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In relationships (Friends, special other, etc) specifically. Is there some defence mechanism?

Following the recent discussion with the Philosophy Film Club, you can find my commentary on The Matrix (1999) below. This theory is an expansion of a topic mentioned during the Film Club hangout and is one that I haven't encountered elsewhere. As always I'm eager to hear your thoughts. http://unraise.com/2015/02/15/the-matrix-part-1-a-metaphor-for-the-unconscious/

I've been getting into the work of John Searle recently because he has a fascinating approach to accounting for consciousness. He's got an awesome 15min TED talk that introduces the most basic concepts that I would highly recommend. Through his work I've added some really great new concepts into my vocabulary such as intentionality, aspectual shape, ontological subjectivity and irreducibility. The focus of John's work is on the philosophy of mind. Which if you are not familiar, basically, goes back to Descartes who proposed that the mind and the physical world are of different substances. A Dualism that regards the mind as being a part of god separate from the physical. There is a tension here on the side for both the mystics and the materialists. The supposed problem is the irreducibility of consciousness. That is that the actual subjective first hand experience that is our conscious experience cannot have a full account through the reduction to lower level processes. Take the example of the color red. Imagine a person who was born truly color blind in the strictest sense. They grow up to be an expert on colors. They know exactly the wavelengths of colors and that red is 600 nanometers in the diameter of these spiraling streams of light. They have seen and measured the effects that these light waves have on the cones and rods in our eyes. They have watched the visual sense data get integrated in an fMRI into our unified conscious experience. And yet they have absolutely no clue what the color red looks like. Think about that for a second. Certain things in reality really are irreducible, and the atomic theory of matter cannot fully account for many of the emergent phenomena in this world. And that doesn't make them any less based in science or real. We don't use physics to account for biological processes. We have a science for that. It's called biology. But this is unsettling for most people who consider this. The mystics tend to want to make the physical the part that is unreal and regard the mind as having primacy over reality, if it does exist. Deepak Chopra says that we all collectively create the physical world through our imagination, for example. The materialists regard those inescapably subjective phenomena as unreal or not based in science and so they disregard the mind and seek to explain consciousness as being like a computer. And if we can only figure out the program, we can have a full account of consciousness that includes beliefs, pains, desires, decision making and all the rest of the subjective first hand experiences we have our own consciousness. John Searle doesn't accept this dualism. Neither does he waste his time on the mystics. What he focuses on is the materialist account of consciousness and how a model of computation cannot ever explain consciousness. He also includes an awesome critique of behaviorism and of Freud's model of the unconscious that will flip some things on their head for you. It certainly changed the way I looked at the unconscious. What I find so refreshing about the whole approach is that he accounts for consciousness in a way that totally accepts our experience of our decision to act in certain ways. Me deciding to lift my arm is what actually happened, is a valid description of the events. He doesn't try to reduce it away to a level of description that says my synapses fired in my motor cortex sending a electrical and chemical information from my brain to my arm activating the muscles in my arm to retract and lift my arm. As if that explained anything about consciousness in the first place. He will convince you that the materialist position on the philosophy of the mind is illogical and anti-scientific despite the enormous support in the world of academia and (many of) those in cognitive science. The book is The Rediscovery of the Mind.

Can we refer to those that are unaware of their unconscious acting out as "possessed"? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLfgtQgTWTA

