My animus

          I was alternately following a young man around, and being him. We were walking around in my home town.  At one point we were about to get on a subway car, when a group of five or six big, tough men blocked our path. My man pulled out a shiv, pointed it at the toughest guy and demanded that he step away. The man just kept coming. He was very menacing. He walked right into the super-sharp knife and it did nothing to him. He shoved my man up against the subway car, which started to move. He was searching my man for something. Somehow my man managed to force open one of the doors and slip inside just as the car began to move away. Miraculously, the others didn’t or couldn’t do the same.

          We got to campus, and walked into a huge room filled with little cubicles or stalls. In each one was a young man who was masturbating. It was sickening to see all those men with tortured expressions, and to hear the rhythmic sounds. My man went out of my sight for a minute and then came back saying he’d just kissed his first male nipple. He was equally pleased and disturbed by this. I really wanted to leave.

          I went to the top floor of a large building, which I expected to be empty because it was after hours. I was going to hide in one of the offices. The stairs on the way up were strewn with empty boxes and various objects. I stepped around them, and went up. The office I wanted to use had a woman working in it. It was dark except for a narrow circle of light from her desk lamp. She got up when I entered and took me to the window, pointing out vaguely, saying that the fill dirt they were using to build foundations for some buildings was taken from a cemetery and had parts of people in it. She was horrified. I saw an image of thre corpses, in plastic sleeves, being laid side by side. I could tell that they would fit nicely in a foundation, and I knew that their DNA would be forever mingled. I didn’t care about bodies being mingled or used as fill dirt, but I felt bad for the woman: I didn’t want to have to explain to her that it is inevitable.

          I was traveling with M.W. She was driving a small, blue, two wheel drive car and we were on snowy roads. She kept doing silly things like turning on to an un-tracked road and then stopping on a slight hill. She had to rev the engine and fishtail the car again and again to get moving. Finally I realized that I should get out and push, so I did. I pushed and pushed, exhausting myself. She finally broke free, and drove off. I wound up being in a public building. For some reason I was lying on my back beneath a pay phone. I reached up and idly checked the coin return slot and found first one quarter, then another and another. I fished thirty or forty quarters out. They were all strangely sticky. I started sticking my finger up as high as I could, and got all the quarters, and then started getting short plastic straws, which had traces of a white powder inside them. I realized they had been used for snorting drugs. I put one in my mouth and inhaled, getting a tiny trace of cocaine.

          I went downstairs to the foyer. I realized that a huge pile of the straws had fallen into my sweatshirt pocket. I looked around for a place to throw them out. There was a woman with a stall set up to sell gemstones or jewelry. Somehow I mistook the window in her stall for a trash chute and put a few of the straws there before realizing my mistake. I picked them up, from between the gems and the woman noticed me. She was very kind, smiling and happy. I mumbled about being sorry, and she looked at the straws and said she wasn’t interested in them, but I should keep them because they might turn out to be collectible. I backed away and continued looking for a trash bin. I wandered onto a patio, and saw several things which looked like trash containers, but when I got close, they turned out to hold deck chairs or huge thermoses for keeping food warm. I went back into the foyer, which was now dark and empty, and saw M. in her car at the top of the stairs. There was a gate which she had to open. I felt that I should have run up to open it for her, but by the time I thought of it, she was already out of the car. She opened the gate and prepared to drive down the steps, which were gold colored. She was very relieved to have gotten there. I was a little worried because the stairway was perhaps too narrow for her car.

          I was at my sister’s wedding. There were lots of people moiling around, and nothing seemed to be getting accomplished. Finally I realized that I was supposed to be officiating. I stood in front of the couple and realized that I had no idea what to say. I asked them for a written copy of the words, but they said there wasn’t one. I began to improvise. I spoke up and tried to get everyone’s attention. I started talking about how wonderful it is for both of them to have this great opportunity to change. I kept trying not to say that they were middle-aged, but I wanted to say something about their age. I kept referring to the groom, Steve, as Eric, and having to correct myself. Finally they prodded me into actually performing the ceremony; it was getting late. I stood in front of them and said something, which seemed to suffice. They were satisfied, but I didn’t think anyone else had heard, since they were all still moiling around and talking. Later I saw Steve accepting a Nobel prize from a ginger-haired man. Steve complained, in his acceptance speech, of having to wear makeup for this. He asked the presenter for hints on how to get it off.

