Rushing into a relationship with my unconscious Part 1

So this all started when I stopped smoking pot while I was working nights as a security guard. I quit for a number of reasons but the reason that is relevant to the rest of this post has to do primarily with dreams.

I discovered Jordan Peterson while working my night job and I was reading and listening to him a lot while I was at work. I heard him describe a number of archetypal dreams both he and his clients had experienced. During one of his descriptions I suddenly remembered the time years ago when I was in high school and I had had a reoccurring dream for about a month. I wrote down all the details of the dream when it was going on nearly every night, but had no idea how to interpret it and no belief or concept of any form of dream interpretation that was valid. I stuffed the writings of it away, the dreams stopped and I soon forgot about it.

Recalling the dream almost ten years later I was shocked to realize not only how much of it I was now able to interpret, but also how much of it had come true in a way and manifested itself in my life. I had no idea that dreams had any substantial meaning as I had never seen any evidence that suggested such and to be honest I sort of just believed they were random firings of the brain, like the senses needed something to do at night so they just made up a bunch of meaningless shit you could shrug off in the morning, so when I say I was shocked to discover meaning, serious meaning, in a dream I really mean it. I viewed myself as a scientist, an atheist and an open mind, but a careful thinker who always kept the unknown in mind when I tried to figure out the truth something.

Somehow I’d adopted the wrong view on a lot of the “soft sciences.” I’ve never been a fan of the term agnostic because it seemed to me to imply that what had been proved by science was so finite and immovable that it carried authority all on it’s own. It always seemed to me that science or, better yet, the body of information we’ve come to understand through the scientific method is in a constant state of change because when we discover something new that changes all the old somethings around it. So when someone tells me they are agnostic I can’t help but think that this person isn’t scientist but instead, a sort of apathetic and lazy authoritarian of information. I know that that isn’t an accurate characterization of all who identify as agnostic, but I’ve met enough people who simply laugh away ideas like God, crystal vibrations, Bigfoot or ghosts, labeling anyone who engages in these topics as uneducated lesser-folk, who at the same time will hear a headline about a new study they’ve never read and go the rest of their life believing that mangos will make their tits bigger. I think I was making the same mistake as the so called agnostics that I’d characterized as lazy authoritarians when I thought of psychology and its attempts at understanding consciousness as undeveloped and lacking of enough evidence to be taken seriously. In reality I was holding my ignorance up as an authority and closing myself off to a body of information that I always dreamed could be fascinating, but never once thought could be grounded in some solid evidence. My experience with this dream made me want to throw out, what I perceived to be, the facts that held together the world so I could start over.

Since I was dependent upon pot to help me sleep when I came home during daylight hours I hadn’t gone to bed sober in six months. I also no longer remembered or had any dreams. I read about other’s experiences losing their REM cycle sleep when they went to bed high and I also read about many people’s experiences quitting and being thrown into a month of incredibly vivid dreams. I decided to quit and keep a diligent dream journal.

The following will be a series of posts documenting the dreams as accurately as I can as well as using what I understand so far from The Red Book and other related texts to interpret the dreams to the best of my abilities. I’d like to point out that I am a complete amateur at this so when I write the dream I’ll be writing every detail I can recall even if from my interpretation I don’t think every detail is necessarily relevant. My interpretation will follow the dream and I encourage anyone reading this to disagree or develop my interpretation further. Like I said, I’m no expert on this and I’d take all the input I can get. Before I begin the dreams I experienced after quitting pot I’d like to share the dream referred to above, the one I experienced for a month in high school. Keep in mind this dream took place over twenty times around October and November in 2008.

Reoccuring Dream:

When the dream begins I’m usually just waking up in my basement or coming down the stairs. When my parents separated and my brother moved out I turned the whole basement into a place where all my friends could hang out so it had couches, video game consoles, musical instruments and quick access to the backyard and the woods where we had a lot of bonfires and often camped. Along with the camping spot up in the woods the basement was so casually understood to be a hangout zone that my friends never had to call first before they came over. It was genuinely understood that anyone was welcome to show up and stroll right in at any time. It was the place I spent most of my time and it was where I felt most comfortable. The door to the backyard and the path to the woods was open so I figure my friends were up in the woods hanging out. I leave the basement and go walking up the path towards the campsite.

In the woods I see my friends crouching in one of those cheap build-your-own above ground plastic pools. It isn’t filled with water. They’re waving for me to hurry towards them and get in the pool. I jump in to find my friends are all dressed warmly as if they’ve been out here all night (It’s autumn in Indiana and all the leaves are on the ground). They have rifles, old ones that I’ve never seen before, carelessly laying against the edges of the pool or on the ground. They keep peering over the edge of the pool deeper into the woods in the direction that leads away from my family’s property. All three of them seem careless, and thirsty for jokes but on edge. They pass a half-gallon of Smirnoff vodka between them and talk unclearly about what’s coming from the woods in the direction they’re concerned with.

