The Boy Behind the Window

Dream:

I was lying in my room at my parents' home when they weren't there. It's night, and I'm lying under the covers, but I'm fully clothed and the lights are on. I hear a crack from the door. The wood in the old house cracks all the time of its own accord, but I feel am afraid there might be someone there. "Ja?" I say, as if someone knocked and I let them in, just to let any burglars know I know they're there. I'm drunk and not thinking straight.

Immediately after, I hear something from behind me and suddenly I get up with a start and look back at the window when a little boy outside roars to startle me. He's standing on the windowsill with his palms to the glass. It's the kid with ADHD I saw years ago at the now dead neighbor's Christmas Eve party. He must've climbed all the way up here somehow. I forget about the boy and he disappears.

I find that I have a rash on my underbelly, big triangular hives that look like skin impressions. I know they come from my shaving razor which got stuck in my colon after I swallowed it. Filings of steel came off the blade rhythmically, like slices off a butcher's meatslicer, abrading painfully into my rectum. "What can come in one side can come out the other," I remember someone saying about it dismissively. But I've been told that a thousand times and I've tried everything but nothing works.

Interpretation:

Yesterday I was thinking that last sentence about depression. I blame who I am for sustaining the depression and again wished that I could just erase my memory, as the basis of who I've become, and start all over to rediscover the world like a child.
My memories of past failures make me lose interest in trying again, and they take away the hope of succeeding. By wanting to forget I want to feel hope for hope's own sake, a theme of a story I wrote yesterday. The sentence "if it can get in one way it can get out the other" refers to a passage in that story, in which a micro black hole bores from one end of a planet into another, setting in motion a destructive process that will eventually lead to new creation. I've often told myself depression can be such a process. Therefore the razor may refer to this black hole as a metaphor for depression.

The music I listened to yesterday reminded me of death metal, and to a sarcastic reaction someone gave to death metal being "boohoo we are so sad… where is the razor?" The razor can therefore refer to the self-injury in my major depressive episode seven years ago. The last time I thought about a bic razor was in a review of Planet of the Apes, in which the costumes were described as making the apes look like they just needed a lot of bic razors. I interpreted the movie as a parody on hippies, who strike me as childlike. Hippies were mentioned yesterday when my brother's partner compared the "green" people in Ghent to them.

Children sometimes swallow objects they're not supposed to, and I came close to swallowing an object myself as a child, so that the dream may tell me that I can't forget everything lest I become disinhibited in the ignorance of past mistakes. The swallowed razor refers to the disinhibition involved both in swallowing and self-injury, the latter of which I would've wanted to do yesterday if I didn't remember that the scars never go away, which my dream reminds me of as the scars on my underbelly.

The fact that the scars in my dream are on my underbelly may refer to my repression of sexuality, and the fact that in many cases I cut myself on account of sexual repression. Recently I also experimented with masochism during masturbation, as I was reminded of when masturbating yesterday before going to sleep, and could refer to the fact that sadomasochism could itself become dangerous if disinhibited.

As a child I also thought there was an evil ghost in that same bedroom because of the cracking of the room. This may symbolize the fear of childhood which eventually leads to inhibition. I wondered yesterday about the difference between repression and inhibition yesterday, and not finding any I went so far as to tell myself that I should become disinhibited in order to become less repressed, but I obviously do need inhibition: the swallowed razor associates the disinhibition of self-injury with the disinhibition of swallowing things that may kill you, such as, in the case of an adult, an overdose of drugs.

As a child I was also diagnosed with ADHD, so that the child may therefore be a metaphor for myself, and the window and field keeping me separated from the child may be a metaphor for the repression of my childlike need to try new things. The first year I saw the boy with ADHD, he was very curious. The next year, he was on ritalin like I used to be, and looked quite depressed. Both I and my first therapist blamed my depression on ritalin, and I thought yesterday about how spontaneous I was with other people until the time I used ritalin. The effects of modafinil, which also made me depressed, also reminded me of ritalin.

Yesterday I remembered having recently told S about wanting superpowers as a child that day because after using modafinil that day to become like the protagonist in Limitless, I felt similarly naive as when my classmates made me throw a certain rock in water to turn into a giant, a story I also related to S. As it came in powder form I wasn't sure precisely how much of the modafinil I had taken except that it was a large dosage, and I was afraid of overdosage. Modafinil is supposedly a histaminergic and I briefly wondered if histaminergics could cause allergies, which I associate with hives, so that the razor which caused the hives is also a symbol for the disinhibition of using drugs.

In summary, the dream distinguishes between fear (cracking door), repression (child behind glass) and disinhibition (swallowed razor), and the way they immediately followed each other seems to suggest a correlation. Repression follows fear, and disinhibition eventually follows repression when it stops. The dream is describing a fear of becoming disinhibited if I don't repress myself and getting hurt as a result.