School of the Hard Knocks

Dream: (2008)

In an asteroid colony, an autistic boy was being interrogated by two men and a woman in an office. The colony had broken off contact with civilization and fallen back to medieval ways, believing the boy was a devil. But they got no word out of him, and as they became more insistent, he got an attack of catatonia, rocking back and forth and muttering. They saw this as all the proof they needed, interpreting his catatonia as a demonic ritual.

The men said they should execute him by firing squad, not wanting to deal with the boy himself. The woman said sarcastically that it might be too traumatic an experience for the firing squad, and decided to do it herself. She took the boy to another room and gave him an injection, and the boy became limp.

Just as they thought the boy dead, however, the boy came to life again, transformed. Within seconds somehow his tormentors fell to the ground screaming. The boy, thinking its revenge fulfilled, lay down again for its eternal rest. But the woman had survived, and dropped her disguise to rise from the body as a winged demon. Intrigued, it took the boy’s corpse to its lair, where it bit its face to suck it dry. It left the drained body as a trophy in a corner. Just as it turned away from the body, even now the boy rose again to finish its revenge.

"You do not know me," the boy said. "You said that Jesus was the heart of love, and in his name you killed me. I, I am the heart of hatred." 

With that, the monster flew suddenly to the top of the cavern, and from his arms, lightning arced across the cavern. I paused the movie I was watching, but found that I could not turn off the screen. Panicking, I woke up.

Interpretation:

The office is a sketch “School of the Hard Knocks,” in which a teacher interrogating a pupil is about to strike him with a hammer. The woman is the worst teacher I ever had. The injection was the ADHD medicine, and my first dying is my first depression early in high school (which my psychologist blamed on the medicine). My revenge is my becoming home-schooled because of depression, and my second dying is my second depression early in university. The teacher was the teacher for the last grade of basic school, associated with the transition from home-schooling to university and symbolizing the transition into depression associated with both. The the autistic kid reminds me of Rain Man when asked why he didn’t win money at one point, so that the interrogation is not only an examination but also an extortion. The interrogation of an autistic kid for suspicion of being a devil is from the Falcon Tower by Erik Fosnes, which I associate with ostracism and suicide.

Abandoned Factory

Dream

At dusk, I got off the streetcar at the left side of a bridge across a canal. It reminds me of Dampoort, until I walk back a little to an abandoned factory which could only be in Roeselare. I descended into a basement which was pitch black until one of three homeless people turned on a flashlight. We talked for a bit, and I told them that they could sleep at my place. A lot of people squatted because of a housing crisis. The girl among the homeless people was Max from Life is Strange.

Analysis:

The canal could be either in Dampoort or Roeselare, both places which I associate with moving to Ghent: the canal by Roeselare because I cycle to Ghent there, and the canal by Dampoort because of the train station, and because it's where I'd go off to go to tango with S. Because of the housing crisis, though, not only do I not find a house for myself, but I feel obliged to receive others less lucky than I in my own house. This reminds me of my dilemma as to whether or not I should spend the money for a house on microloans instead, so that the dream reflects a conflict between egoism and altruism. It also reminds me of how I couldn't receive Couchsurfers this weekend because of my appointment with S in Ghent, which she cancelled, or was undecided, much as whether to live with S. At first, the city also felt somewhat like NYC, reflecting my experiences there when I tried to live together with Sh only for this to be cancelled. This reflects a conflict introduced by my going to Ghent, then resolved by Ghent turning into Roeselare as I walk in the direction the streetcar came from, and my coming back home: it means that my unconscious is about to give up to abandonment, reflected as my entering the darkness of the abandoned factory.

Cheating on the Exam

Dream:

Exam on field. Caveman walked barefoot into the mud, saying the thunder was a sign of the apocalypse which would destroy the exam teachers. Crowd cheered him on. I become the caveman. I think I only believe in yin and yang. Had to shave for the exams in tiny bathroom, I'd left a little bit on the front side. I'd forgotten to study. Fan was trying to take a friend of a mathematician hostage to make the mathematician come to the station. He told the ticket seller to keep an eye on him while he went away. She called the police when the hostage sneaked away, thinking from his manners he's a thief.

