambunctious gradeschoolers through a highly public place. Like, "I got this under control, but it sure doesn't look like it, and man is it ever embarrassing." They were there to defend the goats against vicious wolves. But the dogs and the goats and the possibly wolves were all hopelessly mixed together, spread out on both sides of the so-called fence all along the pasture and the road. Sometimes some wolves would show their teeth and start menacing or even killing the goats, and the dogs would drive them off. But all the animals were milling about, new canines were wandering up from further down the road, and it was hard to tell.
A group of wolves came up from down the road, one fellow hanging back and acting sort of embarrassed. It wasn't big and pointy-eared and mean like the wolves it was tagging along with, but it didn't look or act like one of the dogs either. (Now, I just remembered this while typing up the recap at the end, which means it is very important. I had a gun. I thought about shooting this maybe-wolf-maybe-dog. I pointed the gun at it and thought about it, considered whether it really was a danger like the wolves I'd seen attacking goats. Then I decided not to shoot it and lowered the gun.) I went up to it and spoke to it curtly--though I've got no idea what I said it was definitely a command--and it came with me.
Act three.
Then me and the dog were inside the house I grew up in. It was in front of me and wanted to go quickly, but didn't know where to go. Even though it was my childhood home, the house was bigger and had more places in it, and even the places I recognized were different somehow--better lit, or smaller, or they felt backwards somehow even though the orientation of the rooms was exactly the same. All our family cats were there, just kind of wandering about. The dog didn't interact with them, but it did see them and sort of navigate past them so as not to bother them. It kept glancing back at me, as if to say, "are we going this way?" And I'd feel impatient and annoyed, and would point in the direction I wanted it to go and say "Go!", sometimes several times before it understood which way I was pointing.
Finally we ended up on the back porch of the house--a gray wooden porch that faces up against the magnolia tree I used to climb a lot as a kid. The tree was in full bloom. There was a crow sitting in the middle of the tree, a very very large crow, and it was looking at us, very intently. We walked up near the railing, my hand resting on the dog's back right behind its shoulders. I looked at the crow and said, "Crow, this is dog." I might've said something else, but if so it was short, and the bit I remember was the important part. The crow looked at us intently some more, then launched itself off the branch and started to fly away. It flew very slowly, sometimes freeze-framing in the middle of a flap so that it looked like a statue. Every feather in its neck ruff and along its wings was sharp, detailed, black that was almost matte grey in places and shaded to iridescent in other places, like the shoulders and the primary and secondary wing feathers. It seemed almost to be getting bigger as it was flying away, and even when it stopped moving there was no sense that it wasn't flying normally; it made perfect sense that it should stay aloft. The best way I could think to describe it is that it flew away into time.
Then I woke up.
What's weird to me is that I've never seen a crow in a dream before, and yet I was introducing the dog to the crow, as if I already knew it. Crows are an important symbol to me in waking life, always have been. What exactly they symbolize I couldn't say, but in general I like them and am happy to see them, as I would be to see a dog getting walked or a cat prowling its territory. They are shiny and eat anything and have pretty wings and a cool attitude. And even though they're birds and not especially carnivorous, you don't think of them as being flying snacks for other animals. Partly because of their size, and partly because, being carrion eaters, they're not a favorite food of most other animals if the other animal has anything else it can reasonably catch. So yeah. I suppose that sort of gives you the idea of the emotional symbolism going on there. Part of the food chain, yes, but not something that kills to eat or gets killed and eaten quite so often as other things.
The bus could be Christianity. The relative-shaped dream person I glimpsed seems to be a hint in that direction, and the animals and the field seem to bear that out. Also consistent with the fact that this was a very large vehicle that, apparently, no one was driving. And that I was very fearful and fraught with difficulty while trying to escape.
I think it's hilarious that I had dogs, wolves and goats but no sheep. None, like sheep, were so stupid as to need constant herding. All these creatures go places for their own reasons: to be fed (goats), to protect (dogs) and to kill (wolves). And of course sheep being a symbol for innocence, the lack of sheep says something about my view of humans. XD I was certainly mean to the dog in a way I only tend to be mean to myself. And I even thought about shooting the dog at first, thinking it might be a wolf--which is a pretty good image for my lack of trust in myself.
The crow is a new dream element and a thing that's meaningful to me in real life. So a dream like this demands, in my thinking, to be written down.
dream log: prison break
I debated over doing another one of these, since I'm trying to make my blog a little less introspective and a little more focused on user-friendly content these days. However, I'm going ahead with it anyway. Dreams can be entertaining, and who knows, maybe some of my dream-interpretation technique may be useful to someone.
Also, the one I want to tell you about started out with my "dream camera" looking at me while I said, "Hey, I had the craziest dream, and I wanna tell you about it." If my unconscious self could possibly send a clearer signal that this was a dream that would do me good to write down, I can't imagine what it would be.
A parenthetic note, on a different dream: This very sleep-time I had a dream where I found a dagger. It was quite possibly the most excellent little knife I have ever seen. I want to rave on and on about it and go into great detail, but since it was my dream, the details probably don't make a difference. The important thing is, unconscious me now has access to (but is not actively carrying, even in its special belt-mounted sheath) whatever personality component is symbolized by the most perfect and wonderful personal edged weapon that could possibly exist. This counts as a very encouraging development, since in the past I've had a lot of dreams where I didn't have a weapon when I needed one, or found things that ought to have been weapons but were flimsy or broke easily. Hooray for unconscious me!
The one I want to tell you about happened three sleep-times ago. (I say sleep-time instead of night, because I tend to sleep at odd hours, especially on weekends or, as now, when I'm not working.) To recap some of the basics: My dreams, when I remember them, come in three acts. Each act is located in a dream landscape which represents a progressively deeper area of my personality. So what happens in the third act would refer to something much less accessible to my conscious mind than what happens in the first act. Light levels in dream areas are also an indication of conscious accessibility: a really dark place would represent a part of myself I either don't think about, or for some reason can't think about.
Act One.
After the little introduction bit described above, I found myself standing on a narrow stone ledge in an underground chamber with very, very high walls. The walls and floor were made of dark grayish-green stone blocks, like a castle or fortress you might see in a videogame. Light shone in, from the room I'd started out in, through something like slit fortress windows. But the ambient lighting in the place was just dim enough that I mentally tagged it "spooky ambience". I didn't feel spooked, but I knew I was supposed to. As I stood there on the ledge, metal bars extended down from the ceiling on either side of me. They would have trapped me there, but I saw them coming and moved quickly out of the way. As soon as the bars clanged against the ledge, jets of flame came down from the ceiling, right where I would have been. I breathed a sigh of relief, grateful for the quick thinking.
Then I was down on the floor, walking around in search of an exit. The dungeon was composed of several hallways, with no apparent pattern to their arrangement. Every so often, when one of the hallways dead-ended, there would be a large metal structure extending down from the ceiling to the floor. These machines looked a bit like square ventilation ducts painted dark grayish-green, but much sturdier and more massive. They were widest at the bottom, twenty or so feet across, and narrowest at the top, maybe ten feet across. Each machine was "on", though there weren't any visible lights or dials or anything. I hoped there might be an exit on the other side of one of these, so I grabbed ahold of some lever near the bottom of the mechanism and pulled it up. It lifted easily, like a massive metal door with a counterweight. But instead of an exit, there was a prisoner inside, up on the ledge--a dangerous prisoner. Like Hannibal Lecter, but without the good doctor's cultured refinement and capacity for restraint. Still hoping there was a door in there somewhere, I kept going around the halls and opening up the machines, releasing prisoner after prisoner. Eventually I stopped, since I realized I was getting nowhere and there were a few too many dangerous lunatics around for my taste. So the last couple of machines never got opened up.
There was a weird scene here at the end of Act One where I stood near a door in the top of the wall that opened into a place I thought of as "Iraq", where the sunlight was blinding. I talked with some guy on the other side of the door, but I knew for some reason it wasn't an exit, that it was a fake place and it wouldn't do me any good to go that way, so I decided to stop wasting time and get on with the search.