I normally only remember snippets or flashes from my dreams, but I was quite sick yesterday and took some pm medication to help ease my stomache and help myself fall asleep, and I had one of the more memorable and vivid dreams that I have had in years, but I have little to no idea how to really interpret much of it. I am going through a lot of changes in my life at the time, which I explain more at the end. Any help or feedback would be great. The dream began in what felt like a doormroom at the first college I attended. I was in line for a physical or a weigh-in of some sort in a doctors office, and behind me walked up two twins I knew from high school-we had been on the wrestling team together, but I have had little to no contact with them since. They are going to school to become doctors of some sort, but in the dream I had forgotten this and asked them. I am then walking down the hallway to my dormroom, and the door is open. 2 women are in their, one of whom I recognize in the dream (but I don't remember how-I think it was a fuzzy image of one of my ex's who shows up later in the dream, but I am not a hundred % sure) and the other I don't know. They are watching the tv in my room, and for some reason I know I do not want them there. A former friend from this same college was waiting with them, half asleep/bored on my bed. As I walk in he looks up at me and noda vigorously. I then scream at the women and throw them out of the room. The next thing I remember is that I am with my fiancee, but have to leave to drive to work ( I currently work a few jobs, but was going to my evening waiter/bartender hift at my uncles' restaurant). On the way I see my uncles at a house or different restaurant in a neghborhood. We talk for a few minutes and they tell me not to go to work yet. I stop into a house party I know nearby and am eating cake and playing checkers when another kid I knew from high school. He was a bit of a bully and an a-hole, but not to me (we had almost no interactions in high school). He asked me why I was ignoring Miranda (a girl I had dated for a few months and had stopped seeing for a few months prior to meeting my fiance. She keeps showing up at both of my jobs and asking if I am in, and is highly annoying). He raised his hand to threaten me, I told him I would go talk to her, and that he didn't have to worry, I always kept my word and never gave him reason to doubt me. I go to her house (its around the corner form the house the party was at). I walk in and she is crying (I think she was one of the girls I yelled at to leave my room earlier). The problem is, I and everyone in the dream keeps calling her Miranda but the feeling I get of whom I am talking to is my prior serious girlfriend from a few years ago, Abby. Both are blonde, and I feel like the dream has merged them or that there is some sort of disconnect occuring. Abby was a girl who I had much in common with, and had a relatively amicable breakup with-we both were going to college in cities relatively far away and the relationship sort of splintered becaue of this. I stupidly told her however that I would always love to get back with her and give it another chance whenever she wanted-mainly, I was just saying this to make the break-up easier and to placate her feelings (which I am notorious for doing). Anyways, we decide go for a drive to talk about things. We walk to my car, and pass a prior car of mine which looks exactly like my current one but feels much older. Abby/Miranda says I lft it there awhile back but it has been kept safe. It is locked and I left the key at home but I can look in and see various things from my past`, including some items from the job I have been in for almost 3 years but am leaving in a week. We keep walking and get into my current car. We drive down the street but turn too early, and drive into a housing development. Somehow the street turns into a wide hallway inside a building and I drive to the end of it. I notice tire tracks and scuffs on the wood floor and walls. The hallway opens into a restaurant or bar room with about a half dozen tables in a half square around a bar and fireplace in the middle of the room. There is a bartender and only one half occupied table in the left closest corner. The room's walls are all windows looking out into houses surrounding the bulding, as if we are still in some sort of housing development. Although it was afternoon or early evening when we drove into the hallway, the sky outside of the windows is pihblack with starlight shining through. We back out of the room, and I realize I am late ofr work and need to drive to my uncles' restaurant and have to take her with me. The whole time of the dream other than when talking about my old car Miranda/Abby has been silent and either crying or sad/upset, but has said or done almost nothing, simply following. I realize we have to go back to the hidden restaurant for something, and we drive down the street/hallways again. This time, it is early morning (just after dawn) outide the windows, and also my car has turned into a scooter we use to roll down the hallway. It is all silver, with a much thicker bottom then usually on similar scooters. It is also more squarelike, and adjusts to become longer or shorter depending on how many people are riding. We leave the hallway, and are back in my car driving to my work. Along the way, we pass the neighborhood I used to live in and turn into a shopping development that is nearby to get gas for my car. The neighborhood is one I lived in for the first 10 years of my life, and is right down the street from my church and elementary school (I went to Catholic school for about six years). The shopping development is right next to my (former) church, and in real life has no gas station located in the parking lot but it does in the dream. I drive somewhat quickly out of the street and into the parking lot because I am in a hurry, and make a number of swerves to make it up the curb. A few police officers are watching from the parking lot and drive over with the lights flashing as I pull up to the gas pump. I get out of the car and am informed I owe a $200 fine for making an illegal right turn into the parking lot and also for speeding, but the sleezy police detective I am talking to informs me that I can also get out of the ticket if I pay him $5. I start crying and inform him that I can't do that, that I am going to law school to be an attorney and I can't have bribing a police officer on my conscience or on my record if I am ever caught. He walks away, and a middle aged, hispanic, female police chief walks up and I tell her the choice I made, and she gives me a hug and wishes me luck. I go back to my car, balling my eyes out and see a black man two cars ahead of me pull out a knife, and then I see the man right ahead of me pumping gas pull out some sort of machine gun. They are looking at the police officers, and look like they are going to either rob somebody or attack the police officers first, but they do not notice me. I step on the gas and run over the man in front of me with the gun, and the man with the knife brandishes it and stares at me, but doesn't move. I am mortified I ran the man over but I also feel like I know it was the right thing to do. I get out of the car and look at who it was I ran over, and it apparently is Kel Mitchell (an obscure Nickelodean actor from the late 90s early 00's, from "Kenan and Kel" (one of my favorite shows growing up, "Good Burger", "All That", etc. he has had a very up and down career since then, and there was a time when there was a false story that he had died or had been killed that I had believed for awhile. In the dream, I freak out and believe that it was now myself who had killed Kel. Thats the last thing I remember before waking. Brief personal background. Atheist and anarcho-capitalist 23 year old college student-I will be attending law school this fall, and begin in one week. I began listening to Stef's podcasts about 8 months ago, and they blew my mind-felt like they were saying many of the things I had always felt or thought but never had words for at the time. I began cleaning up my personal life, and since then I have graduated undergrad (after 5 years), I recently put in my two weeks at job I hate and will be leaving the same time school starts, I proposed to my girlfriend of 18 months at the time and our relationship has improved by leaps and bounds in the time since I began listening to the podcasts, and I have become more brave and assertive in my personal and familial relationships-we had been keeping the engagement secret from my family for a few months until we got our plans more in order, and just recetly we came out to my mother, which went....well, it could hve gone worse but not by much, and mostly confirmed much of what I already suspected about my mothers unwillingess to share in her childrens' happiness if it doesn't conform to her definition of what "happiness" or "success" is. Finally, the Abby girl came back into my life recently, trying to get me to break up with my fiance and get back with her. She has a history of mental illness and depression, and I had to be very firm with her but was worried she would do something drastic. Anyways, any interpretation or feedback about what this mess of a dream is is more than welcome, and I can answer any other questions as well.