Search the Community

this one is really simple. i had a dream that i woke up in my bed in the dead of night. i noticed there was a mouse in my room, and it had a yellow tag with a number on it. i watched it dart around my room, sitting up in my bed. it didn't take notice of me. after a while, another mouse appeared. then another and another and then some more, all with yellow tags. i also noticed a toad appeared as well. i remember counting about 6 mice at the time. i looked for the source of their entry, and found them coming in from the gap underneath the door to the bathroom, where they were popping in one by one every second. these mice i saw coming in had no yellow tags. i looked around again and now i noticed that my room was now littered with crickets, toads, and lizards. i saw some of them eating the crickets, but at this point i was starting to panic, wondering if the mice were hostile and would try to bite me. i was still in my bed, which sits on the floor with no bed-rails, but none of the creatures had climbed in, so i got the sense i was safe there. i put my head on my pillow in exasperation and closed my eyes, and sleep overcame me for a short time. when i "woke up" from this, i looked around my room again, finding only 2 mice, exploring the small piles of dirty clothes on the floor. i got out of bed, and opened the door to my bathroom, finding it completely empty, however i did find holes underneath the vanity, at which point i woke up from this dream. the night before: my roommates had kept me up very late, talking and laughing quite loud from the living room. i didn't want to kill the mood, but i also wanted to walk out there and tell them to quiet down. so i just put up with it. i've been trying to assert my preferences more recently and usually do so when i'm confronting a single person, but i think i might have been afraid to do so with multiple people. what does this dream mean?

[i refer to myself in the second person and first-person-plural in journals and in thought] (something to listen to while you read: your choice) (Creepy music) (Bittersweet music) This is my zombie madness. Don't expect a mentally healthy, rosy, outlook. These are my dark thoughts, after all. The cold, eternal, dark... Journal entry: 2/4/2016 1:05 PM I had another zombie nightmare. Why is it always zombies? I tell myself that it has something to do with conformity. This time it was at a mountain lake with a swampy characteristic and a large central island in the bowl of the mountain. There were two people I was watching scraping zombie teeth against a rock, seeing if simply getting cut by a tooth would cause infection, both young men were daring the other, trying to gauge what would happen, seeing if the other might turn. Meanwhile there was a rock conveyor that was making land fill, expanding the island. However the island was made mostly out of driftwood, and when a rock (slightly smaller than the old woman meteor, and sharper, and whiter, like a shark’s tooth) reached the top of the conveyor (and hung, for a moment, like the Sword of Damocles) it dropped, crashing into the island – all the driftwood sank and dispersed, dredging up the undead. The survivors of the island panicked, now that they were no longer safe in their mountain lake hideaway. They tried to swim to the shores but the waters were thick with zombies. No one survived. I spent some time in the dream as one of the survivors, the rest of the dream was in third-person. As a survivor, I hesitated to enter the water as the zombies crawled up the raft and flotsam/debris which other survivors were quickly abandoning. There is nowhere safe in these zombie apocalypse dreams of mine. Not underground, not in the mountains, not at sea – nowhere. They will swarm and hoard you until you are the last man alive. And then you will die and become mindless. The dreams recur sometimes, but they all have the same theme. The first was in Jr. high school. The magical amulet of the locker room didn’t dispel the hoards and I ended up getting surrounded and bitten (then going to a zombie school dance with a blonde zombie). Hiding underground worked in one dream, surviving off of mushrooms, but the species died and there wasn’t enough to eat without the sun. The hills and mountains have continued to fail to stop the hoards. Being at sea doesn’t work because the zombies float, like bloated corpses. They are slow but they will always surround you, and fighting only exposes you to their infection sooner. I understand the metaphor at play here; it’s too obvious to ignore, and my subconscious is not giving me an escape – these are the people all around me, mindless cannibals, that won’t stop until everyone becomes... one of them. I’m surrounded by mindless people no matter where I