Analysis:

"The front" of the train in Snowpiercer is compared to the head of a body, a fascist metaphor. "Trim around the superego" is a line from Flowers for Algernon I recalled yesterday, in which a psychotherapist was compared to a hairdresser for being impersonal, much like X when trying to put a diagnosis on me. In the dream I'm left bald except for a tuft at the front, representing the superego, which makes me appear "self-involved" as X said. In the book the hairdresser was the father, referring to my parents as the original source of the complex with my superego.
In the dream it makes me look ridiculous, so I gladly shave it off, which represents blocking the people on facebook that inflame my superego while draining every other part of me. The thunder refers to revenge against those people, as exemplified in a Minecraft server (Mianite) which uses "gods" as admins, but where one person decided to stay neutral and build a symbol for his own team, involving yin-yang symbols. This refers to someone's recent criticism of infinitarianism as "theology" much as the neutral team Ianite became associated with team Mianite.
The crowds refer to my blog audience, a fulfillment of a wish for support now I've found out how to turn comments on. They cheered me on as if I was entering an arena, but remind me of how my classmates cheered me on half-sarcastically when I entered a football game late. The field turned first into my school's study room and then into a club, symbolizing the many forms the ubiquitous competitiveness of society takes on. I never liked exams or any other form of competition, so I decide to either riot against the school by kidnapping a mathematician, possibly to cheat on the exam, which is an exaggeration of my recent development of a desire to do whatever it takes to take what I want from a society I no longer respect, including lying and extortion.
The caveman refers to the wizard from Fantastic Planet, which could refer to a need to dominate people into enlightenment (in the film they are literally illuminated), or "force people to be free" as Slavoj Zizek describes it in his analysis of the movie "They Live," where someone has a fight with his best friend to force him to wear sunglasses that show ideology for what it is (Pervert's Guide to Ideology). The fact that I am not the caveman at some point and become it at another may mean that I am developing a separate (sub)personality after A's own experiments with doing so.
In the train station I use the dominance of the train transport staff which drove me away from it. In this my subpersonality appears unprincipled about not dominating others and fights fire with fire, turning foe on foe for his own ends.

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.

Land Grab

Dream:
I was in the center of a large cubic space in Minecraft. In the center was the only patch of green in the cavern, in a shaft of light that came down through an opening in the ceiling. I was trying to defend it from others who were sneaking onto it from all sides to grab some of it, like hyenas or vultures. On a ledge at the top of the room, a player was looking for armor fragments. A hole in one corner of the cavern led to a little cave occupied by dwarves, a hole in another led to a cave occupied by giants, but I could deploy another giant from my inventory to chase them away.

Interpretation:
The evening before I was writing a comment on the land grab by corporations of fertile African land. In this comment I was calling upon the reader to boycott their products, i.e, which is references as my trying to defend the plants in the center of an otherwise infertile area. The game reminds me of the Minecraft Hunger Games in which the players kill each other over food. The other players refer to corporations, the dwarves to Third World citizens, and the giants to First World citizens. In a video I saw of The Wolf Among Us, Bigby turns into a giant wolf, substituted as the giant in the inventory, in order to protect Snow, the deputy mayor who tries to come up for the little man, substituted by dwarves, against Tweedledum and -dee, substituted as other giants. The corporate looters in the dream are protected by people from high up, however, who are only growing more and more invulnerable, referenced to as the player on the ledge gathering armor.

Undertones

Dream:

I dreamt of being back in the Alps, this time trying to hike through the snow. I was in a beautiful white valley. A bear spotted me from the flank of a mountain and began pounding the snow with his front paws, a bluff bears often perform when threatened, including one bear I stared to long at on the AT. But he caused little avalanches underneath him, and it seemed as if he was intentionally causing avalanches in an attempt to bury me.

I was in the Pyrenees in summer, near a cabin just below a gravel road. A hiker passed by, and we talked for a bit. It was a hot afternoon, too hot to walk, so I tried to meditate. The blistering sun was uncomfortable, so I took out my visor.

I was in a little storage room in a huge concrete garage with some other people, who were smoking. We were talking about meditation, and I said the Buddhist approach to meditation was contradictory, because you need emotion to want to get rid of emotion, so that you can never be free of emotion.

I was in a long dark hall in Amnesia. I used a platform to get to the other side while a grunt came my way. When I passed him, it caught a glimpse of me from the corner of his eye while I snuck to the other side. Suspicious, it came to my side of the platform. Again I snuck to the other side just in time, and again when it resumed its patrol.

I was in a huge bare concrete chamber. In one corner, a huge monster, much like Godzilla or the Overlord from Duke Nukem 3D, stood amidst DJ equipment. It was friendly, and had the voice of S, an old classmate. Clearly in a death match video game, we fired small nukes from Shadow Warrior at each other. It took no damage from mine, and I dodged its. In the other corner, P and M sat on a concrete slab. P was using my old microscope trunk as laptop. P looked for more nukes in his handbag, but instead took out delicate supercomputer parts for me to see, stacked in arrays of large microscope sample glasses. He had little time because he was studying for an exam about them tomorrow. He acts distant.