I look over the edge of the pool and I see blue figures between the trees in the distance with some larger blue thing behind them. My friends pull my head down and laugh about something. I drink some vodka and laugh with them.

After a moment someone hands me binoculars and I look again over the edge. There’s some sort of blue and gold vehicle that looks like a carriage or buggy, but it looks futuristic and has no horses or engine or wheels. Around the buggy there are a lot of what look to be union soldiers from the civil war, but they have no faces besides the slits in the sides of where their cheeks should be that look like they’re made to imitate cheekbones. They don’t look human but robotic rather with blue metal making up their heads and hands otherwise they really do look exactly like union soldiers complete with uniform, rifles and hats. When they moved in the woods they didn’t move directionally and fluidly like people. They’d sort of take a few steps this way or that way. Stop or go for no observable reason. Sometimes they’d be grouped or break off. They almost seemed to be programmed simply to cover all the terrain ground around us. They were always all about the same distance away from us. As I scan the rest of the woods I see that there are hundreds of them and that we’ll soon be surrounded.

In the pool everyone is still laughing about carelessly and hopelessly. No one bothers picking up a rifle when the soldiers get closer. No one pays any more attention to keeping their head low when they look out at the nearing army.

The soldiers are standing at the edge of the pool now. They’ve come for us, but they don’t have eyes and they don’t even seem to be noticing or concerned with us. They seem to waiting as if for an order only audible to them. On their uniform they have a peculiar symbol over their heart where war medals go, one that I drew many times in my notes about this dream back when I was experiencing the dream on a regular basis. The silver pin was in the shape of a trapezoid. On the diagonal ends of the trapezoid there were lines that paralleled the edges and ran up from the corners where a short triangle on each side was placed. From within these lines towards the center of the symbol there were first two olive branches that looked like the United Nations’ and were oriented the same way then within the branches were one short and one longer crescent much like the band A Perfect Circle’s symbol and then directly in the center of these symbols there was something that looked similar to the Hammer and Sickle, but the hammer was a thick, blunt and dull three-pronged fork that wasn’t straight but looked more organically formed like it was a piece of a branch and the sickle was also more blunt and dull as if it was an old tree branch version of the Soviet symbol.

All four of us lay back as if we’re already dead but sitting at the edges of the pool with our heads tilted to one shoulder. The soldiers pull up their rifles as if they’d all just heard the same order and they shoot my friends in the head and at the same time I see a bullet come into my head and I fall inside my body which is mostly a shadowy figure with some sort of faint gray phantom-like double helix swirl dissipating in the center like water at the bottom of a drain. At the same time I can still see outside my body. My friend’s bodies get pushed over and the soldiers push the edges of the pool over us and wrap us up in the cheap, blue plastic pool to be hauled away or buried or something else. And that’s always the end of the dream.

Interpretation:

So, there’s a lot to unpack here.

First of all, the physical place in which this occurred is significant. It’s a place that meant a lot to me and where I spent most of my time. It was a communal area that was sacred to those who occupied it. The place in time is also significant. This dream took place before my friends or I developed significant intimate relationships, experimented with drugs, made decisions about college or what we wanted to do with our lives or even began to think about the next life steps we’d be taking.

The Union soldiers are a collective. Like ideologues, the soldiers don’t seem to have minds of their own, but instead are governed by something more centralized. Not only are they robotic and resemble the Union army, but their symbol on their chest seems to be an amalgamation of a number of different collectivist movements or organizations. Something that sticks out to me about the symbol is that it is in the shape of a trapezoid. Collectivist movements like all the marxist movements of the twentieth century fix reality in an oppressor/oppressed narrative structure and claim that all the problems of the oppressed could be solved by removing the oppressors from power. The oppressors are always at the top of the society or top of the pyramid if you will, and if a pyramid or triangle archetypically represent the hierarchical structures that man, ape and even further back species have organized themselves into as evidenced by the Pareto distribution then it seems fitting that a trapezoid (a triangle that’s had it’s top third removed), would be a fitting symbol of the aims of a collectivist movement.

The pool is a flimsy blue border. It does no good to conceal or shield us from the coming onslaught. In fact it sticks out in the brown leafy environment. It makes the clean-up of our dead bodies easier for our murderers. It makes us all face each other and join in the passing of the jug to become more careless and numb. Instead of facing the hydra we all sit in our empty blue plastic structure and even act dead before they shoot us. I think the pool was our belief structure: flimsy, thin, empty, useless, dependent upon mutual delusion and continual sedation, the same shade as the collective but much less substantial. Two of those friends work jobs they hate so they can come home, smoke weed, watch TV and eat garbage with women who don’t test them, In other words they’re complacent. The other is a full-blown ideologue in the world of academia who believes people are all good and the same. I was heading down the same path for quite a while, but something always felt wrong. If you read the intro to Peterson’s Maps of Meaning I’d say I experienced something close to that. I used to say a lot of things I didn’t believe and when I stopped it felt like I couldn’t define what I was or what made me me. So there was something like a death there. Anyways, those kids definitely all died and it’s not obvious that any of them became individuals.