go. There is no escape. No escape. Freedomain Radio was not an escape, no bastion of hope that could clear a path through the innumerable hoards. There is no cure. I think that in one dream I even caused the outbreak and was one of the first to die. I’ve become a zombie on a few occasions. Starving to death underground was the longest that I lasted. … The Last Man is coming. And if we don’t do something soon, there will be no survivors. I am not equal to the task of ushering in the superman. To believe that I could be the superman gives me hope, but hope is the enemy – last of the blights upon humanity hiding at the bottom of Pandora’s Box. [end of entry] Strangely, a lot of zombies are irrationally exuberant. Hope... Hope is what makes people think that there's a heaven - the ultimate in wishful thinking. The "realm of pure reason", divorced from cold, hard facts; Platonism - surrounds me. The undead deny the fact that they die, even though they fester, and rot away humanity (in these nightmares). The denial of death is central to the mindless hoards. They infect people with their ignorance. ... I fail to see how they... No... That's not true... I know exactly why they ignore death and act like their rotting away doesn't matter. Every philosopher tries to overcome radical skepticism; Cogito ergo sum; life is absurd, embrace it [ignore the dissonance by being consumed by it]; there is a higher realm and revealed truth, believe; the wonderful thing about man is that he is a bridge; truth at any cost, Socrates?; empirical, often reductive, "sciencism"; noble lies, all of it. The noble lie is infecting people, like a brain disease, spread through the mouth. They will not accept the leveling of death; the absolute nothingness that awaits all things. They "create" for themselves "meaning" - ex nihilo nihil fit. The universe is meaningless (the referent "universe", not the word "universe"). "What is the meaning of life?" is a syntax error - a question wrongly asked... And, yet, it drives people onward in the search for a wild goose or red herring. Everywhere around me people are walking around like they were above the laws of thermodynamics - perpetual motion machines. There is a leveling, an obliteration, that you can ignore, but which will hunt you down, surround you, and drag you to your death - and it is an immutable feature of existence. The zombies are like Egyptian Pharaohs trying to escape their "second death" (to be erased from historical memory). After high school, Marvel Comics published their zombie universe, and I had to turn away, as I saw heroes devoured on comicbook shelves. Iconoclasm forces me to watch everything I hold dear being destroyed. Nothing is sacred, god is dead, and there are no heroes, nor villains, no ideals, and no idols. I wanted to be a scientist, a biochemist, to study life (which I had held sacred)... but, like so many people, I had no idea what science really was - skepticism an confidence intervals always lower than 100%. I wanted to be a "nercomancer" and cure death with the chemistry of life, in a sense. Life has become a machine, a simple engine, governed by principles. I studied medicine and saw gore. Engine parts... Nothing is sacred. Nothing has "inherent value". These emergent properties people take for granted (ghosts in the machine, like freewill) are illusions. They are willfully ignorant of what makes them tick, and the universe around them. Dr. Josiah Gibbs must have been a lonely man after James Clark Maxwell died. Einstein called Gibbs the greatest mind the United States had ever produced, and I agree. We've seen to the end of the universe, and it is cold and dead. People think science is something great (when they are referring to technology, in fact, not science), and they know nothing about how it destroys everything you hold dear. I am alone. Worse than alone - I'm surrounded by people who don't know and don't want to know. Zombies, who want me to conform to their way of thinking so that I can un-death myself. To any survivors out there... Survive as long as you can, your engines are failing, and whatever you do - don't feed the dead.

Dear Dream Analyzers, I usually don't reflect on my dreams for very long. I would often have reoccurring nightmares as a child. I had a very disturbing dream two nights ago, and instead of forgetting it, I decided to examine it more closely. A significant portion of the audio content contains a book review (plot spoilers are minimal in case you are worried), which may have contributed to the dream as I had just finished the book before falling asleep. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNBs1i-sMdA Any and all of your comments, thoughts, feelings or suggestions are welcome. I am new to dream analysis and self-knowledge. Thanks!