Interpretation:

Why do I go deeper and deeper underground as the dream progresses? First the Alps, then the Pyrenees, then a level floor, then deeper and deeper underground. The subtitle of Amnesia is "The Dark Descent," and the game symbolizes a descent into deeper layers of the unconscious, where the protagonist gradually remembers repressed memories. I thought yesterday, when I started meditating again, that meditation is essentially the same thing, and that I've probably built many layers upon layers of superficiality above my core over the past few years.

I also read last night about how one writer described words as having a cellar of undertones and garret of undertones. Anais Nin, of whom I read a quote last night, describes her own writing as being focused entirely on one or the other, which in her case means the purely physical or purely mental. I revised an essay yesterday on how expression between people is either physical or mental, and I decided recently to initially focus on online rather than offline contact when meeting new people until we've become close.

Therefore, the higher levels symbolizing overtones a the analytical and the lower levels symbolize the intuitive, which I respectively associate with the Dionysian and Apollonian. I've long identified equally with the Apollonian (distant) and the Dionysian (close), but feel like I need to shift my balance more towards the Dionysian, and the dream was trying to do just that: in the dream, the higher my altitude, the more alone I am. In the Alps there is only the bear. In the Pyrenees a hiker passes by. On the ground floor I'm having an impersonal conversation. In the Amnesia corridor, I'm playing hide-and-seek. And on the bottom floor, I'm actually interacting with people on a personal level.

Yesterday I was also thinking about a quote on the words "upwing" and "downwing", which said upwing looks at the sky while downwing looks at the earth. This comparison made me unsure whether I was really upwing at all, since you obviously need to look both at the sky and the earth. By that logic the upwing looks to the future, downwing looks to the past, and only those balanced between the two look forward at what's in front of them, at the current. By descending, in the dream I'm therefore trying to become less focused on the future and more on the current, but I'm also trying to go back to the past, to a time when I was more focused on the current, when I was still sociable and could play with my classmates. Yesterday I was also thinking about the elections, in which I'm torn between the upwing Pirate Party and the more balanced Green party, originally an environmentalist party, i.e. concerned with the Earth.

But there’s a pessimistic element. I was interpreting my dream about the orgasmic meditation recently, which originally happened in a concrete room. Shortly afterwards, I was in the Razz Matazz, a club made out of concrete, hence the DJ. I’ve come to associate both with rejection. In a video I saw recently, a player treated a captured Godzilla as a friend, even though it kept attacking him: in the dream, I may be trying to learn to cope with rejection.

P sometimes plays transvestite. Last night, just before going to sleep I was messaging people on a dating website, and the last person I messaged was a transsexual informatician. In the dream, P is visibly offended, so yet again the dream may be a way to learn to cope with rejection, which I was already expecting from the informatician on account of my warning of sex change. I told him/her to make sure that she was a core transsexual rather than non-core transsexual. This would explain the displacement of the transsexual with P, a transvestite, and may be a way of warning me that the informatician is a non-core transsexual, perhaps on account of his similarity to other non-core transsexuals I know, who are also into IT, hence the computer parts.

Albino Scorpions

Dream:

In the middle of an extremely large bathroom, I undressed next to two rows of sinks and lay down. I felt a sting in one of my limbs, and when I looked up I saw two albino scorpions had climbed out of the pile of clothes. At first I thought it was a lobster. When I decided it wasn't, I wasn't sure if the scorpion had stung me with its tail or pincers. Z, the orgasmic meditation practitioner from years back, came to me and I explained what happened, but she reassured me.

Interpretation:

Since I explained to Z that I was trying to relieve sexual repression I'd subjected myself to during puberty, the scorpions probably represent some sort of trauma. The size of the bathroom refers to feeling exposed. Last time I saw an image of an albino animal, it was a whale. A few days ago, S and I found a white piece of chemical waste on the beach and she thought it was spermaceti, a substance excreted by sperm whales, so the scorpions might actually refer to sperm. During my period of sexual repression, I thought orgasm was psychologically harmful, hence the scorpions envenoming me, like Cupid's arrows, and my denial of being bitten by a scorpion might also refer to my denial of having a sexuality. Perhaps saying that I was sexually repressed was just another way of denying my sexuality, and the only reason I told Z was as an excuse to remain unresponsive.

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.