 

 

 

I vanquish a fighter

          I was in England with a group of people, and we were staying with a man. The first morning  my shoelace broke as I was tying my shoes. We went out to buy a one, and first stopped at a bank to change money. The bank was a quaint cottage, and you conduct your business through a slot in the door, while standing on the street. I was getting money out of my bag and felt someone at my back. It was a street person, who I suspected was trying to see how much money I had. I turned to him and tried to push him away, but he was both very wiry and stocky and strong. I realized that he spoke English, so I started shouting at him to get away from me, to not touch me. I was furious with him. I pushed at him some more, and then I slapped him really hard on the face. His face turned an unnatural color where I’d slapped him, and the rest of his face turned green. I thought of him as a green man. He was very sick, dirty and sort of oozing.

          He came at me again, so I used my thumbs on his Adam’s apple, and that really stopped him. He stopped breathing.  I let go when he started to vomit on me. He stepped back, and said his throat really burned. Then there was a TV above us, and a huge crowd had gathered. On the TV was footage of my fight with him. The announcer said it was amazing that this woman could best a famous fighter. I was then standing on a sort of platform with my friends and someone in the crowd pointed at me and said ‘look, it’s her!’. At that point I disassociated and the fighting girl was an 11 or 12 year old. She was asked to go to the microphone and explain how she had done it. I stood behind her and tried to encourage her, but she was too shy, and she just sort of leaned against the mike.

          We went back to the house, and the man we were staying with said he would make us lunch. He had piles and piles of white bread, and a boy came in with 12 fishes. He brought out special oils and sauces, and there was small, pale balls of something exotic and delectable. We went into another room, and something happened. We came back, and the man hadn’t even begun cooking. He was instead painting the bare cement walls a blue-green color. He had gotten only patches done here and there. We looked around and found him in a different room, with a paint sprayer. He was lying on his back, holding the sprayer above his head, painting the floor. It looked very awkward. He was spaced out and not in touch with this reality. There were a number of men watching him. One of my friends said she was hungry, and since he wasn’t cooking, we should go out. We weren’t sure what the etiquette was.

 

I’ve been attacked a lot lately, and fought back. I’m not comfortable with conflict, and so we’re in a foreign country…but not that foreign. The little girl is my childhood self who was attacked and fought back by being rebellious. I can’t say who the spaced-out host is, but he made a fair stab at bringing us loaves and fishes.

Dreaming and psychosis.

          The dreaming mind shares an erratic mode of logic with the psychotic mind.  That is to say that both dreams and waking psychotic moments have a degree of cognitive bizarreness.  In this context the word bizarre has a paradoxically well-defined definition in psychology. It refers not to hallucinations, but to illogical jumps (known as disjunctive cognition) in a train of thought.  A schizophrenic’s waking fantasies, like a dreamer’s dreams, involve impossible plots, characters and actions, like flying, or seeing an animal which has half dog and half sheep. There is also a discontinuity or uncertainty about time and place as in rowing a boat in a lake which becomes an ocean or jumping into the past.

          Normal people don’t experience bizarre cognition while awake, but their dreams are as bizarre as a schizophrenic’s waking

the lake in winter

          I was in Canada in the winter. I walked across the lake to the cottage, and parts of it were closed off for construction or because of some administrative decree. I had to go to the bathroom, and the one that was in an open area was occupied. I went to the kitchen, to pass through to go to a different bathroom, but the kitchen door was locked. I peeked through a hole in the door and there was a young woman in there cooking. I pleaded with her to let me in and at first she pretended to ignore me, but after a time she let me in. I went into the bathroom and the toilet was very high off the ground. I had to jump a little to get up there, and then I found that my underwear wouldn’t come off. A woman I knew only slightly a long time ago came in and asked if I was the one who was suing Bruce. I was surprised that I remembered her name.