Act Two.
All kinds of crazy, dangerous prisoners were wandering around. Fortunately for me, one of them was the wicked awesome hot fascist lady who'd outwitted me back in the pointless dystopia dream. (Long story short, she is either my inner self or spirit guide or some other thing that I'm as yet too boneheaded to recognize. I spent most of my life being terrified of her, but her dream-repesentation has gradually evolved, from a big, scary spider into a scary super hot lady.) In this dream she looked a lot more butch--short cropped hair, nondescript gray clothing, face not pictured--but I was immensely relieved to see her. For the rest of Act Two I followed her like a devoted puppy, and felt completely safe.
We went to get prepared to get out of there, which for some reason meant putting on shoes. In dream logic, this makes perfect sense: shoes are a symbol not only of your most basic level of interface with your surroundings, but also what type of role you're taking on. I dug through a huge pile of shoes, none of which were pairs. Many were inappropriate for fleeing, many were ugly or uncomfortable; some would have been perfect if I'd been able to find a second shoe. Finally I found a pair of well-worn, low-heeled red leather knee-high boots. Wish I had those things in real life, although I can't think of a single place I'd wear them!
Everybody then ran and got onto the prison bus, which was actually a school bus. My butch ladyfriend got in the driver's seat, I sat in the very front seat on the passenger side behind the door, and the other crazy prisoners (there weren't really that many of them) sat elsewhere in the bus. There was some nervousness because we were being pursued and needed to move out secretly. We drove out across sunny meadowlands, where there was nary a road or building in sight. It rendered oddly in my perception; on one level I was seeing grass and trees and slow, rolling hills, while on another level I saw a pop-up map that showed our location and nearby monsters and terrain features. Exactly like in a videogame, except since the perspective was first-person the two were superimposed. Apparently I was the bus for awhile, or at least seeing our surroundings as though I were. I understood from my ladyfriend (she didn't speak--speech is rare when I dream) that she'd been following a slow downward descent, as though the bus was just naturally rolling down the hills, rather than being driven. This would help confuse our pursuers somehow, make them think it wasn't actually us.
I saw the monster as a monster icon on my mental map subscreen first--then we rounded a grove of trees and I saw the real monster. It was several times larger than the bus, red and scaly and armored, with a big mouth full of sharp teeth. Strangely that is THE most detail I can give about it, since it didn't render visually, hardly at all. Even when we were right in front of it, I mostly saw the icon on the map. It opened its mouth, perhaps to roar or spit fire, and she drove the bus right into its maw.
My view stepped back a bit: I still had the subscreen, but now my outside view was of the monster's flank, with the bus on the other side. The bus apparently had a flamethrower, because my ladyfriend was firing it at full power at the monster's belly from the inside. After about half a minute of this, the monster exploded and the bus drove out again, totally unharmed.
Act Three.
Full-on first person perspective; I was alone again, and thought of myself as myself. If that makes sense. The plot context from the first two acts had fallen away, is the best way to put it. I was in an extremely dark place that I thought of as the basement of the house I grew up in, even though the rooms I started in were mashups of various rooms from upstairs with nonexistent rooms. Even though there wasn't any light, I could see everything perfectly, still in color. (That's been the case since the tower / turkey dream, where I put on some glasses.)
The first room was a bedroom. It was a mess. Dirty clothes strewn everywhere, furniture pushed against the walls any old how, half-empty drawers hanging open, random objects scattered. It looked as though it was simultaneously the home of a deranged packrat and an abandoned room that no one had set foot in for months. I spent most of my time in there looking at particular things and thinking particular thoughts about them. Which I'm sure would give me a wealth of personality construction info if I could remember it, but almost all the details are gone. The one detail that did stick around came right before I left that room. There were two closets with clothes, for a wonder, up on hangers. I looked at them and thought, "I've got too many of my clothes in Dave's closet; I really ought to move them."
The second room was a kitchen. It was, if anything, an even bigger mess than the bedroom. (Freudian typo slip there: original typing of that sentence read "I was, if anything, an even bigger mess than the kitchen.") There were no less than four refrigerators, but none of them were plugged in. I knew without having to open them that they were completely empty. Every shelf, countertop, table and any other flat surface was piled with objects, some half-used, others broken but never opened. I remember seeing eggs lined up on a shelf and feeling guilty and annoyed that they weren't refrigerated and were going to spoil. The sink overflowed with dirty dishes, dishes that toppled over and spilled the dirty standing water in them on the countertop when I leaned over the faucet for a drink of water.
When I straightened up, I spied a delicious cholocatey dessert treat on the counter near the sink. It was misshapen and had toppled over a bit, itself, but hadn't gotten any dishwater on it. And somehow was still fresh; the whipped cream center peeking out from under the chocolate looked like it had been just made. I snatched it up, furtively, as though I was stealing something that I wasn't allowed to have, or would get in trouble if anyone caught me taking.
A note of description here. In the basement of the house I grew up in, the furnace room, and the little workshop room behind it, were the second scariest and darkest places in the entire basement. Other dreams have established that for me, when I'm dreaming, the workshop room symbolizes some very important personality construction functions. I have, as yet, only a vague understanding of what these functions are: I understand it in terms of emotional states, but I haven't sorted out what's going on well enough that I can put that understanding into words without totally misrepresenting the process. The workroom was a place where, in my early childhood, Dad kept guns and ammunition and other things best kept away from the reach of children. It was a place where interesting stuff happened, but dangerous interesting stuff in whcih I was not allowed to participate. But the furnace room, with its deep, dark cobwebs, its single ineffectually bare lightbulb, and its scary secret corners tucked behind grimy pieces of machinery, was a place both of uncomplicated fear and ironical refuge. You hide in the back of the scary place, because no one would want to look for you there, see?
So next thing I knew I had flung myself, prone, onto the floor of the furnace room. It was completely empty, clean, stripped; nothing but the painted cement and the lightbulb. And there I devoured my delicious chocolatey treat. And oh, let me tell you, it was extremely delicious.
Then I woke up.
----
As in any dream, the most important events here were the parts when I, in first-person mode, physically interacted with my dream environment. I'm'a try to set down some thoughts on those events and what they can tell me about where I'm at right now.
When I take the symbol of the machines that had dangerous prisoners in them, and put that next to the imprisoning bars and jets of flame that almost caught me right at the beginning, I think I get what those things represented. Kinda. The bars and flames were the start of another machine, like the ones I opened, "growing" down out of the upper parts of my personality into the area I was then exploring. The fact that one of them (who knows which one? maybe the one that turned out to have that weird bright fake doorway into a war zone behind it?) also had my ladyfriend in it is another clue.
Meaning: those crazy inmates were personas or roles of mine, which I consider dangerous and keep very carefully locked down. I could unlock them easily, and they didn't come after me, even before I met up with my ladyfriend. They, too, were principally looking for a way to escape from the dungeon.
The shoes might possibly be as significant a symbol as the knife from my more recent dream. These boots are made for walkin'...or in this case, escapin'. Like the glasses, which changed my unconscious relationship with the act of perception, the shoes could signify a change in my unconscious relationship with the act of locomotion. Further thought and observation are needed!
The bus ride and monster fight are tough to interpret. I'm still on the fence about the meaning of the "me plus ladyfriend, who's driving, get into vehicle and drive across boundary" meme. The last time that happened in a dream, I was sore tempted to say that this indicated unconscious me was going outside my personality in the dream state. Personally I do believe out of body experiences have some reality to them, but I'm not prepared to say what kind. Not enough data. I know and have known people, whose judgments I trust, who have had some pretty interesting experiences of that type, both in natural sleep and meditation-induced trance. But with what aspect of reality do such experiences enable a person to interact? Not enough data! However, in terms of my personality alone, I am willing to conclude this much. Whatever else the monster represented, it also represented something that was keeping me away from the parts of myself represented by the messy rooms in Act Three. Since as soon as it got blowed up real good, that's where I found myself.
