About dreams

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I have made a series of dreams recently. Most were nightmares, but after all, my life has been a dream, while my dreams have been my life.
Most properly my life has been a nightmare, tolerable only if spinned (I am autistic). In the last dream I had a furious fight with my sister. My relationship with my sister has been decent, if not really as warm as would have desired. So why this dream has forced me to reconsider life with sister ? I reconsidered the whole story of my life and came to the shocking conclusion that I had it all wrong up to now. It’s true that having lived with impossible parents and this only sister (in a kind of social void (no family friends, peers, no kin) my sister was the most acceptable person. But in turning points of my life she stayed on the fence, and never, never really intervened in an effective way to side with me (she was five year my major). So if I wanted to maintain the « decent » relationship with her I had to remove from my consciousness the real substance of its workings.

It’s like if you had to go to a marriage or a job interview: you wouldn’t go in underpants or in a nightwear. You wear « decently », and in some sense you believe in your clothes.
This has not much to do with freudian rimotion of sexual content. And, after all, in Freud’s Interpretation of dreams you mask reality in dreams : if you dream of a stick it’s a penis, if you dream of a bag it’s a vulva. And than there are inversions and all the other tricks. As I see it sex is not more prominent in dreams that in real life. It’s real life that is spinned not dreamlife.

Yes, I've had vivid dreams lately.

It's the same in my family - I had to believe their illusions, their story, in order to associate with them civilly. Their story always involved them being good and right and me being bad and wrong. Essentially I was the family scapegoat but we were supposed to pretend that wasn't the case. I think it's one of those 'victors write history' things. they were the majority and could dictate the 'history'. I was never treated the same as my siblings, was excluded from information and priveleges (some financial) and yet any protest I made was greeted with accusations of insanity. It's a bit like the Cinderella and the ugly sisters thing, except there's no prince. Fairy tales are supposed to speak of the unspeakable truths of human life aren't they, is that Bettleheim or something?

Since both my parents are now dead, I only contact my siblings to advise of any change of address via email. I just make sure they have my current details and there's a little exchange of social information but not much. That suits me.

I've had dreams I'm staying with a family of nudists

I often have dreams of one of my brothers, the one closest to me in age. There were four of us kids but the 'battle', if that's what it was, always reduced to myself and him. There was family reality, a shared play in which we were assigned roles, and a real reality which was true but only allowed to live in my head. My brother was given the role of child prodigy and my role was the naughty child. A family has to have somewhere to deposit its bad feelings, and I was it - like Postperson, the family scapegoat. (How useful AS is for producing scapegoats!)

Anyway, my brother and I still do battle in dreams. Maybe I try to redress the balance, to put equality where there was none. Or just to be an adult witness to the pain of an overwhelmed child. In dreams usually he is giving me something I don't want or can't use, disguised as something that is uselful; white cloth served up as food, no nourishment, no colour. A shroud maybe, nothing with any life in it. In real life, surprisingly, we are friendly with each other, but not close. The stuff of childhood keeps us a little distant.

Inequality still persists in so far as roles haven't changed in the minds of what remains of that nuclear family. I am still expected to play 'naughty child/scapegoat' but at my age, I am old enough to decide what roles I want to play. I didn't even want to be in the production, so I exited, stage left. That was very 'naughty' of me, of course. Proof that the 'bad child' cap fitted all along

Why keep having these kind of dreams though? To me the story is already written, done, dusted. Perhaps the past is a constantly shifting thing that needs a little rearranging every now and then. What is unfathomable (inedible! like the white cloth) to a child maybe as adults we can chew it over, make it more digestible? Perhaps we have to keep rewriting the story.

I drempt of Jung Kim Ill.

My dreams are so vague and disjointed that it's hard to remember any details, let alone interpret their meanings.

I repeatedly dream of wandering the halls of a fascinating building with a beautiful girl. I long to be alone with her, but there are people absolutely everywhere. This lasts for hours of dream-time. When desperation sets in, I wake up feeling agitated.

Way too many of my dreams involve the Nazis in some way. Sometimes these are nightmares, sometimes bizarre comedies, but most often just your run-of-the-mill acid tripping entertainingly weird dreams. One that keeps coming back is the one in which I read my 10th grade chemistry teacher's mind and discover that he was in a concentration camp (in real life the guy is, like, 49, or about 15 years too late if you know what I mean).

I have a few distressing dreams in which my mother is cruel to me. In life she is the furthest thing. Sometimes I dream of being diagnosed with epilepsy and being given a diamond-studded medical alert bracelet.

I have lots of dreams that don't involve these things, but the sapphic privacy deprivation dream, the various Nazi dreams, the bad parenting dream, and the epilepsy dream are always in heavy rotation.

