So I was wondering whether if you dream your children are dying, does a part of you want that? Isn’t that what dreams are: the manifestation of your unconscious onto the canvas of your sleeping mind?
Is it even meaningful at all? Sometimes I think that the hardest thing in this life is to distinguish signal from noise; or, in darker hours, I think that there is only noise, and the signal, if we feel there is one, is created from whole cloth.
Does it mean there is something wrong with me? What does that even mean? I feel entirely wrong. I often stop and think, I want to be someone else. I can’t distinguish the thought from thinking that I want to be me. A real me, as though such a thing even exists. Does it?
This is the question that I have asked myself often in the past few years, which have not been good for me. Is this me? Or is there, as I feel there is, a “real” me waiting to spring from beneath this beleaguered shell, like a butterfly from a cocoon of shit?
Do others feel like that, like they have a beautiful core that has accreted grit, dirt and shit and if only…
(I know that the cure for if only is to just do it. I’m not stupid. I sometimes feel that I am acting stupidly because I have multitudes within me and different parts get to drive the car from time to time, and some of them don’t have a licence. Or know how to steer. Or what the pedals do.)
Can’t you just wake up and be who you are? Isn’t that what everyone else does? Isn’t that what I am doing?
I’m afraid that it is. I actually fear that this man that I see when I look in the mirror really is me, is the summation of what I could have been, what I put in and took out.
God, I need a drink. I need a god too. I do admire some of those who have one’s ability not to fear life. The teaching aide in my twins’ prep class is a hardcore Christian. I imagine her bouncing out of bed in the morning, delighted that there is a new day for her, that her god has blessed her with health, vitality, joy.
I think I understand envy. I do not want what others have. I do not have any lack of material things. But I envy those who are who they are and even if it meant cutting myself to ribbons and pasting those ribbons into a whole new pattern, I think I want that more than anything, but do not know how.
I do not want them to die. My son has been asking his mother about dying and she does not know what to tell him. I do not know either because it is the only thing I regret about my children: that I have condemned them to be and not to be. Perhaps they will find joy and mind not being less than I do.
I was thinking, I have to tell you to wrap this up, I was dreaming, I mean, but daydreaming, about the hummingbird I saw at Eungella. It was perfectly poised, motionless but for its flickering wings, on a warm afternoon, high above the log it used to perch on, motionless but for the ceaseless motion that created its lack of motion. And I don’t know what that means, but I haven’t forgotten it, and so much else you just forget. It seems to mean something, but what? What if the reason you cannot tell the signal from the noise is simply that you do not understand the signal at all?
Dreams can represent fears as well as wishes. TBH, we do not understand dreams and sleep all that well. Both appear necessary to keep the brain working properly.
I think a lot of us feel as though we have parts we need to suppress and parts we cannot figure out how to free. I tend to see life as a constant sorting out and growing. Sometimes we grow crooked, but we grow. If you are feeling too crooked it sometimes helps to see someone for help. Most of the time just talking it out with those who care about you is enough.
I would not envy your fundie Christian too much. She is probably afraid of Muslims, gay marriage, the government, Obama, sex and drugs much more than you are. Faith is generally a good thing IMO. If you have questions about God and faith, there is probably a minister, priest or even a witch near you to talk over spiritual matters. I would submit that absolute conviction does not necessarily equal real faith. But that is another, and a very long, topic. Good luck to you.
Steve
believing in god doesn’t equal a joyful existence, though it can. and dreaming about our children dying? dreams to me are never literal in their meaning, ever. what parent hasn’t wished, though, for a fucking break from the unending job? :-)
changed my url so if you’re interested you can see my most recent blog post that deals with the god thing, sort of. I’m someone who needs god to keep me sane, but my atheist friends might call what I call god “my will.” :-)
I don’t claim any great understanding of dreams and their importance, but I do have some insights I’ve acquired over the years. That I work hard to base them in science does not mean that science agrees with me. Grains of salt, etc.
An axiom of non-verbal communication is that we consciously process around 20% of the total “data stream” we experience moment to moment. The rest gets “dumped” into our subconscious, and is a source of things like deja vu, “eureka” or leap-of-intuition moments, and what some call precognitive (prophetic) moments. Dreaming is the necessary function at the end of that pipeline, where the mountain of data the conscious mind did not deem immediately important gets thrown out with the bath water. Indeed, some believe that sleep deprivation and the eventual hallucinations are the mind’s attempt to accomplish that function despite the mind’s not cooperating by being asleep.
I confess to using a deliberate parallel to the gastro-intestinal system. ;-)
There is no structure or pattern to dreaming. The data is simply pushed out, and can appear in our dreams in very odd combinations. The best (as in most valuable) dream interpretation I have experienced started with the attempt to re-isolate the components of the dream and examine them separately from how they appeared.
So, when I have a disturbing dream, I start with the thought that sometimes a banana is just a banana. If I dream about one of my children being hurt (or worse), I remind myself that I have waking thoughts of worry for them that don’t disturb me as much, or prompt me to constructive action to try to alleviate the worry. We cannot act that way while asleep, so the worry easily translates to anxiety or worse.
Wow! When you’re in water that deep it has to be scarey when you get a mouthful unexpectedly.
One of the things we need to understand is kids go through stages. Sometimes a stage will involve death. The best thing I can think to do about that is to talk about it in a way that doesn’t give the topic more power without trivalizing it. Dying happens to all of us eventually.
Someone the other day was commenting on how close the dog is to me. We seem to be on the same page, dog and I. I told the person that dogs are given to us to prepare us for losing loved ones. Pets teach us to love. Then when they die they teach us to handle loss with their death. Dying like laughing, crying, loving, is part of living.
Your Jesus friend goes there because she is just afraid as you are. She probably thinks it would be wonderful to be an atheist and not have all the restrictions of conscience that comes with believing in Jesus. Not understanding of course that the restrictions of conscience have nothing to do with believing or not in a god.
I believe in dreams. I can’t tell you all the times I’ve awakened with a problem solved in a dream that had been driving me crazy in a conscience state. So for problem solving I recommend dreams if you can get them.
Anything more than that, especially looking into the future, dreams are nothing more than electrons having a ripping good time in cerebral soup.
I imagine her bouncing out of bed in the morning, delighted that there is a new day for her, that her god has blessed her with health, vitality, joy.
You have a romantic notion of what it means to believe in a god. I doubt any Christian who is not naturally a morning person actually wakes up like this.
As Mr. Jakob has just noted, matters are a bit more Grimm than suspected, even among the more beatific of the faithful…
“I imagine her bouncing out of bed in the morning, delighted that there is a new day for her, that her god has blessed her with health, vitality, joy.”
“You have a romantic notion of what it means to believe in a god. I doubt any Christian who is not naturally a morning person actually wakes up like this.”
I think people of faith are under very strong pressure to be, or become, morning people. Note, BTW, that those passages in the Jewish scriptures in which somebody “rises up early in the morning” usually end badly. Note also Fitzgerald’s comment that “in the dark night of the soul, it is always four o’clock in the morning.”
What if the reason you cannot tell the signal from
the noise is simply that you do not understand the signal
at all?
Thanks for that.
- –
Okay,
Father Luke
“I envy those who are who they are and even if it meant cutting myself to ribbons and pasting those ribbons into a whole new pattern, I think I want that more than anything, but do not know how.”
That’s me too, buddy.