The messy rooms are of course the richest and most personal symbols in the whole shebang.
The fact that I thought "aloud", that is, in words, about having too many of my clothes in Dave's closet, means unconscious me really wanted to draw attention to that idea. Somewhere in the bottom of my mind I've got assumptions, identity beliefs, characteristics of myself that I have been projecting onto Dave. I've been expecting him to think or react or desire in the same ways I do--out of pure solipsism. That is a bad Fiat who has let such a thing stay so messy and confused, and been a boorish solipsistic girlfriend because of it. Now, as soon as I can figure out what those things are, I can stop projecting them. But the task should be easier now that I've recognized, unconsciously as well as consciously, that it needs doing.
Now, a word about mana. In the Bible, the original manna (trans: what is it?) was magic food God rained down on the Israelites to sustain them while they were crossing the desert. In games, mana is a mystical energy that mages use to cast spells. It's kind of the same energy as the Force from Star Wars, though different systems source it in different aspects of nature. Some fantasy authors have it that mana can be found in blood, or in the ethereal life essence of living things. Some games source it in the mental energy of a character. In Magic: the Gathering, it is produced in fixed quantities by lands.
In my lexicon, mana is what you are using when you pay attention, put forth effort, emotionally commit yourself. Freud called it libido, the essential energy that the personality runs on. It just feels more natural for a nerd like me to say "I've got a lot of mana tied up in this belief" than to say "I've got a lot of libido cathected to this belief." And something I've noticed, when listening to other people's dreams and studying my own, is that everybody's unconscious mind has its own symbols for mana. For my sisters, it's often money. I've heard a couple dreams where the symbol was weed. I had one once where it was books.
But in this one, there were two: water and a delicious choclatey dessert treat. And I extracted both of them from a potentially very useful area of my personality that has been sadly neglected and left in a mess. One of them, the chocolatey delicious, was something I needed so badly and yet still don't (on an unconscious level) feel I deserve to have that I had to flee to a dangerous hiding place before I could actually consume it.
So hey, more mana for me. Whatever is represented by super cool shoes. A means of becoming less of a jerk. And possibly a knife! I feel rich!
I'm'a go apply for unemployment now.
Also, the one I want to tell you about started out with my "dream camera" looking at me while I said, "Hey, I had the craziest dream, and I wanna tell you about it." If my unconscious self could possibly send a clearer signal that this was a dream that would do me good to write down, I can't imagine what it would be.
A parenthetic note, on a different dream: This very sleep-time I had a dream where I found a dagger. It was quite possibly the most excellent little knife I have ever seen. I want to rave on and on about it and go into great detail, but since it was my dream, the details probably don't make a difference. The important thing is, unconscious me now has access to (but is not actively carrying, even in its special belt-mounted sheath) whatever personality component is symbolized by the most perfect and wonderful personal edged weapon that could possibly exist. This counts as a very encouraging development, since in the past I've had a lot of dreams where I didn't have a weapon when I needed one, or found things that ought to have been weapons but were flimsy or broke easily. Hooray for unconscious me!
The one I want to tell you about happened three sleep-times ago. (I say sleep-time instead of night, because I tend to sleep at odd hours, especially on weekends or, as now, when I'm not working.) To recap some of the basics: My dreams, when I remember them, come in three acts. Each act is located in a dream landscape which represents a progressively deeper area of my personality. So what happens in the third act would refer to something much less accessible to my conscious mind than what happens in the first act. Light levels in dream areas are also an indication of conscious accessibility: a really dark place would represent a part of myself I either don't think about, or for some reason can't think about.
Act One.
After the little introduction bit described above, I found myself standing on a narrow stone ledge in an underground chamber with very, very high walls. The walls and floor were made of dark grayish-green stone blocks, like a castle or fortress you might see in a videogame. Light shone in, from the room I'd started out in, through something like slit fortress windows. But the ambient lighting in the place was just dim enough that I mentally tagged it "spooky ambience". I didn't feel spooked, but I knew I was supposed to. As I stood there on the ledge, metal bars extended down from the ceiling on either side of me. They would have trapped me there, but I saw them coming and moved quickly out of the way. As soon as the bars clanged against the ledge, jets of flame came down from the ceiling, right where I would have been. I breathed a sigh of relief, grateful for the quick thinking.
Then I was down on the floor, walking around in search of an exit. The dungeon was composed of several hallways, with no apparent pattern to their arrangement. Every so often, when one of the hallways dead-ended, there would be a large metal structure extending down from the ceiling to the floor. These machines looked a bit like square ventilation ducts painted dark grayish-green, but much sturdier and more massive. They were widest at the bottom, twenty or so feet across, and narrowest at the top, maybe ten feet across. Each machine was "on", though there weren't any visible lights or dials or anything. I hoped there might be an exit on the other side of one of these, so I grabbed ahold of some lever near the bottom of the mechanism and pulled it up. It lifted easily, like a massive metal door with a counterweight. But instead of an exit, there was a prisoner inside, up on the ledge--a dangerous prisoner. Like Hannibal Lecter, but without the good doctor's cultured refinement and capacity for restraint. Still hoping there was a door in there somewhere, I kept going around the halls and opening up the machines, releasing prisoner after prisoner. Eventually I stopped, since I realized I was getting nowhere and there were a few too many dangerous lunatics around for my taste. So the last couple of machines never got opened up.
There was a weird scene here at the end of Act One where I stood near a door in the top of the wall that opened into a place I thought of as "Iraq", where the sunlight was blinding. I talked with some guy on the other side of the door, but I knew for some reason it wasn't an exit, that it was a fake place and it wouldn't do me any good to go that way, so I decided to stop wasting time and get on with the search.
Act Two.
All kinds of crazy, dangerous prisoners were wandering around. Fortunately for me, one of them was the wicked awesome hot fascist lady who'd outwitted me back in the pointless dystopia dream. (Long story short, she is either my inner self or spirit guide or some other thing that I'm as yet too boneheaded to recognize. I spent most of my life being terrified of her, but her dream-repesentation has gradually evolved, from a big, scary spider into a scary super hot lady.) In this dream she looked a lot more butch--short cropped hair, nondescript gray clothing, face not pictured--but I was immensely relieved to see her. For the rest of Act Two I followed her like a devoted puppy, and felt completely safe.
We went to get prepared to get out of there, which for some reason meant putting on shoes. In dream logic, this makes perfect sense: shoes are a symbol not only of your most basic level of interface with your surroundings, but also what type of role you're taking on. I dug through a huge pile of shoes, none of which were pairs. Many were inappropriate for fleeing, many were ugly or uncomfortable; some would have been perfect if I'd been able to find a second shoe. Finally I found a pair of well-worn, low-heeled red leather knee-high boots. Wish I had those things in real life, although I can't think of a single place I'd wear them!
Everybody then ran and got onto the prison bus, which was actually a school bus. My butch ladyfriend got in the driver's seat, I sat in the very front seat on the passenger side behind the door, and the other crazy prisoners (there weren't really that many of them) sat elsewhere in the bus. There was some nervousness because we were being pursued and needed to move out secretly. We drove out across sunny meadowlands, where there was nary a road or building in sight. It rendered oddly in my perception; on one level I was seeing grass and trees and slow, rolling hills, while on another level I saw a pop-up map that showed our location and nearby monsters and terrain features. Exactly like in a videogame, except since the perspective was first-person the two were superimposed. Apparently I was the bus for awhile, or at least seeing our surroundings as though I were. I understood from my ladyfriend (she didn't speak--speech is rare when I dream) that she'd been following a slow downward descent, as though the bus was just naturally rolling down the hills, rather than being driven. This would help confuse our pursuers somehow, make them think it wasn't actually us.
I saw the monster as a monster icon on my mental map subscreen first--then we rounded a grove of trees and I saw the real monster. It was several times larger than the bus, red and scaly and armored, with a big mouth full of sharp teeth. Strangely that is THE most detail I can give about it, since it didn't render visually, hardly at all. Even when we were right in front of it, I mostly saw the icon on the map. It opened its mouth, perhaps to roar or spit fire, and she drove the bus right into its maw.