Hello everyone, Below is a dream that I had a little over two months ago. It is a very long and extremely detailed dream. As soon as I awoke from this dream i got the feeling that it was very important and immediately went to write it down. It took almost two hours to write. As i said, parts of this dream are very disturbing and it is sometimes meticulously detailed and somewhat complicated so I hope you will bear with it. Also very mysterious and strange at times. I don't know why i didn't want to post this here until now but i re-read the dream again today and that really inspired me to post it here. It is also important to know before reading this dream that i have an abysmal relationship with both of my parents and plan on De-fooing as soon as I'm financially independent. They have also never taken responsibility for the abuse inflicted on me as a child. I hope by saying that i am not "loading" or giving you any pre-conceived notions about the dream but I just think its important to know that because there seems to be many parental themes in the dream. Anyway, here it is: The dream starts I am dressed in a black suit in tie. I am walking up a staircase where at the top there is a door. Through the door there is an immediate turn left. I take the immediate turn left and begin walking down a hallway. This is the first of four hallways. The hallways appear to be a part of a movie set. There is no ceiling and the walls are propped up. Furthermore, beyond the hallways there is only darkness. As I walk down the hallway, I look in front of me above the walls (which again, have no ceiling and are not much taller than myself), As I look up beyond the walls, I see another big wall behind it with a phrase written on it with big letters. The phrase is "WE WILL FUCK YOU". It is written in blood. I definitely perceive this as a threat. I become aware that the whole time I am walking down these hallways, someone is watching me and they want me to know that they are powerful and that "they will fuck me" if i don't complete my task (more on what the "task" is later). As I reach the end of this hallway, I turn right into the second hallway. As I start walking down the second hallway I look to my left, there is no wall only a frame of a wall. Beyond the frame of the wall I see boards sticking up from the ground in an angular manner, like you would see in an attic. Beyond these boards and below the writing that says "we will fuck you", i see a man being tortured. He is strapped to a chair with a big white sheet over his head and most of his body. I can really only see his legs. There are two men next to him that are his torturers. They look as if they are preparing something. I cannot tell who they are or how they are torturing him, i only know not to interfere. If i did anything to interfere the person or thing watching over me would surly kill me. I continue on down the second hallway and take a left to the third. In the third hallway there is a cardboard cut out of a very muscular man. He looks like the muscular guy on the book cover of Atlas Shrugged who is holding up the globe, only not as noble looking but more intimidating. He also looks like a body builder. He has his fists on his hips and is looking off in the distance with an arrogant and angry look on his face. I perceive this cardboard cut out as message from the person or thing watching over me describing the power that they have. I acknowledge this and continue down into the end of the hallway. As i reach the end, I turn right and look down the fourth and final hallway... (Note: I am only looking down the fourth hallway not walking down it.) It is very dark and at the end of the hallway there is a door which is closed. In front of the door there is a child playing with some toys. The child is four years old. From what I can tell the child is a boy. He is wearing a shirt and a diaper. (He actually looks a bit younger that four years old but for some reason I am positive of the fact that he is four). The child sees me and begins walking towards me. Eventually he starts running towards me. As he is running towards me, two mirror entities of himself appear to the left and right of him. they are greenish and very spectral looking. The child has a smile on his face for the entirety on the dream, an open mouth smile like he is laughing. As he continues to run towards me, I pull a gun out of my inside suit pocket. The gun is a big ass revolver. I aim the gun at the child and proceed to shoot his two mirror entities, and then himself, in the head. This is the end of this part of the dream... The next part of the dream begins and i am in a totally different place. I am in a room in the house were I live (I'm 19 and live with my mother). The location of the room in the house is the downstairs bathroom, but it is not the downstairs bathroom... It is just an empty room with a big window. I am looking out the window. As I am looking out the window, I see the area and the neighborhood in front of my house. The strange thing is that instead of being on ground level looking out (and this room is on the ground level of my house), I am looking down at the neighborhood from what looks like 3 stories up. There is no 3rd floor in my house unless you count the attic. As I look out the window I am contemplating. I think I remember doing something else as i am looking out the window but i cant remember what it was and i cant