Rejuvenation

April 25 2014

Dream:
S was sad as we walked down the shopping street in Ostend. It turned into an US road, where there was a funeral in a house organized by friends and relatives. It was open to all, but I couldn’t peek in, as you had to stay the whole duration if you went in. Instead, I moved into an unfurnished bungalow on the same street to sleep through the winter, to hibernate.

We arranged to meet an underclass couple at the Watersportbaan (“water sports track”) in Gent, which had frozen over. I didn’t see the woman of the couple, but the man was shaven bald. He threw some sandals on the ground and said those were the only skates they dispensed. “At least you can’t fall with these,” he said.

I am at the same track with my father, or I am a father with a son. The viewpoint shifts from the father’s to the son’s. There are bushes on the edge of the track now. The father is on the pavement, the son on the ice. I shift to the viewpoint of the son. The father tells me to watch out for gaps in the ice. They’re semicircles at the edge of the ice.

When I was at the end of the track I argued with my father, who for some reason wanted me to get out of there as quickly as possible, but I had to do so on the ice for some reason.

There was a tiny, shallow metal boat, black on the inside and red on the outside. I’m not sure if the inside was paint or ash or tar. It was just large enough for me, as a child, to stand on, but I used my sleeping pad to slide across the track on my belly instead, so as to not have to step on it and so keep from falling through.

I was suddenly on the other side of the track. Suddenly there was a long hillock of snow ice on the track, which became an enclosed swimming pool. I had swum enough and went out of the swimming pool. Someone offered me a red apple, which I ate. I tried to finish it before I went into the showers and locker rooms, since they smelled funky. I saw other children there from my school, though I didn’t recognize them. On the way I saw L’s face with a strange faraway look, from very close.

Interpretation:

The man from the couple looked like me after my recent shave. My mother noted the day before that I looked like a different person. I didn’t identify with myself at all at this point, but he was very open towards me, in a way that reminds me M, someone else with very short hair. In the dream, I am two different people and my old self is just getting to know my new self. I didn’t see the woman of the couple, so that it may be a woman I haven’t met yet, representing the possibility of a future relationship.

I noted the day before that I look much younger when shaven. Since I become my father later in the dream, I associate my old self with old age and my father. S, with I often felt old, stood next to my old self. With S I sometimes felt fatherly and also felt like my father, who listens without speaking out.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about rejuvenation and its requirement to longevity. I’ve also had some pain in my achilles tendon, and thought about what M said about tendons becoming frail past the age of thirty. M is recovering from tendon injury, and therefore a symbol of regeneration. He’s also very open, like the kind of person I want to become. When my viewpoint shifted from the father’s to the son’s, this represents a process of rejuvenation taking place. This reminds me of Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Father and the Son in the Antichrist, which I read relatively recently.

The funeral earlier represents the self I was up until my journey to the Appalachian trail in the US. The duration in which my new self incubated last winter represents the time I had to spend at the funeral if I was to attend. The funeral probably symbolized the depression that occurred in the meantime. Having had enough of trying to do anything about depression any longer, I instead kept myself distracted while I waited for it to end: I hibernated.

The hillock of snow and ice looks like the hillock of dirt outside my parents house, which was extended right after I came back home during a demolition, possibly referring to the hibernation taking place while I was there. This could explain why the father wanted me to go to the other side of the track as quickly as possible, as I wanted the process of renewal to come to its conclusion. I came to the other side without him, implying that the old self is gone. The boat looks like a telepad from Minecraft, symbolizing sudden transition.

On the other side of the pool, I feel young but no longer little as I did on the one side of the pool, implying that my child and adult self have become one. I remember thinking the day before that I never had an adolescence, instead having turned from a child right into an adult when the machismo of my classmates repelled me and made me act as an adult. There was no transition between the two. I always felt either small or old. The only time I’ve ever felt as an adolescent was in the spring of 2008, age 18, when I lived in Ghent and often jogged around the Watersportbaan.

The last time I ate the kind of red apple I ate in the dream was in Damascus, where I stayed a few weeks in the middle of my thru hike in the US, possibly symbolizing its central role in my metamorphosis. I never knew L, and the only relevance I can see is that my character in an RP has the same name. Since I ate the apple at the same moment I saw L, and Lucas undergoes a transition from evil to good, the apple may be a symbol of the knowledge of good and evil. While I was in Damascus, I felt guilty for spending money: I felt like a spoiled child, much like L.

My not entering the locker rooms with the other children on account of the apple and turned back probably means that I thought better of actually regressing towards childhood, a counterbalancing to the process of rejuvenation. The dream expresses a desire for renewal, symbolized by the growth of adolescence.