My view stepped back a bit: I still had the subscreen, but now my outside view was of the monster's flank, with the bus on the other side. The bus apparently had a flamethrower, because my ladyfriend was firing it at full power at the monster's belly from the inside. After about half a minute of this, the monster exploded and the bus drove out again, totally unharmed.
Act Three.
Full-on first person perspective; I was alone again, and thought of myself as myself. If that makes sense. The plot context from the first two acts had fallen away, is the best way to put it. I was in an extremely dark place that I thought of as the basement of the house I grew up in, even though the rooms I started in were mashups of various rooms from upstairs with nonexistent rooms. Even though there wasn't any light, I could see everything perfectly, still in color. (That's been the case since the tower / turkey dream, where I put on some glasses.)
The first room was a bedroom. It was a mess. Dirty clothes strewn everywhere, furniture pushed against the walls any old how, half-empty drawers hanging open, random objects scattered. It looked as though it was simultaneously the home of a deranged packrat and an abandoned room that no one had set foot in for months. I spent most of my time in there looking at particular things and thinking particular thoughts about them. Which I'm sure would give me a wealth of personality construction info if I could remember it, but almost all the details are gone. The one detail that did stick around came right before I left that room. There were two closets with clothes, for a wonder, up on hangers. I looked at them and thought, "I've got too many of my clothes in Dave's closet; I really ought to move them."
The second room was a kitchen. It was, if anything, an even bigger mess than the bedroom. (Freudian typo slip there: original typing of that sentence read "I was, if anything, an even bigger mess than the kitchen.") There were no less than four refrigerators, but none of them were plugged in. I knew without having to open them that they were completely empty. Every shelf, countertop, table and any other flat surface was piled with objects, some half-used, others broken but never opened. I remember seeing eggs lined up on a shelf and feeling guilty and annoyed that they weren't refrigerated and were going to spoil. The sink overflowed with dirty dishes, dishes that toppled over and spilled the dirty standing water in them on the countertop when I leaned over the faucet for a drink of water.
When I straightened up, I spied a delicious cholocatey dessert treat on the counter near the sink. It was misshapen and had toppled over a bit, itself, but hadn't gotten any dishwater on it. And somehow was still fresh; the whipped cream center peeking out from under the chocolate looked like it had been just made. I snatched it up, furtively, as though I was stealing something that I wasn't allowed to have, or would get in trouble if anyone caught me taking.
A note of description here. In the basement of the house I grew up in, the furnace room, and the little workshop room behind it, were the second scariest and darkest places in the entire basement. Other dreams have established that for me, when I'm dreaming, the workshop room symbolizes some very important personality construction functions. I have, as yet, only a vague understanding of what these functions are: I understand it in terms of emotional states, but I haven't sorted out what's going on well enough that I can put that understanding into words without totally misrepresenting the process. The workroom was a place where, in my early childhood, Dad kept guns and ammunition and other things best kept away from the reach of children. It was a place where interesting stuff happened, but dangerous interesting stuff in whcih I was not allowed to participate. But the furnace room, with its deep, dark cobwebs, its single ineffectually bare lightbulb, and its scary secret corners tucked behind grimy pieces of machinery, was a place both of uncomplicated fear and ironical refuge. You hide in the back of the scary place, because no one would want to look for you there, see?
So next thing I knew I had flung myself, prone, onto the floor of the furnace room. It was completely empty, clean, stripped; nothing but the painted cement and the lightbulb. And there I devoured my delicious chocolatey treat. And oh, let me tell you, it was extremely delicious.
Then I woke up.
----
As in any dream, the most important events here were the parts when I, in first-person mode, physically interacted with my dream environment. I'm'a try to set down some thoughts on those events and what they can tell me about where I'm at right now.
When I take the symbol of the machines that had dangerous prisoners in them, and put that next to the imprisoning bars and jets of flame that almost caught me right at the beginning, I think I get what those things represented. Kinda. The bars and flames were the start of another machine, like the ones I opened, "growing" down out of the upper parts of my personality into the area I was then exploring. The fact that one of them (who knows which one? maybe the one that turned out to have that weird bright fake doorway into a war zone behind it?) also had my ladyfriend in it is another clue.
Meaning: those crazy inmates were personas or roles of mine, which I consider dangerous and keep very carefully locked down. I could unlock them easily, and they didn't come after me, even before I met up with my ladyfriend. They, too, were principally looking for a way to escape from the dungeon.
The shoes might possibly be as significant a symbol as the knife from my more recent dream. These boots are made for walkin'...or in this case, escapin'. Like the glasses, which changed my unconscious relationship with the act of perception, the shoes could signify a change in my unconscious relationship with the act of locomotion. Further thought and observation are needed!
The bus ride and monster fight are tough to interpret. I'm still on the fence about the meaning of the "me plus ladyfriend, who's driving, get into vehicle and drive across boundary" meme. The last time that happened in a dream, I was sore tempted to say that this indicated unconscious me was going outside my personality in the dream state. Personally I do believe out of body experiences have some reality to them, but I'm not prepared to say what kind. Not enough data. I know and have known people, whose judgments I trust, who have had some pretty interesting experiences of that type, both in natural sleep and meditation-induced trance. But with what aspect of reality do such experiences enable a person to interact? Not enough data! However, in terms of my personality alone, I am willing to conclude this much. Whatever else the monster represented, it also represented something that was keeping me away from the parts of myself represented by the messy rooms in Act Three. Since as soon as it got blowed up real good, that's where I found myself.
The messy rooms are of course the richest and most personal symbols in the whole shebang.
The fact that I thought "aloud", that is, in words, about having too many of my clothes in Dave's closet, means unconscious me really wanted to draw attention to that idea. Somewhere in the bottom of my mind I've got assumptions, identity beliefs, characteristics of myself that I have been projecting onto Dave. I've been expecting him to think or react or desire in the same ways I do--out of pure solipsism. That is a bad Fiat who has let such a thing stay so messy and confused, and been a boorish solipsistic girlfriend because of it. Now, as soon as I can figure out what those things are, I can stop projecting them. But the task should be easier now that I've recognized, unconsciously as well as consciously, that it needs doing.
Now, a word about mana. In the Bible, the original manna (trans: what is it?) was magic food God rained down on the Israelites to sustain them while they were crossing the desert. In games, mana is a mystical energy that mages use to cast spells. It's kind of the same energy as the Force from Star Wars, though different systems source it in different aspects of nature. Some fantasy authors have it that mana can be found in blood, or in the ethereal life essence of living things. Some games source it in the mental energy of a character. In Magic: the Gathering, it is produced in fixed quantities by lands.
In my lexicon, mana is what you are using when you pay attention, put forth effort, emotionally commit yourself. Freud called it libido, the essential energy that the personality runs on. It just feels more natural for a nerd like me to say "I've got a lot of mana tied up in this belief" than to say "I've got a lot of libido cathected to this belief." And something I've noticed, when listening to other people's dreams and studying my own, is that everybody's unconscious mind has its own symbols for mana. For my sisters, it's often money. I've heard a couple dreams where the symbol was weed. I had one once where it was books.
But in this one, there were two: water and a delicious choclatey dessert treat. And I extracted both of them from a potentially very useful area of my personality that has been sadly neglected and left in a mess. One of them, the chocolatey delicious, was something I needed so badly and yet still don't (on an unconscious level) feel I deserve to have that I had to flee to a dangerous hiding place before I could actually consume it.
So hey, more mana for me. Whatever is represented by super cool shoes. A means of becoming less of a jerk. And possibly a knife! I feel rich!
I'm'a go apply for unemployment now.
Miercoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol. 13
Senor Burns, Senor Burns
con el corazon de pero
Senor Burns, Senor Burns
el diablo con dinero!
