Following Orders

December 5 2013

Dream:

I was a soldier in an army, whose general sent its soldiers into an enemy base one by one.  They had no chance of escaping the notice of the automated turrets, and were shot down one by one, only to be revived time and time again and be sent again. Eventually the general decided to send the whole army at the same time, but again they were all shot down. We all wore Deadpool’s uniform, and everything is red. At the furthest extent I reached in the base, I saw large stuffed animals in a shop, the largest being a white rabbit.

This looked a lot like a video game, so I decided to use cheats, and tried to figure out how to enable them without a keyboard. I decided my abdominals were a lot like keys, and pulled up my shirt to see letters on them. I guessed I must have been born with them, and they were some kind of mutation, perhaps a next step in evolution. I couldn’t make up the letters on the keys, however, and soon they all wore out. I tried turning my nipples as knobs, without result.

Interpretation:

The day before, I thought that if I had been born in a less free time or place, I would have risked my life for freedom and even given my life or others’ for it if there was no other way, because a life without freedom isn’t worth living, and I would rather take the chance, however small, of reincarnating in freedom, than the certainty of living on in slavery. I thought that if there were such a thing as reincarnation, I would likely not have lived very long in each of my lives. This thinking can be seen as a metaphor for the way I live my life, giving up on any part of my life that’s not free. In the dream, my unconscious makes it clear that in doing this, there’s one obstacle to my freedom that I can’t escape, that of the general, my ego. However, by the time I used to use cheats in a video game, I no longer take it serious and just do whatever I want in the game.

Turning my nipples refers to the film “Modern Times,” in which a factory worker, tasked with fastening bolts, gets a nervous breakdown and tries to fasten anything around him, including a coworker’s nipples. During the nervous breakdown, he becomes rebellious and disrupts the factory.

“Pushing someone’s buttons” was a pun used in the series MD House, which I remembered while reading one of Anaïs Nin’s erotic short stories. The impulse may have presented itself the day before in the presence of my ex. Turning my own nipples refers to masturbation, which in the dream is a mechanical process, much as fastening bolts in “Modern Times”, and fails to produce any effect. The buttons on my abdominals refers to self-improvement, and the association with masturbation refers to a quote from Fight Club which I recently remembered, that “Self-improvement is masturbation. Now, self-destruction…” The White Rabbit refers to entheogens, a means of self-improvement, but in the dream it’s compared with materialism, a distraction, and certainly not something worth fighting for.

Intention:

I had no idea in the dream what I was fighting or what I was fighting for. I should have turned back and confronted the general.