I think trying to find meaning in dreams is futile, and Freud's hypotheses are the worst nonsense.
I think dreams are nothing more than the brain reviewing memories, patterns, connections, etc. Recent research on REM sleep and the visual cortex back this up.
I have some crazy full-color nightmares that suck until I wake up and notice how cool they were (now that I know they weren't real).
I was playing regular golf on a mini-golf-sized course when I got a bad, sinking feeling. I looked up at the sky and a few tentacles were just disappearing behind some dark clouds. I hurried back to the camp I was staying at and saw the beast again there, rotating slowly amid the clouds, a giant disc of dark reptilian quality, with tentacles coming off all around the circumference and all bent slightly, like a spiral galaxy or power saw blade. I was imbued with sudden knowledge: this thing was looking for me. It would pass overhead slowly and in a straight line. When it got out of range near the horizon, it would accelerate to warp speed and circle the entire earth in about ten minutes, reappearing on the opposite horizon and slowing again for another pass...but this time at a lower altitude. I started to freak out a little, looking around the camp compound for someplace to hide, but nothing seemed satisfactory; the camp population was low this particular week, and nobody in authority was around, and nobody else was interested in my crazy story. Jump cut to the inevitable: the beast is back for another pass, and this time it's only a couple of feet off the ground, spinning rapidly and cutting down everything in its path - trees, a shed, a dirt mound. It's coming right at me and all I can do is jump into this foundation hole of a building under construction; the reptilian thing passes over me by about five feet and plows onward across the rest of the campsite. I stand up, shaken, wondering how deep I need to burrow into the earth, and it occurs to me there's mines in South Africa seven miles deep, if I could only get there in time...

I don't think, as Freud affirmed, that dreams are the "custodians of sleep", through their work of masking the unacceptable (in terms of cultural repression) sexual motivations of wake activity. Dreams are often very disturbing and this appears clearly in nightmares, which are sometimes so intolerable that they result in wakening, sometimes shouting and needing some time to reassure oneself that they were only dreams. We don't know, and perhaps we will never know why we dream. But rather than covering realities of life, they sometimes point, through a condensed symbolism, to the real rationale of our wake life. So, through condensation, they unmask, rather than mask, as Freud would have it, reality. Dreams are in this sense like poems, or art creation (music or painting): they express what would be impossible to express in our gross, clumsily technnical verbalized descriptions.

I think pertinent to this discussion the poem by Wislawa Szymborska

UTOPIA

Island where all becomes clear.

Solid ground beneath your feet.

The only roads are those that offer access.

Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.

The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.

The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple,
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.

The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.

If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.

On the right a cave where Meaning lies.

On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.

Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life.

The following is probably one of the most unusual dreams I've ever had. I had it when I was 13 and I never forgot it because it was so peculiar; it had this strange 'prophetic 'mood' to it and it didn't break any of the laws of physics(i'e', it was very realistic). You might find this entertaining...
The dream took place in present day London. I was walking along a street by myself in a commercial district where there were many shops and boutiques. There were short sidestreets that branched off from the main ave. that also had some little stores. I turned left into one of these sidestreets. There was a small archway that I walked underneath in order to get to the end of the street. To my immediate left, there was a small store that sold rare and used books. I entered because that was where I was supposed to go. Upon entering the shop, to my immediate left was the checkout stand. An elderly man, who was the shop proprietor sat behind it on a stool. I said hello, and told him I wasn't sure what I was looking for. He seemed very excited to see me, and enthusiastically replied, "Oh, yes, I have the book you should read!" He walked to a ladder that reached to a shelf that was seperated from the other book shelves. He climbed up, grabbed a book and came down and handed it to me. It was very dusty and delicate and looked to be at least a couple hundred years old. It had a dark blue cover, almost black. But there was no title, or any letters at all, on the cover. So I asked the old man what it was. He said, "This is the secret text. You have many questions and this book will provide to you the answers to all of your questions." I was taken aback, confused, but very very curious. With a promise like that, I couldn't wait to start reading it. The man then walked back behind the counter and sat back down on his stool. I went to the front of the counter to pay. I asked, "Okay, so how much do I owe you?" To this he responded, "No, this book is not for sale. I have been saving it especially for you. It is free. It is yours." "Oh...", I said, again taken aback by what he said. Then I didn't even wait to leave the store. I began to open it right there, because I still didn't know the title to this book. I wanted to find the title on the inside pages. I started to turn the first page, the promise of a title lay on the next page. Just as I was about to discover the title, I woke up.
It was not until I was about 22, when I was watching a documentary on one of those learning channels (like Discovery or something) when it made mention of The Apocrypha. It started to explain that the title was greek (I believe) which translates into english as "The Secret Text", or "The Hidden Text". Then it went on to explain what this was. Being a dedicated athiest for most of my life, I was shocked to discover that this was a collection of christian books, banned in the 16th or 17th century in (I believe) the Church of England. But it is still in use in the catholic church (or so I've been told). Could the dream that I never forgot be mere coincidince? Or is it something more? Whatever, it was still enough to make me question my lack of faith and consider joining the catholic church. I think I will be doing that soon.