~that one Simpsons where the school strikes oil. may have gotten the words wrong!
should I
save myself
for later
or generously
give
and do
~Bjork
Saw a rabbit this morning. I said, "Hello, bunny." It just sat there warily as I walked past, which surprised me, since like all rabbits it looked as though it were ready to bolt into the underbrush at the slightest movement.
I sometimes think my dream logs might be the most entertaining things I put on this blog, because they are colorful and action-packed. Like reading a miniature short story with a plot that doesn't make sense, but characters and images which are shiny and leave a tasty residue in the brain.
Oh, a doozy of a dream last night. A doozy! Acts 2 and 3 would make a great movie plot.
However, in order for me to understand what this dream was trying to tell me, I needed the symbolic context provided by an earlier dream. Which, in backreading, it turns out I did not write down.
The earlier one, let's call it "the laser stadium dream":
Act one. My entourage and I were hurrying through the outer hallways of an enormous building which felt like a stadium. It was well-lit and bustling with people (not pictured), its walls made of grey stone. Visible through the occasional archway in the walls (or maybe I just knew what was going on in there through dreamovision?) was a central chamber, about the size of the United Center turned on its side. Maybe a little bigger. In it, partnered teams of humans and enormous, shiny magical beasties were taking turns singing and dancing together; the music was haunting and wonderful and the dances gyrated and pranced all through the empty space. I wanted very badly to go on in and take my turn. One of my entourage handed me a vibrantly-illustrated book, and as I looked through it I realized with a jolt that I had no idea what I/we were supposed to perform. "I don't know the words," I said, stricken. My entourage-person grabbed me by the hand and we took off, flying down the halls.
Act two. We flew up and up around many halls, ramps really, and the light and the color of the stone walls gradually shifted from cool grey to a warm light tan color, like afternoon sunlight on sandstone. At last we came to a square chamber, its walls and ceiling made of large blocks of the same color of stone. Lower down on the walls there were a few round ducts or tubes, one of which we had arrived through. Instead of a floor the walls stretched down into emptiness (not pictured). I was alone. There was a round window or portal, near the top of the wall at the front of the room. The warm light should have been shining through it into the room--and thence, I understood, down into the rest of the building. Instead, there was a complicated and nasty-looking metal device which exactly covered most of the window, and in front of the device a crossbeam of iron or charred wood ran across the length of the room. In the center of the device there was a small pinhole or lens, through which the sunlight captured by the device could be focused and pointed like a laser. I floated, or was gently pulled, down into one of the tubes, and rushed out of the floorless room back down into the building.
Act three. My entourage and I were sitting at a table in a large banquet hall behind the performance chamber in the stadium. Some other people were with us--I think they may have been fictional characters or representations of people I knew, but those details are gone from my memory. The hall was crowded; everyone was eating their meal and talking and mingling. I brought my attention back from looking around at the room, and saw that everyone else at my table had gotten up and wandered off. Then laser beams, three or four of them, fired down out of the ceiling, scoring the table in front of me. I was worried by how close I'd come to being hit, and also quite annoyed.
The symbolism in that dream has come to be very understandable to me as I've thought it over! What I am fond of calling "the machine in my brain", the issues I still have that are what remains of my craziness, are represented by the machine in the window in act 2. They take something that should be wholesome and joyous and make it into a weapon. A weapon which, more often than not, is something that endangers me and drives people away from me, or me from them. The proper use of the thing the machine is sitting on top of and evilly transforming would enable me to achieve some form of awesomeness that I desire very, very much.
As I fell asleep last night, I was contemplating in some detail about some personality-construction issues that have been bugging me. It is therefore most gratifying to me that my dream-making parts were able to represent the issues with which I am wrestling in the following way! I want to call this "the pointless dystopia dream (with monster)":
Act one. Some confusion of sequentiality here. My entourage and I were hanging out in a house. I had found a seal, or went out and found a seal, who was definitely my friend. It was a happy and playful fellow and didn't seem to mind having to waddle around on land. We went into the living room of the house or were already there. A dog was there, equally happy and playful as the seal, and also my friend. I sat down on the couch to play fetch with them, and wanted them to play with each other. I had some sort of toy that I would throw across the room; whichever animal reacted first ran over to the other end of the room, grabbed it, and carried it back to me, while the other animal sat in front of me feeling miffed. When they continued in this way even after I'd explained to them what I wanted (yes, dogs and seals in dreams can have things explained to them!) I became a little frustrated and vaguely confused.
Act two. Camera pulled way back. Lighting went from midday summery sunlight to temperate darkness and gloom. Same location, different process, that much was clear.
(Interesting thought occurs to me here. I never experience temperature in dreams; it can only be inferred from the quality of ambient light, or more obvious visual cues like snow or fire. Must read around to try and find out which parts of the brain one dreams with. I wonder if the lack of certain physical sensations like heat and cold are due to the same limitations that prevent your body from responding to physical movements you make while dreaming?)
Mr. Burns had either knocked down his own house, or realized that it had been knocked down. He grinned evilly and made imperious gestures, and as he did so, mazelike walls and ramparts and corridoors began constructing themselves. The structures expanded out and out in erratic patterns, to fill the entire landscape. The whole thing was made of plywood which had been inexpertly painted black, like the plain boxes theaters use to make rearrangeable sets. Only here the paint job was bad and the wood looked either flimsy or old or both. Myself and my entourage had to hide in the hollow spaces inside the walls and flee from the place's security guards. Since the place wasn't ours, of course, we didn't belong there and we didn't want to be caught. So the ending image of this act was of us in flight, certain that pursuers were only a step behind us.
Act three. Did not take any longer in subjective time than the previous acts, but was information-dense, so I've subdivided it into scenes!
Scene one. I fled into something like a junkyard or a car scrapyard, still with the feeling that my pursuer was gaining on me. After a few dodges and darts I found an unlocked car and threw myself into the back seat, landing on some crumpled-up plastic. The chief security guard got into the front seat. This was her car. For a single panicked moment I thought maybe if I crouched under the plastic and stayed very still she wouldn't see me. But then she gave me a look over her shoulder and a little smile, and I knew that me finding her unlocked car was exactly the plan.
She looked a bit like Annie Lennox:
only with heavier makeup and one of those old-fashioned police hats. Scary, but rather hot. (Gee whiz, I wonder what recurring dream character we have here? Grr. Whee!) More dreams or movies about dystopian futures should have such a chica as main antagonist!
Scene two. The car was now a tank. There was more light in the sky, and scenery existed in the background. She drove us over to the edge of the scrap yard, where it bordered on the woods, and I saw something like a small graveyard. I recognized it immediately as the graves of my fellow members of the resistance, kept there in (supposed) secret from the guards. The area with the burial plots in it was marked out from the bare dirt by a loose line of pale stones. Narrow pathways marked out in the same way meandered throught the area. Instead of names and dates, the graves were marked with gaudy headstones made of brightly-colored metal and plastic. Even though the paths were extremely narrow and the ground was difficult to see from inside the tank, the chief guard lady maneuvered along the paths with delicate precision, turning with slow care, so as not to disturb anything. I noticed this and realized it for a gesture of deep respect, as between honorable enemies at the end of a long campaign.
Scene three. We moved further out, to the edge of the woods. No longer had the sense of being in a vehicle. It was just about dawn. Behind us and to the right, beyond the scrap yard, a nearly-intact highway stretched out to the horizon. On our right plains and woods rolled out, with some steel-colored old water towers standing lonely in the distance, the paint on them faded beyond legibility. (The old-school shape, like a hat-wearing cup on stilts, not the kind that are all bulbous on top.) In front of us was a wide river, and immediately to our left was a pool of water with a weeping willow leaning out over it. I/we looked around at the river and further out to the woods and plains, and thought, Maybe anyone who was left [from the resistance, that is] fled out there, into the wilderness. Then a flock of pigeons exploded out of the trees, their flight patterns indicative of panic. You know how flocks of birds get all crazy-swirly when there's a bunch of flocks that don't normally fly together trying to share the same airspace? I didn't recognize it till I ran through the images in my mind just now, but that's where I'd seen that before. After the first flock of flocks, more came; the birds were fleeing from every direction except the one from which we had come. And I had the horrified thought: Plague. Here we'd been fighting each other for control, while out there in the wilderness there was coming something that wanted to totally destroy us.