remember if i was doing anything for sure. Eventually, I leave the room and walk out to the first floor of my house. I see my mother in the living room. She is standing on something and is working on something near the ceiling. I think perhaps she is decorating. She does not notice me. I walk into the pantry in the kitchen and collapse. Thus ends the second part of the dream. The third part of the dream begins and i am standing at the beginning of the first hallway again. Something is different this time. I begin to see things in a third person perspective (specifically is feels like I am playing a character in a video game). This part of the dream is somewhat hard to describe. As I am playing this video game character (which is me in the hallway) I (the person playing the character) suddenly remember that this scene in the hallway was really memorable and really stuck with me. It is as if I am re watching the whole scene again. (This is the first time in the dream where it is acting like a video game, this theme of it being a video game continues later). Suddenly I am back embodying myself again in the hallway (IE: im not playing myself in a game anymore, I am simply there in the hallway). Everything is the same in the hallways. As I am walking down the first hallway I suddenly have a flashback... The flashback is to a room where two people (I don't know who they are) are standing on a catwalk (or bridge like structure). It is very dark in the place they are in, it is a very similar darkness to the room with the hallways. they are observing something being made below. I don't know what is being made but it looks mechanical, like a giant futuristic robot and whatever it is it is obviously evil and nefarious. Suddenly, a man jumps out of the darkness from the area where the thing is being made and begins to somehow climb up the catwalk. The man is a character from the video game grand theft auto 4 (which i first played many years ago when it first came out at a time when I was much younger. I remember having to convince my mom to buy it for me.) The man then proceeds to kill the two people on the catwalk (I think he shoots them). This is the end of the flashback Back to me. As I continue down the hallways is the same as the first time. However during the second hallway, I look to my right instead of my left (to the left is where the tortured man is). Again there is no wall just the frame of the wall and there are the same boards protruding from the ground. As i look to the right I see a wooden head attached to one of the boards. The head looks like Pinocchio. Above the head there is a sign that says "we see everything". This is a reminder that i am being watched. Further off to the right I see a light in the darkness but i don't know what it is. I continue down the second hallway then turn left into the third. I walk down the third hallway past the muscular cardboard cut-out and reach the end of the third hallway and the beginning of the fourth and final hallway. The final part of the dream begins. I am now seeing things from the perspective of a young woman. She is the same age as me (19) or perhaps a bit older. She has short hair and is attractive. I (as this woman) am sitting at the end of the fourth and final hallway were the child was before. As a reminder, there is a door at the end of this hallway. I am propped up against the wall next to the door. I am injured in some way. The door next to me which was closed before is now open. The room that lies beyond it is my mothers bathroom which is large and bright. As I (as this woman) am lying there injured, an invisible entity appears next to me and says into my ear: "Four years and five score today..." It then stabs me in the womb. (It could be the gut but i think it is symbolic for the womb). (Note: When the invisible entity says "Five score" I thought during the dream that this meant five days. However after looking it up, a "score" means a group of 20. So perhaps "Five score" means one hundred days? I'm still not totally sure. The important thing is that during the dream i perceived it as five days.) As soon as this entity stabs me, the four year old child appears and begins running towards me from the beginning of the hall. The two spectral mirror entities that he had before are running along side it. I (still from the perspective of the woman) pull out the same revolver that I shot the child with earlier. I shoot the two entities beside it but not the child itself. The child itself reaches me and I get a "game over" screen (this is where the theme of the dream being a video game begins again). I suppose I press "continue" and the sequence with the child running at me starts again. This time however as the child turns the corner to the fourth hallway, he does so in an intensely terrifying manner. As he turns the corner his shadow looks like that of Nosferatu and he skulking very creepily. I see this and I am shaken with fear to the very core. He stops skulking and begins to run at me again with that same laughing smile on his face. This time, I crawl back into the room behind me (which is my mothers bathroom) through the door that is open. I then pull out the revolver and shoot the child himself (not the entities beside him) Many times in the head. It takes many shots (I suppose six since its a revolver) but he finally vaporizes and his mirror entities beside him disappear. I take a breath of