Dreams of death

I have long had a very interesting, instructive, and vivid dream life.  At various times, I have flown high in the sky, walked through walls, levitated objects, talked with animals, breathed underwater, used my hands as flashlights, died in my dreams, seen both heaven and hell, seen angels, and fought and defeated (and often run from, as well) all sorts of dark forces.  I have had lucid dreams every  bit as real and vivid as waking life.  I was once in a corn field at night, with the breeze blowing, the moon in the sky, and able to see my body in every way that one can in what we call “waking” life. Every pore on my body was awake and alive. It was very pleasant, and of course a bit strange.

The other night I had a very useful dream.  I have been trying to figure out how we internalize violence against ourselves, how abuse becomes self abuse, and how far it goes.  Can we not, for example, posit that everything we need for perfect happiness is ALREADY present, in as-yet unmanifest latency?

I was wandering in a forest, and came upon a train of people, seemingly pilgrims, who were traveling up a hill at night along an unpaved trail.  They seemed pleasant enough; the wagons were painted in a forest green, I think with some yellow, almost like circus wagons.  They felt like gypsies.

I began talking with one of them, who said they were on their way to a sacred ritual.  An aspiring initiate went through the catechism for me, in which he would swear an oath to God with certain gestures, then kneel and swear the same oath, at which point he would be decapitated.  Of course, I was horrified, but the procession continued; they got to their stopping point, and many were killed.  I managed to save one somewhat chubby, indecisive man, who came away, but kept looking back like he had missed something.  The executioners, of course, were not pleased, and fell on me.  Several grabbed me and tried to smother me.  I got away, then they started throwing very thin, very deadly spears at me. I created a weapon to block them with.  Finally, I saw a freeway, and began running as fast as the cars and escaped.

I analyze this on three levels, two of which I will share, and the third of which I will keep for myself after admitting I left one or two details out.  I would also in the process like to submit several techniques I use in dream analysis.

My immediate interpretation was that this is the rough mechanism of “zombification”.  These people were not dying outright.  They were dying to themselves, to their own judgement, to their own potentiality.  And there were those only too willing to play the role of executioner.  There are always executioners.

When I look at the left in this and other countries, when I contemplate the stomach turning atrocities done in the name of compassion, the mind reels.  But I cannot help but feel that many, many people in this world are lost, and there are those who say to them: come with me.  Let me protect you.  Let me remove from you all the worries and troubles of life.  Let me show you the compassion of submission, of admitting the futility of living your own life, of drawing your own breath, of choosing your own steps.  Let us do it for you.

And I look at all the people shilling for Barack Obama;  We have in recent days come to have strong evidence pointing to the conclusion that he has virtually no compassion, no regard for others, no benevolent plan for the future, and nothing to offer but sorrow.  People WANT the promise to be true, so desperately that they are willing to sacrifice their own minds on the altar of conformity; of virtue expressed by unceasingly doing and thinking as they are told.  This is a particularly awful crime when done by journalists, and those who would aspire to lead us.

I could go on, but will simply submit that in response to patent truths like “we can’t borrow a trillion dollars a year without consequence” get responses ranging from “Bullshit”, to (Daily Kos) “our goal here is not to discuss policy, but to make sure it gets implemented.”  How can you know that your ideas are sound if you never submit them to critical scrutiny?  You can’t of course, and this is how bad ideas have babies and metastasize.

This is, however, superficial analysis, and one fully encapsulated in my expression “Cultural Sadeism”.

It gets more interesting when you add the idea that all characters in all dreams are PARTS OF YOU.  Those demons you fight?  You created them. Every character in every dream is a part of you, and if you were flawless you would know only dreamless sleep, or visions of heaven.  I’m not, and I don’t.

Framed this way, I was sacrificing myself to myself, and watching the process.  This process felt eternal, and likely is on-going in me.  What does THIS mean?  That is a much more interesting question.

I have in recent days been thinking heavily about the nature of trauma, and trying to separate actual trauma from its after-math.  It is not getting hit, or enduring emotional cruelty that matters, but what you make of it, how it continues to reside in you, hidden.  How does it hide?  What is the mechanism that captures and prolongs it?