Right on cue, a hideous behemoth came into view in the distance, lumbering down the highway, wide as four lanes of traffic all by itself.
I scrutinized it as best I could from afar. Didn't intend to stick around once it got near. Its basic body type, my brain had clearly gotten from the behemoths in Heroes IV (oh how I miss that game! and the broken laptop all my savegames are on!), but it was distorted or mutated way beyond that. Still had the grey fur and the lumpy physique. Instead of a face-shaped face, though, its head skewed over to one side, so that one eye would have had to be much bigger than the other. (Fortunately the small-eye side was the side facing us.) Its legs were small and stubby, almost vestigial, while its arms were freaking enormous, massive muscley claw-shaped hands nearly as long as the rest of its body. Between the arms and legs it had a mass of wavy tentacles instead of a proper front-of-torso. As it continued down the road towards the scrap yard I saw it (or perhaps another one like it?) glide through the air, using its tentacle mass as a kind of wings, so that its huge grasping hands looked like a giant scoop held out in front of it. It turned right as it came to the scrap yard, and upon closer inspection it didn't look so much like the behemoth as I'd thought.
My companion (not pictured) was now apparently carrying me by flapping with her wings; I could feel the action but was not paying attention to it yet.
The beast was headed towards the pond--not hunting us, just hunting. I looked down at the water and saw the silvery side of a fish, wide as my arm, turning just under the surface. My first thought was, Hey, a fish! Maybe we can catch it and eat it. But then it kept turning and turning--eight feet long, I thought--and I realized no fish could be that long and the still same width all the way down. The idea disturbed me and I discarded any notion of possibly trying to eat OR catch whatever it was. We hovered back away from the bank as the beast approached; it passed next to the tree, brushing back the lower branches as it went by. (This was a very tall tree.) It hitched itself over, with something like a very graceful full-body shrug, so that it could lower itself into the water tentacles down. Seen up close, it was obvious to me that it was also a kind of squid, and its tentacles up close looked a lot more like fish than like part of a furry beast. Long, silvery fish.
Just then, I could feel that the wings that kept us hovering over the surface of the water were laboring harder, that we were slowly beginning to sink towards the water.
At the thought of even touching the surface of a pond with two of those fearsome beasts in it, I felt that old familiar, "well, fuck this!" feeling surge up inside of me, and woke up.
So it'll take me some time to sort out all the symbols in there, but there are some things I can say right off the bat.
The little girl character has become a woman! No longer just an unpredictable young woman whom I love dearly and fear passionately. Now she is a sexy commandant who tricks me into the back of her vehicle, honors my fallen, and then warns me of oncoming peril which endangers us both. Oo yeah. That kicks so much ass.
Mr. Burns is me again. This is like the fourth or fifth time that an active mode entered into by my conscious personality has been represented in a dream by a male cartoon character. The flimsy dingy gloomy maze probably represents a mental state. Of, well, gloomy brooding with undertones of panic. Maybe I turn into male cartoon characters when I do things that are stupid, selfish or immature? That would make sense.
The dog and seal are an interesting image. Tentatively I'd interpret them to be the conscious and unconscious sides of my hat. The dog would represent the conscious side because it is a land creature and because it was already in the house. The seal would then be the unconscious side, because it is an underwater creature and because I just recently became friends with it. So they'll each play with me, but not with each other, and each feels sort of pouty when I pay more attention to the other one than to it. Oy vey. At least they are both friends with me, though!
Yeah, the behemoth squid thing was scary-looking. But the threat it presented was potential, avoidable, rather than immediate and certain. Like keeping an eye on the wasp in the room. All the cues point to it being something not originating from within my personality, as well, which makes it a little easier to be alert against it. Whatever it represents.
What I find most interesting from a dream tech standpoint was the car/tank/graveyard/flapping bird wings thing. Okay. We already postulate that the "wilderness" represented the world of mental experience outside my personality; behemoth came from there, I don't have that many flocks of pigeons in me, etc. Which means that act three, scene one up there either represented (if I was not traveling or there's no such thing) or was (if I can and was) me and my invisibler half moving to, and then across, the boundary between my personality and whatever's right next to it in whatever part of the world we all go to when we dream. Which, assuming the second thing, suggests several items of tech.
Item the first, sexy scary chick is the person/represents the aspect of me who/which has the ability to direct energy extensions out of my personality. Textev: car belongs to her. Car becomes tank as we approach boundary. Once we cross the boundary, the tank becomes unmanifested, implying that what feels big and bulky when on the inside is like a minimal requirement for movement on the outside.
Item the second, what I refer to as "my entourage" in dreams, whoever or whatever they are, are not of use or do not manifest separately from me when outside my personality. This is the meaning of the graveyard scene. Now, I don't take that scene to mean they are dead or disempowered or whatever. I would be very surprised if they were absent from my next dream. Rather, I think it is location and function-dependent. Like in the card game Magic, when a creature you had in play is put into the graveyard, that doesn't mean it's no longer a factor in the game. There are spells that can bring cards out of the graveyard, shuffle them back into your deck, or that simply act differently when certain things are in your graveyard. So the term, and the image, are pretty fluid for me. But the whole no-entourage-outside-the-ego-boundary implication is pretty unambiguous.
Item the third. This is not a conclusion, only a suspicion. I have seen dream-beasties before which resemble the behemoth squid monster. For lack of a better word, an organism/idea/experience of the sort represented by that dream image is the sort of creature I do refer to as a demon.
(I've talked about this before and at length, but to recap a bit. In common parlance, demons and angels are like anthropomorphized quanta of moral energy under direct control of either god or the devil. According to that system, only the direct (god speaketh!) or indirect (I speaketh in the name of god with his/her permission!) intervention by one of the two ultrapowers will affect their behavior. In my personal made-up lexicon, demons and angels are either A. organisms which don't have bodies, B. memeplexes which seem to behave organically, or C. there is no difference between the two descriptions. Which means they can be treated like organisms; communicated with, befriended/tamed, chased away, eaten etc. My favorite is C, by the way.)
So then. What if, when a thing like our friend Uglybuns over there gets inside a personality but doesn't actually subsume it, part of it can turn into something like the laser-window machine from the laser stadium dream? Like a...hell, hard to think of a good metaphor for this one. Like if a lion tried to gouge out your guts, maybe, and while you were fighting it off a piece of claw got lodged in your small intestine, so that from then on all the food you digested had to move around it, so you got fed more slowly and had diarrhea no matter how much you ate?
Okay, that metaphor sucks. I'm usually better at metaphors. But, dangit, at least half of being good at metaphors is being able to notice when two things resemble one another, even (or especially) in a totally non-obvious way. And those two things did, some way or another, even though I can't possibly show them to you because my brain assembled them out of bits and pieces of sense-memory and shoved them into my dreams to try and get me to pay attention to parts of my personality that need fixin'.
Peter Carroll once wrote something to the effect that even a small ability to change oneself is greatly preferable to a large, impressive ability to perform useless parlor tricks. So even though my metaphorical analysis is gappy as of yet, the goals they describe are clear to me. Metaphorically speaking: I must get to be on even better terms with this dream lady with the too much eye makeup, and/or convince my dog and seal that they really can get along, even if the one doesn't swim too good and the other finds walking a chore. Then I will perhaps open up several new, improved avenues by which to be able to change myself into someone even more fun to be around!
Then, not only will imaginary lava want to be my friend, so will other people maybe! Teeheehee! *tents fingers and tries vainly not to giggle*
That means, "I'm not crazy anymore"--in my made-up space language.
~ Saturday Night Live, one of the Jeopardy sketches
Ach, time to go home from work.
con el corazon de pero
Senor Burns, Senor Burns
el diablo con dinero!