relief. The theme of this part of the dream being a video game is now fully realized because when i kill the child, a screen appears before me that says I will now get a reward. The reward is that I get access to a new weapon (or to be more specific it is an upgrade to a weapon that I already have). It is a katana. As I try to confirm the upgrade by hitting yes or no on the game menu, the buttons on the screen change from Xbox buttons to PlayStation buttons. I realize that I cannot control a PlayStation game with an Xbox controller. THE DREAM ENDS. I wake up in a sweat. It is important to note that the night before I had the same dream however it was only the first part of the dream and when i got to the part with the child in the fourth hallway (as me not the woman) I managed not to shoot him and continue on through some different path. Some of my thoughts on the dream: I think that the "task" I had in the dream was to not shoot the child and that the being watching over me was warning me not to and if i did i would regret it. I think the writing that said "We will fuck you" is not really sexual in its intention. I perceived it in the dream as more like "we will fuck your life up". However, I could be wrong in this assumption. Also, The child is four years old and there are four hallways. Coincidence? I don't know. Here my last thought. In the last scene I think the injured woman could be my mother. This is because she appears in the same place where the child was earlier and In reality I see my mother as basically an overgrown child. I'm very sorry if I provided any unnecessary details (I know i use too many parentheses lololol) but i just wanted to add everything because some of the things described could be very important to the dream. Please, please, please, I would LOVE to have your thoughts about this dream. If you made it to the end I commend you haha. This dream is very important to me and I would be absolutely thrilled to get some feedback on it. Thank you so much.

Where I give a backdrop to my self-knowledge journey so far I suppose my journey over the last few months has reached something of a full cinematic conclusion within my dreams, one of which I have not previously experienced in my life. I don't experience lucid dreams, and this one surely wouldn't qualify as one, but it was at least tangential to a lucid dream in its intensity. I should start by saying that I was raised in a life of fear. My parents through their carefully crafted manipulation put me through a gradual process of transformation from a curious and outgoing young child into a shell of a person by age 11 with a crippling panic of public interaction rendering me nearly catatonic when it came to simple tasks such as checking out at a cash register. I was changed countries 3 times, I was relocated through multiple states and cities, I changed schools nearly every year from age 4 to 12, having to adapt myself to each new public school prison and its corresponding juvenile inmates. Empathy and love never existed in my childhood, only from a few good teachers and older models did I learn any sense of a faint echo of what these things might be. My mom was and is a narcissist, she learned this from a childhood of poverty surrounded by 5 older sisters who would strangle the life out of her and dominate her will, something I assume she resolved to never allow to happen again in her adult life. Consequently she sought out to only find those she could exercise control over. Not a big surprise she became a staunch leftist. She was and is full of feminist venom and malice, though she would never say as much in words. To her I was the distant reflection of an alcoholic absent father who might leave again (which ultimately lead to the one thing she feared in any case). She was a master manipulator, she developed a method of affection and affection withdrawal that would leave me constantly seeking her good graces. If at any early age I did not demonstrate any consideration for the "error of my ways", if I was not apologetic, she would escalate the situation by increasing my punishments until I relented. My mom loved to echo socialist rhetoric in a manner, it was always for what was "good for the family as a whole", especially the last move we made at age 12 when I was finally starting to make friends at the school I was at in the suburbs of Chicago. The entire family moved for the last time to South Florida, for "the good of the family" which was in actuality nothing more than her desire to live in warmer climate, there was zero economic reason to move otherwise, my father did not change companies, he just transferred offices. She was also very fond of forcing me to apologize to her or my sister or anyone regardless of whether I agreed with her reasoning or not. This was the most vile brainwashing of all, having to affirm something I did not believe over and over. Consequently my inate intelligence which far surpassed anyone else in my family became subdued and I behaved aloof and brutish, like my father. My father was and is a shell of a human being. His childhood from what I can gather from uncles and hearsay, was incredibly violent. So violent that he refuses to discuss it. He was my mom's enforcer. When I was "misbehaving" she would send me to my room and then send my father late at night upon his return from work to give me the verdict and the threat of escalation if I continued