As I have acknowledged previously, nobody wants to hear about other people's dreams. But as I also put it previously: I am going to do it anyway so fuck you. Mainly because this dream made me feel like I was in some sort of Thomas Ligotti/Clive Barker scenario which could almost appear in a Lamentations of the Flame Princess game.
I was on a high, dark staircase that was also a tower - not exactly a spiral, but a staircase wrapping round a central column, with landings at regular intervals. It was high up, and the wind was blowing and it was drizzling with constant rain. There was a wall of sorts on the outside edge of the staircase to stop people falling off, but it was pretty low and easy to look over. In all directions stretched a slate-grey landscape of barren hills.
I was surrounded by a pack of black dogs and for some reason felt like they and I were prisoners or outlaws together - although I was a human, I sense that the dogs were comrades or sympaticos of some kind. We were all being punished for something together, by being kept on one of the landings on the staircase from which we couldn't move. The staircase carried on up (way up, as if to the clouds) and way down, but we couldn't ascend or descend. And our punishment was that we had all had our teeth removed. In order to survive, we had to live off a diet of oysters, mussels, clams and other shellfish which were slid to us down the side of the staircase in a kind of trough/gutter. We had to somehow extricate the meat from inside the shells in order to survive, and then swallow it all whole because we had no teeth.
I never had any glimpse of who it was that was keeping us captive, but for some reason I got the sense that there were armoured figures with spears watching us the entire time.
Then (thankfully) I woke up. There's no punchline. It was terrifying.
You've got this hideous teeth extraction thing going on. That city in Silver Princess... it absolutely horrified my players...(I had every citizen carrying dental pliers). Totally grim. WHAT DOES IT MEAN???
ReplyDeleteI forgot about that Silver Princess thing. Must be something Freudian I have going on!
DeleteThat was a pretty cool dream, I enjoyed reading it.
ReplyDeleteConsult Dr. Jung. He was good. He was only one that could break through psychotic patients before anti-psychotic drugs were developed. There is philosophical/archetypal analysis of dreams that he did for his neurotic patients, but there was another analysis, that he did.
ReplyDeleteA woman dreamt that there was a stallion loose in her home (she lived in a mansion). She dreamt that the stallion broke all the furniture inside the large rooms and then tumbled down the grand staircase and crashed on the ground floor. Dr Jung advised the woman to seek medical help, because she might be suffering from a serious illness ravaging her body. She went and was diagnosed with a degenerative disease of the nervous system at en early stage, that destroyed her body and killed her after about two years. The amount of fear you say you experienced combined with the complexity of your dream leads me to believe that it may be body trying to speak to you.
For all its worth, my own shrinky interpretation of your dream is that you fear that you are losing control over your life by becoming too soft (were you ever hard?). Whatever is exerting mastery over you (and others) is doing it through comfort and life of luxury. Maybe they are supporting you economically or have control over your economic well being, but you are not the only one in the same situation. You got peers in this, whom you may view as beneath yourself. The tower symbolizes social hierarchy, teeth - self empowerment (as to a dog). If you go Freudian on this, it will dovetail into same (oral dependence).
Interesting. There may be elements of truth in your interpretation.
DeleteOkay, here's another one that I had last night, Dr Brooser Bear. I was attacked by a single hornet that was flying towards me in a bloodthirsty fashion. I turned and ran away from it, but it came and stung me right in the middle of my back. It wasn't painful, but just very uncomfortable. As though suddenly I had something stuck in my spine that restricted my movement. Then I woke up.
(Incidentally I know a few academic psychologists. They all swear by Freud and say that despite his theory having no real empirical "evidence" to support it in the sense that you can't really identify an id, ego, superego etc. in the brain, psychoanalysis is the only way to actually cure most patients. It's just very time-consuming and hence expensive, so they do cognitive behavioural therapy instead as a kind of self-management technique.)
DeleteEven though there is no statistical evidence for talking cure, it still works. You can use sleep deprivation, alcohol, coffee and peoples own words describing themselves fed back to them in an endless loop to drive them catatonic. You start with nothing but words, but they will need psychiatric treatments and drugs to bring them back.
DeleteFreud was a genius. So was Jung. Freud used an unfortunate choice of terminology, and everyone knew and ridiculed him for it. In a place where nobody knew psychoanalysis and declared Freud a quack, in a time before serial killers and before people talked about child abuse, there was a serial killer, who raped five year old girls, strangled them, and then scooped their eyes out with his fingers. One girl survived, blinded, and recognized a member of the ruling junta. Nobody dared interrogate him. Head of the secret police brought this old 90 something rich woman, everyone thought senile. She was a retired psychiatrist and studied under Freud. He asked her to do what she can. The whole thing was terrible. She talked to him a bit, and he opened up to her. He talked to her for four days straight. She told him that his aunt used to have sex with him when he was washing. He broke down, and told her everything, including about the girls he murdered. My mom was a young student and that was the first time she heard of Freud. Dr. Jung developed the first lie detector. It wasn't really a machine, it was a method he taught Gestapo agents. First, they would torture the suspect brutally. Then a trained interrogator would start asking the resistance suspect about this and that. The interrogator would know, where the suspect was hiding something, and would order more torture, until the suspect gave up everything he or she had. All of a sudden everyone talked to Gestapo. Few people know enough to thank the father of archetypes and the icon of the would be mystics for his contribution to police science.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is no substitute for psychoanalysis, and you shouldn't use psychoanalysis for certain conditions. Time consuming is gobbled gook. Do you use the word time consuming when you train for the marathon or the Olympics? Psychoanalysis or any kind of an analysis is a cheap substitute for being in a positive loving relationship, in which you grow and heal, and for a positive and plentiful social environment where you have plenty of time and peer support for self development. Unfortunately most people are born into less than positive circumstance and they don't develop enough character to overcome their environment. The corollary to all that is that 75 of all problems come from our minds, and even though you do not believe in a witch doctor, his or her curses will still hurt you.
Regarding your dream, you can't feel pain in a dream. It is about your fear. You probably fear the hornet's sting. Next time anything is chasing you. Turn around and face it, make it into a lucid dream, and see what happens.
In armenia, losing your own teeth in a dream is a very bad omen : it means death or grievous injury. My grandmother was seriously convinced I was in danger after I had such a dream. I love to hear about people's dreams, I think it's an underused source of amazing material.
ReplyDeleteI fairly often have dreams about teeth, so I think it must be a false omen. The worst one I ever had (probably 20 years ago now) I still remember really vividly: I grew an additional set of teeth outside my existing ones, but this new set of teeth turned out to be spider egg sacs which hatched a load of spiders into my mouth.
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