~that one Simpsons where the school strikes oil. may have gotten the words wrong!
should I
save myself
for later
or generously
give
and do
~Bjork
Saw a rabbit this morning. I said, "Hello, bunny." It just sat there warily as I walked past, which surprised me, since like all rabbits it looked as though it were ready to bolt into the underbrush at the slightest movement.
I sometimes think my dream logs might be the most entertaining things I put on this blog, because they are colorful and action-packed. Like reading a miniature short story with a plot that doesn't make sense, but characters and images which are shiny and leave a tasty residue in the brain.
Oh, a doozy of a dream last night. A doozy! Acts 2 and 3 would make a great movie plot.
However, in order for me to understand what this dream was trying to tell me, I needed the symbolic context provided by an earlier dream. Which, in backreading, it turns out I did not write down.
The earlier one, let's call it "the laser stadium dream":
Act one. My entourage and I were hurrying through the outer hallways of an enormous building which felt like a stadium. It was well-lit and bustling with people (not pictured), its walls made of grey stone. Visible through the occasional archway in the walls (or maybe I just knew what was going on in there through dreamovision?) was a central chamber, about the size of the United Center turned on its side. Maybe a little bigger. In it, partnered teams of humans and enormous, shiny magical beasties were taking turns singing and dancing together; the music was haunting and wonderful and the dances gyrated and pranced all through the empty space. I wanted very badly to go on in and take my turn. One of my entourage handed me a vibrantly-illustrated book, and as I looked through it I realized with a jolt that I had no idea what I/we were supposed to perform. "I don't know the words," I said, stricken. My entourage-person grabbed me by the hand and we took off, flying down the halls.
Act two. We flew up and up around many halls, ramps really, and the light and the color of the stone walls gradually shifted from cool grey to a warm light tan color, like afternoon sunlight on sandstone. At last we came to a square chamber, its walls and ceiling made of large blocks of the same color of stone. Lower down on the walls there were a few round ducts or tubes, one of which we had arrived through. Instead of a floor the walls stretched down into emptiness (not pictured). I was alone. There was a round window or portal, near the top of the wall at the front of the room. The warm light should have been shining through it into the room--and thence, I understood, down into the rest of the building. Instead, there was a complicated and nasty-looking metal device which exactly covered most of the window, and in front of the device a crossbeam of iron or charred wood ran across the length of the room. In the center of the device there was a small pinhole or lens, through which the sunlight captured by the device could be focused and pointed like a laser. I floated, or was gently pulled, down into one of the tubes, and rushed out of the floorless room back down into the building.
Act three. My entourage and I were sitting at a table in a large banquet hall behind the performance chamber in the stadium. Some other people were with us--I think they may have been fictional characters or representations of people I knew, but those details are gone from my memory. The hall was crowded; everyone was eating their meal and talking and mingling. I brought my attention back from looking around at the room, and saw that everyone else at my table had gotten up and wandered off. Then laser beams, three or four of them, fired down out of the ceiling, scoring the table in front of me. I was worried by how close I'd come to being hit, and also quite annoyed.
The symbolism in that dream has come to be very understandable to me as I've thought it over! What I am fond of calling "the machine in my brain", the issues I still have that are what remains of my craziness, are represented by the machine in the window in act 2. They take something that should be wholesome and joyous and make it into a weapon. A weapon which, more often than not, is something that endangers me and drives people away from me, or me from them. The proper use of the thing the machine is sitting on top of and evilly transforming would enable me to achieve some form of awesomeness that I desire very, very much.
As I fell asleep last night, I was contemplating in some detail about some personality-construction issues that have been bugging me. It is therefore most gratifying to me that my dream-making parts were able to represent the issues with which I am wrestling in the following way! I want to call this "the pointless dystopia dream (with monster)":
Act one. Some confusion of sequentiality here. My entourage and I were hanging out in a house. I had found a seal, or went out and found a seal, who was definitely my friend. It was a happy and playful fellow and didn't seem to mind having to waddle around on land. We went into the living room of the house or were already there. A dog was there, equally happy and playful as the seal, and also my friend. I sat down on the couch to play fetch with them, and wanted them to play with each other. I had some sort of toy that I would throw across the room; whichever animal reacted first ran over to the other end of the room, grabbed it, and carried it back to me, while the other animal sat in front of me feeling miffed. When they continued in this way even after I'd explained to them what I wanted (yes, dogs and seals in dreams can have things explained to them!) I became a little frustrated and vaguely confused.
Act two. Camera pulled way back. Lighting went from midday summery sunlight to temperate darkness and gloom. Same location, different process, that much was clear.
(Interesting thought occurs to me here. I never experience temperature in dreams; it can only be inferred from the quality of ambient light, or more obvious visual cues like snow or fire. Must read around to try and find out which parts of the brain one dreams with. I wonder if the lack of certain physical sensations like heat and cold are due to the same limitations that prevent your body from responding to physical movements you make while dreaming?)
Mr. Burns had either knocked down his own house, or realized that it had been knocked down. He grinned evilly and made imperious gestures, and as he did so, mazelike walls and ramparts and corridoors began constructing themselves. The structures expanded out and out in erratic patterns, to fill the entire landscape. The whole thing was made of plywood which had been inexpertly painted black, like the plain boxes theaters use to make rearrangeable sets. Only here the paint job was bad and the wood looked either flimsy or old or both. Myself and my entourage had to hide in the hollow spaces inside the walls and flee from the place's security guards. Since the place wasn't ours, of course, we didn't belong there and we didn't want to be caught. So the ending image of this act was of us in flight, certain that pursuers were only a step behind us.
Act three. Did not take any longer in subjective time than the previous acts, but was information-dense, so I've subdivided it into scenes!
Scene one. I fled into something like a junkyard or a car scrapyard, still with the feeling that my pursuer was gaining on me. After a few dodges and darts I found an unlocked car and threw myself into the back seat, landing on some crumpled-up plastic. The chief security guard got into the front seat. This was her car. For a single panicked moment I thought maybe if I crouched under the plastic and stayed very still she wouldn't see me. But then she gave me a look over her shoulder and a little smile, and I knew that me finding her unlocked car was exactly the plan.
She looked a bit like Annie Lennox:
only with heavier makeup and one of those old-fashioned police hats. Scary, but rather hot. (Gee whiz, I wonder what recurring dream character we have here? Grr. Whee!) More dreams or movies about dystopian futures should have such a chica as main antagonist!
Scene two. The car was now a tank. There was more light in the sky, and scenery existed in the background. She drove us over to the edge of the scrap yard, where it bordered on the woods, and I saw something like a small graveyard. I recognized it immediately as the graves of my fellow members of the resistance, kept there in (supposed) secret from the guards. The area with the burial plots in it was marked out from the bare dirt by a loose line of pale stones. Narrow pathways marked out in the same way meandered throught the area. Instead of names and dates, the graves were marked with gaudy headstones made of brightly-colored metal and plastic. Even though the paths were extremely narrow and the ground was difficult to see from inside the tank, the chief guard lady maneuvered along the paths with delicate precision, turning with slow care, so as not to disturb anything. I noticed this and realized it for a gesture of deep respect, as between honorable enemies at the end of a long campaign.
Scene three. We moved further out, to the edge of the woods. No longer had the sense of being in a vehicle. It was just about dawn. Behind us and to the right, beyond the scrap yard, a nearly-intact highway stretched out to the horizon. On our right plains and woods rolled out, with some steel-colored old water towers standing lonely in the distance, the paint on them faded beyond legibility. (The old-school shape, like a hat-wearing cup on stilts, not the kind that are all bulbous on top.) In front of us was a wide river, and immediately to our left was a pool of water with a weeping willow leaning out over it. I/we looked around at the river and further out to the woods and plains, and thought, Maybe anyone who was left [from the resistance, that is] fled out there, into the wilderness. Then a flock of pigeons exploded out of the trees, their flight patterns indicative of panic. You know how flocks of birds get all crazy-swirly when there's a bunch of flocks that don't normally fly together trying to share the same airspace? I didn't recognize it till I ran through the images in my mind just now, but that's where I'd seen that before. After the first flock of flocks, more came; the birds were fleeing from every direction except the one from which we had come. And I had the horrified thought: Plague. Here we'd been fighting each other for control, while out there in the wilderness there was coming something that wanted to totally destroy us.