disobeying. This threat dominated my entire childhood. He rarely hit me but it was enough to issue these threats in his aggressive tones to continuously keep me at bay. I wanted to have nothing to do with him and really despised him as a person, his cowardice disgusted me to my soul, but I did not know to what degree I felt this until recently. He enjoyed humiliating me at public gatherings he had with office workers or his mom's friends. Always cracking a joke at my expense when I felt the most vulnerable as a forced social introvert; the betrayal would tear at me and make me feel like I could die. On one occassion I was dreading giving a speech in class that had been offered as an extra credit opportunity, and I decided to seek his advice the night before to see if he'd reassure me it would be ok to not do it. It was an extreme rarity for me to seek any sort of counsel from my father but I was so terrified of the speech I thought I might convince my father it would not be necessary. He responded with rage at the idea of abandoning the chance to marginally improve my grade and when I told him I didn't want to do it and I would not do it, he threw the chair he was sitting in at me. It was a plastic lawn chair and didn't really hurt physically, but the sense of sociopathy and betrayal of confidence echoes within me to this day. At times I would feel so exasparated and hopeless from the complete lack of understanding of my feelings I would explode with rage within my room lashing out violently at any inanimate object I could find until my mom would knock on the door and threaten to make things worse for me if I didn't stop, and so I learned that I must resign to be a slave and live passively within that existence or else not survive. Even at the age of 13 they managed to subdue me; the first overwhelming passionate rebeliousness when puberty was hitting me hard and all my understanding of the world was being flipped and inverted. The threat of sending me off to military school was sufficient in that case. Is it not bizarre and yet completely logical how that which deeply repulses us the most as a child is what we come to depend on the most to exist? At age 20, still living with my parents, I developed severe and devastating panic attacks. They would often last entire nights and leave me in complete fear for my life and drained and exhausted once they had passed. Eventually I went on antidepressants for it and subdued all these feelings for a time, but I had to increase dosage as time went on to continue to subdue the feelings. After a time the antidepressants had me so sick I could barely digest food or get out of bed. It wasn't until later on when I had changed my dietary habits, quit the meds, and left my parents' home that I began to slowly recover. Unfortunately, that was not until 26 years old. I was somehow stuck within the cycle of abuse and dependency at home, I became the same as a prisoner who had grown too institutionalized to exist outside in the real world on his own. I went to the local university though I had plenty of opportunity to leave. I took trips to Europe to try to escape them with some faint dream of finding a job with my EU passport and never coming back. Inevitably I would come home after only a week suffering from a depressive meltdown of loneliness. My mom had bred dependency in me to the point I was a cripple without her presence. I did not keep romantic relationships and my parents had no problem with the state I was in so long as I remained submissive. I could not talk to strangers or even make a phone call to a business without difficulty. In time I managed to become more independent but it was with great difficulty. Fast forward to two years ago, I discovered FDR and began to examine very critically everything I'd been taught. After reading On Truth and RTR I began to seriously question the falsities behind my family, but it still took me a great deal of time to unravel just how deep the trench was. 6 months ago I began a relationship with a girl who was a self-proclaimed libertarian. In the initial period I told my mom about her and she immediately went snooping on her facebook profile to try to dissect her, subsequently telling me she might potentially be trying to use me or kidnap me. She was actively trying to sabotage my relationship before it had began and this from an entirely different state. Incidently she has repeated this pattern in the past and yet I allowed for her abuse and manipulatition to continue in order not to upset her. Unfortunately my ex was not at all what I had initially expected (though for entirely different reasons than my mom's initial paranoias), demonstrating serious irrationality steming from a fire and brimstone strict Christian childhood. When things inevitably broke apart between us I realized at the time I had really just been trying to replace the affections of my mom with someone else, not actually solving any of my own problems or exploring self knowledge in any meaningful way (in spite of the material I had read up until then). For the first time in my life I was honest about what I wanted out of my relationship with my mother: Nothing. I told her I didn't want to talk to her anymore and blocked her everywhere I had her as a contact online. She of course sent me a pitiful narcissistic email about how I spent my whole life trying to run away from her in spite of her best efforts. It's