I look at the moment before I get hit, or before someone says something cruel that came from some unacknowledged part of themselves, such that they don’t even realize, consciously, that they are attacking me.  Integrated into ordinary life, over a long period of time, what becomes internalized is the pre-reaction, the protective flinch, the covering, the armor.  This is what endures.

But I think there is a second element, the punishing element.  Whenever you get TOO relaxed, long after being removed from the situation, there is a secondary protective element that ALSO attacks you, so you don’t lose your defenses, so you don’t allow yourself to be blindsided.  This is the part, in me at least (and I think for my own purposes at the moment, a bit more self revelation than normal is appropriate, since in part I am trying to provide something recognizable and useful for others) that hates that unprotected, unguarded child (OMG: am I at the “inner child”?  God don’t let me become whiny).

In order to survive, you have to sacrifice some part of yourself, the one that reacts outwardly with anger to things that should occasion anger, and which do in normally developed people. And on a deep level, I think there is this voice that says “don’t go out there.  They will get you.”  So when you “go out there”, you get attacked.  So you have these parts of your consciousness that are at war with one another.  Healing consists in integrating them, in developing sound reality testing on a DEEP level, such that you are neither meek nor cruel, but open to pain, and, thereby, open to pleasures of the most meaningful sort, those of affection given and received, and living life with a sense of purpose that goes from the tip of your head to the soles of your feet, and which is not rejected nor attacked anywhere in the middle.

Anyone who had read this blog for long has seen repeated meditations on the meaning of Horror films, and of violence in our media generally.  What is it?  What need does it serve?  This is of course a complex phenomena, and many answers are possible with respect to many sorts of people, but one I will suggest, that I may not have suggested before, is that those sorts of movies are the food that what I will call the aggressive self protective instincts feed on.  They induce fear, and by inducing fear justify continued emotional contraction, which both reduces emotional injury, and prevents emotional growth.

Here is an interesting statistic: “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago,” (from here).  If true, this has several interesting aspects to it.  First, if emotional empathy is down, then the RISKS of being open are up.  This follows inevitably.  And this would explain not just the normalization but the valorization (academese for “valuing of”) of psychopathy.  As I have pointed out, in the first “Silence of the Lambs” Hannibal Lector was a villain, albeit an interesting one.  In later iterations of the franchise, he was the HERO. 

Read that article.  Without quite saying so, he half wishes he were a sociopath/psychopath (synonyms: psychopathic is clinically insane; this is a different animal) because then he would be free from worries, from fear, from remorse, and thus more “free” to live his life.  This is the same thing Apollinaire (a radical leftist, it should go without saying) meant when he called Sade the “freest man who ever lived.”

Liberty breeds confusion, when people are stupid; and most of our modern intellectuals are stupid.  It is my sincere belief that if my own treatment of Goodness were taught at a college level, people would actually be liberated.  This is not, I don’t think, naked vanity, but a considered opinion based upon someone who is widely traveled, well read, and who has engaged in conversations on varying levels with people of all walks of life for decades.

In my own case, the story is that I got outside the cycle sufficiently to see it as it was.  The fat man was my weak sense of self, still driven in some regards to return.

Clearly, in some respects, we are unfree.  Anyone who denies it is in my view expressing unwarranted optimism.  At the same time, we not FULLY unfree.  There is room for what I have called “nonstatistical coherence”. We can choose where to direct our attention, and when done long enough, opportunities will open up spontaneously that would not have occurred had we not chosen where to direct our minds.

There is more to this that I am still working out, but I am getting close to the root of the thing. 

I will add, though, that the essence of “spiritual” development is achieving emotional wellness.  Meditating will achieve nothing if it does not integrate the emotions, if it does not access and release deep realities. In some respects, the highest attainment possible on this Earth is to be “normal”.  So few people ever aspire to this, and far fewer attain it.

Vanity, in most respects, is and always has been the coin of the realm, making the only sane ones those who cannot exist within its order.