Right on cue, a hideous behemoth came into view in the distance, lumbering down the highway, wide as four lanes of traffic all by itself.
I scrutinized it as best I could from afar. Didn't intend to stick around once it got near. Its basic body type, my brain had clearly gotten from the behemoths in Heroes IV (oh how I miss that game! and the broken laptop all my savegames are on!), but it was distorted or mutated way beyond that. Still had the grey fur and the lumpy physique. Instead of a face-shaped face, though, its head skewed over to one side, so that one eye would have had to be much bigger than the other. (Fortunately the small-eye side was the side facing us.) Its legs were small and stubby, almost vestigial, while its arms were freaking enormous, massive muscley claw-shaped hands nearly as long as the rest of its body. Between the arms and legs it had a mass of wavy tentacles instead of a proper front-of-torso. As it continued down the road towards the scrap yard I saw it (or perhaps another one like it?) glide through the air, using its tentacle mass as a kind of wings, so that its huge grasping hands looked like a giant scoop held out in front of it. It turned right as it came to the scrap yard, and upon closer inspection it didn't look so much like the behemoth as I'd thought.
My companion (not pictured) was now apparently carrying me by flapping with her wings; I could feel the action but was not paying attention to it yet.
The beast was headed towards the pond--not hunting us, just hunting. I looked down at the water and saw the silvery side of a fish, wide as my arm, turning just under the surface. My first thought was, Hey, a fish! Maybe we can catch it and eat it. But then it kept turning and turning--eight feet long, I thought--and I realized no fish could be that long and the still same width all the way down. The idea disturbed me and I discarded any notion of possibly trying to eat OR catch whatever it was. We hovered back away from the bank as the beast approached; it passed next to the tree, brushing back the lower branches as it went by. (This was a very tall tree.) It hitched itself over, with something like a very graceful full-body shrug, so that it could lower itself into the water tentacles down. Seen up close, it was obvious to me that it was also a kind of squid, and its tentacles up close looked a lot more like fish than like part of a furry beast. Long, silvery fish.
Just then, I could feel that the wings that kept us hovering over the surface of the water were laboring harder, that we were slowly beginning to sink towards the water.
At the thought of even touching the surface of a pond with two of those fearsome beasts in it, I felt that old familiar, "well, fuck this!" feeling surge up inside of me, and woke up.
So it'll take me some time to sort out all the symbols in there, but there are some things I can say right off the bat.
The little girl character has become a woman! No longer just an unpredictable young woman whom I love dearly and fear passionately. Now she is a sexy commandant who tricks me into the back of her vehicle, honors my fallen, and then warns me of oncoming peril which endangers us both. Oo yeah. That kicks so much ass.
Mr. Burns is me again. This is like the fourth or fifth time that an active mode entered into by my conscious personality has been represented in a dream by a male cartoon character. The flimsy dingy gloomy maze probably represents a mental state. Of, well, gloomy brooding with undertones of panic. Maybe I turn into male cartoon characters when I do things that are stupid, selfish or immature? That would make sense.
The dog and seal are an interesting image. Tentatively I'd interpret them to be the conscious and unconscious sides of my hat. The dog would represent the conscious side because it is a land creature and because it was already in the house. The seal would then be the unconscious side, because it is an underwater creature and because I just recently became friends with it. So they'll each play with me, but not with each other, and each feels sort of pouty when I pay more attention to the other one than to it. Oy vey. At least they are both friends with me, though!
Yeah, the behemoth squid thing was scary-looking. But the threat it presented was potential, avoidable, rather than immediate and certain. Like keeping an eye on the wasp in the room. All the cues point to it being something not originating from within my personality, as well, which makes it a little easier to be alert against it. Whatever it represents.
What I find most interesting from a dream tech standpoint was the car/tank/graveyard/flapping bird wings thing. Okay. We already postulate that the "wilderness" represented the world of mental experience outside my personality; behemoth came from there, I don't have that many flocks of pigeons in me, etc. Which means that act three, scene one up there either represented (if I was not traveling or there's no such thing) or was (if I can and was) me and my invisibler half moving to, and then across, the boundary between my personality and whatever's right next to it in whatever part of the world we all go to when we dream. Which, assuming the second thing, suggests several items of tech.
Item the first, sexy scary chick is the person/represents the aspect of me who/which has the ability to direct energy extensions out of my personality. Textev: car belongs to her. Car becomes tank as we approach boundary. Once we cross the boundary, the tank becomes unmanifested, implying that what feels big and bulky when on the inside is like a minimal requirement for movement on the outside.
Item the second, what I refer to as "my entourage" in dreams, whoever or whatever they are, are not of use or do not manifest separately from me when outside my personality. This is the meaning of the graveyard scene. Now, I don't take that scene to mean they are dead or disempowered or whatever. I would be very surprised if they were absent from my next dream. Rather, I think it is location and function-dependent. Like in the card game Magic, when a creature you had in play is put into the graveyard, that doesn't mean it's no longer a factor in the game. There are spells that can bring cards out of the graveyard, shuffle them back into your deck, or that simply act differently when certain things are in your graveyard. So the term, and the image, are pretty fluid for me. But the whole no-entourage-outside-the-ego-boundary implication is pretty unambiguous.
Item the third. This is not a conclusion, only a suspicion. I have seen dream-beasties before which resemble the behemoth squid monster. For lack of a better word, an organism/idea/experience of the sort represented by that dream image is the sort of creature I do refer to as a demon.
(I've talked about this before and at length, but to recap a bit. In common parlance, demons and angels are like anthropomorphized quanta of moral energy under direct control of either god or the devil. According to that system, only the direct (god speaketh!) or indirect (I speaketh in the name of god with his/her permission!) intervention by one of the two ultrapowers will affect their behavior. In my personal made-up lexicon, demons and angels are either A. organisms which don't have bodies, B. memeplexes which seem to behave organically, or C. there is no difference between the two descriptions. Which means they can be treated like organisms; communicated with, befriended/tamed, chased away, eaten etc. My favorite is C, by the way.)
So then. What if, when a thing like our friend Uglybuns over there gets inside a personality but doesn't actually subsume it, part of it can turn into something like the laser-window machine from the laser stadium dream? Like a...hell, hard to think of a good metaphor for this one. Like if a lion tried to gouge out your guts, maybe, and while you were fighting it off a piece of claw got lodged in your small intestine, so that from then on all the food you digested had to move around it, so you got fed more slowly and had diarrhea no matter how much you ate?
Okay, that metaphor sucks. I'm usually better at metaphors. But, dangit, at least half of being good at metaphors is being able to notice when two things resemble one another, even (or especially) in a totally non-obvious way. And those two things did, some way or another, even though I can't possibly show them to you because my brain assembled them out of bits and pieces of sense-memory and shoved them into my dreams to try and get me to pay attention to parts of my personality that need fixin'.
Peter Carroll once wrote something to the effect that even a small ability to change oneself is greatly preferable to a large, impressive ability to perform useless parlor tricks. So even though my metaphorical analysis is gappy as of yet, the goals they describe are clear to me. Metaphorically speaking: I must get to be on even better terms with this dream lady with the too much eye makeup, and/or convince my dog and seal that they really can get along, even if the one doesn't swim too good and the other finds walking a chore. Then I will perhaps open up several new, improved avenues by which to be able to change myself into someone even more fun to be around!
Then, not only will imaginary lava want to be my friend, so will other people maybe! Teeheehee! *tents fingers and tries vainly not to giggle*
That means, "I'm not crazy anymore"--in my made-up space language.
~ Saturday Night Live, one of the Jeopardy sketches
Ach, time to go home from work.
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