important to note here that I did not defoo my father. At that time I was so angry with my mother and the realization of how deep her manipulation was, that I felt some pity for my father as this empty shell who was being driven around by her for decades. I had the naive view that a sense of empathy still might inhabit my father and upon a confrontation he might feel remorse for the past reign of fear and bullying and humiliation he had exposed me to. So I kept communication with on a very casual basis by phone only discussing the bare minimum until he came into town last week. Where I confront my father and all illusions are destroyed The entire night before my father and I were scheduled to meet outside a Panera Bread near my house I was filled with trepidation and enormous fear. I felt as if I might arrive at the meeting and die right there on the spot, such was the intensity of the fear. When I got there he was sitting in a table outside the restaurant with the family dog, a tiny perfectly groomed Maltese who my mom had molded into her perfect specimen of affection and loyalty.. He'd dropped off my mom beforehand at a mall to go shopping, thankfully she had no desire to see me either. I was immediately emotional and it took me at least 5 minutes stewing in fear to finally mutter anything of significance. Finally I broke loose. "Do you know the difference between sympathy and empathy?" "Yes, of course," he said. "Well, I have been thinking about it for a while, and I don't think there was ever any empathy in our family" My father rolled his eyes, "Why does this matter, why do you bring this up?" "Because there was never any consideration for my feelings, no curiosity as to why I felt a certain way, why I was acting out, nothing" "I wasn't a psychologist, I was your father, I wasn't responsible for you feelings, only for raising you" (wtf?!) "So you mean that my feelings didn't matter to you, you had no interest in learning about them?" He dodged the question, "when you turned 12 years old you started to despise us and think we were terrible people, I have no idea why you decided we were terrible people but I think we were very leniet with you considering your attitude in that time." I get indignant, "did you never stop to think how destructive it is to change a kid from a school every year for 8 years in a row, did you not think it would have been helpful to understand what I felt about that?" "So what if you changed schools? I don't see a problem with that. My responsibility was to be your father not to fix the whole family around your feelings." "Was it your responsibility also to humiliate and make fun of me at your private parties with friends, to throw a chair at me when I came for your advise the one damn time I had the guts to do so?" He laughed nervously and pathetically. "It's not funny, I said, half in tears. My father became all of a sudden tranquil and with a very seemingly introspective tone he blurted out the following abomination, "you're right about me throwing a chair at you, that wasn't right, but let me tell you, in that time I really feel that I should have hit you more to teach you respect back then, you were out of control and we let you get away with it then." My illusions all suddenly ended with that exact moment. How could I possibly still be afraid of this pathetic human being? He'd not only not shown any empathy but actually doubled down in spite of seeing me in clear emotional pain when expressing these things. "Ok," I said. "I see that you don't get it." I immediately stopped feeling overwhelmed and calmed down pretty quickly. I resolved to reserve my inevitable and unavoidable defoo with him for some other time and continued with some petty small talk for a few minutes more, which was all I could stomach before getting the hell out of there. It is amazing how greatly illusion and mythology can obscure the truth about relationships. In spite of all the self knowledge work I had already done, in spite of all the reading and journaling and exploring of some painful subdued emotions, I had not been aware of how disjointed from a logical perception of reality I was when it came to my father. I realized that my father for me had just been a sort of last chance desperation for me to salvage and reconcile my past. I had known all along that my father was completely unfeeling, but I simply hadn't been ready to accept it. The fear was too enormous and crippling. After the encounter I had very little fear left of him at all, it was all relegated to remnants of past fear and emotion. It was within this context that I had an incredibly powerful and vivid dream only 10 days later. A true gem of a dream. Where the dream happens and I discover my rage I was in the kitchen inside a strange home I did not recognize. I was sitting at a table apparently waiting for dinner to be prepared while my father and mother were actively cooking. My dad was holding a knife and actively cutting away at something imperceptible. I apparently muttered a comment which irritated my dad and he feigned a motion with the knife in his hand as if he was going to throw it at me. This seemed to me to be something I had seen him do before but I could not place it. I immediately reacted with unusual anger and blurted out "Why don't you try it you fucking coward?!" Incredibly, this enraged him so much that he actually threw the knife at me but missed. I was