          At first she said “Tom”, but she meant Bruce. She clarified that his “real“ name was Tom, but we knew him as Bruce. She was slightly incredulous that I was suing him. It seemed that she was a good friend of his and really admired him. I was trying to defecate while she talked. I first pulled out a tampon. I said that yes, we are in litigation because he made a mistake – a small mistake which anyone could have made – which wound up costing me $10,000. He knew he made this mistake, but wouldn’t take responsibility for it. At that, I defecated. The woman was mollified as well. As she left I put in a new tampon, and it was strangely lacking density, so I thought it wouldn’t go in, but it did.

          I went back across the lake, and something happened with a dance and two different men. I was to date one or the other of them. Then I was going to meet up with Larry B. who had a cottage just across the lake from ours, but he was late, and had a lot to do before he would be ready to meet with me. I was very calm about it, and just said that I’d go back to the cottage and get my skis, so there’d be plenty of time. I was aware that walking back and forth from the landing to the cottage so much would probably make me tired, and started to think of a different plan, but woke up.

 

If the theory that unknown characters in dreams represent one’s alter egos, the meaning of this dream is quite clear to me. There are elements here which are literal and some that are figurative. I am involved in a dispute with a man named Bruce who did cost me $10k. It has been going on for months, and I certainly would like to get it over with; expel the toxins of the dispute. The woman from a long time ago would be an alter associated with the time in my life associated with this particular cottage – which was a long time ago. That the cottage was partially blocked off or inaccessible suggests to me that some of the feelings I had at that time have been blocked from current understanding, but are now becoming available. I think I associate the harassment by Bruce with that of my brother when we were children, and my alter was incredulous because to her it was unthinkable to challenge him or, more poignantly, to shit him out.

 

The theories which have been developed to describe multiple personality disorder posit that alternate personalities or egos develop as a response to trauma. My theory about dreams is that the same sort of thing happens to “normal” people, only on a subtler level, and the disassociation is amplified in dreams. Certainly in our day-to-day lives we have slight variations in our personalities depending on the situations we are in, and certainly we don’t remember every single thing that ever happened to us. I know that at some point in my growing into an adult I actively tried to forget childhood slights and difficulties because they were “silly” and childish.

living in the cottage

          I was living in the cottage my father owns. It was early morning and I was getting dressed. I was having trouble getting my clothes on, and suddenly there was a knock on the door. I had to slink around to get my bathrobe on, since there was a clear line of sight between me and the door. I opened the door and it was Chris and Beth. They had with them a young boy. Chris asked me about who they could find to put on a play. I thought they were asking me if I could, which confused me since I know nothing about anything thespian. Then Chris and the boy started saying that it wasn’t me they wanted, but… something else.

          Just then Dad showed up, and I said ‘wow, Dad! There’s no end of surprises this morning.’ I frantically tried to remember if he had come in the night before and I’d just forgotten it, or if he’d arrived that morning. He was in his pajamas, so it must have been the night before. I tried to get things together to make coffee. There were a lot of dirty glasses in front of the coffee maker, which I had to clear away. As I was trying to fix  coffee, Dad said that some of my tools would have to be moved. He meant tools out in the garage or something. He was not happy. I said sure, sure, I’ll do it as soon as I get back from work. I asked if he wanted me to also move my things from the main bedroom to the small one upstairs and he said yes, definitely. I asked him if he was upset by me staying here, and he said that he was. I said that he probably hadn’t anticipated feeling that it was a sort of intrusion when he agreed to let me stay there.

          I went about making some breakfast. I put some toast in a toaster, and made some pancakes. When they were done Dad brought them into one room, and I said why not put them in another room, on the table. He had put butter and syrup on the pancakes, but the butter hadn’t melted. He said he’d put it in too late, and I said that that was what microwaves were for. He turned at that and said very sternly that from this day on …. something that didn’t have anything to do with microwaves, but somehow had to do with forest officials …. wasn’t to happen any more. I certainly had no plans to do that something, but I was surprised by his seriousness and dourness.

 

If this wasn’t my dream I’d assume that the dreamer had issues with her father. As a matter of fact, my relationship with my father is better than with anyone else in the family. Could it be anxiety about being rejected in some other portion of my life? In the dream I didn’t feel bad about his not wanting me there – I actually felt good that I talked with him about his feelings. The cottage is really important to me, and dates the dream to my childhood, though this dream occurred just before waking up for the day. I’m sure the morning setting was just daytime concerns bleeding in.