initially shocked and appalled that he'd gone through with it but did not let my anger subside, "I can't believe you did that, I'm calling the police immediately!" Suddenly my father and mother seemed to grow panicked at the realization of what he had done and my father started throwing other knives at me. As I dodged them I ran out of the kitchen and up a flight of stairs I did not recognize to the second floor. I ran into a room and in a panic tried to lock the door behind me but it would not lock. I looked around the room for something to use to defend myself and found lying next to the bed my warhammer. A warhammer is an enormous medieval hammer used for piercing and brutal blunting of armor piercing. In an era where swords would not penetrate armor with ease, the warhammer was devastating. This was the only object in the entire dream that I recognized, because I own one in real life and also keep it next to my bed as a home defense tool. As soon as I grabbed the warhammer my fear of dying ended, I felt suddenly empowered and ready to face the attack. I discovered my rage. My father burst into the room with a baseball bat and swung at me but missed. I walloped him across the torso hard with the blunt end of the hammer and he went down. I then ran from that room onto a balcony and resolved to jump but just then my mom popped out from behind me and started firing a cross bow. She missed me and I turned and knocked the crossbow away from her as she was loading another arrow and pushed her away. I then finally jumped out of the window and began running as I hit the ground. Decades of fear began to fade away. I woke up calm and relaxed, though tired. As I type this I am smiling and still reflecting upon the complete relief at finally escalating to the point I always longed for in past confrontations before the pang of regret would hit, the inevitable realization that the threat to my life would be too much to bare, the resignation to slavery. No longer will I be slave to ghosts or the living dead. I know now I am so much stronger than they, that their decades of abuse could not enslave me. I am free. The warhammer is still propped up next to my bed and it will stay there.

I wanted to share a short dream I had and my analysis of it. I would like to get any input you might have on it, and hopefully encourage others to do dream analysis, since it's something I'm finding increasingly important in my own self therapy. The dream I'm titling: Political Prisoner I'm meeting a woman who's just getting out of prison. I'm with someone else when I meet her and bring her back to her personal library. The library is dingy, dark and full of cobwebs with very tall ceilings, almost like a warehouse. A man is there sitting at a computer who is very happy to see her. He is her fiancè, a large hairy manly man w/ dark hair and blue eyes, and I identify with him. (At this point I like this couple very much). She explains to me that she has been researching something very important here in the library with her partner (the manly man) who was an anonymous celebrity hacker years ago. This research somehow led to her incarceration in a way she doesn't explain and I get the sense that she was a political prisoner. They both look very dedicated as she continues to explain that they are nearly finished with their research, at which point they are going to get married, reveal his true identity and share their research with the world. I'm filled with optimism and wake up. I think that this is an interesting dream because I can already see at least two very different interpretations. The library seems to be a sort of ancient unconscious part of myself, and research in that area would seem to me to be self work, therapy, etc. I am myself a large hairy guy who works as a programmer so it's no wonder I'd identify with the fiancè. And the hacker revealing his real name is (I think) me using my actual name on the internet now, on the boards, on YouTube, wherever, which was something I felt very ambivalent about. But the role of the political prisoner woman I'm less sure about. What is a political prisoner except someone who is punished / attacked for telling the truth? And to be a prisoner in my own unconscious smacks verily of suppression / repression. But why a woman? What is this repressed feminine part in my own life that would be coming up now? And why is the symbolism for my unconscious a library? Why is the purpose of the research never revealed? Why is the purpose of the research never revealed? I have a little bit of an amorphous goal in my own self therapy (and psychoanalysis). I ultimately want to be happy, less susceptible to anxieties / depression and have a stronger sense of self, my goals and how to achieve them. It can be difficult often to follow thru on goals (if I can feel confident I want to do them in the first place). I grew up not caring about what I would be when I got older. My older sister said I should be a firefighter so I just said to myself "ok, whatever, I'll be a firefighter". I rarely did my homework (unless I could finish it in class). For a lot of my youth I was very cynical, nihilistic and aimless. I had no real goals. A big goal I have is to have good goals. What is this repressed feminine part in my own life that would be coming up now? The one thing I could get myself interested in spending lots of time learning about was web development (and programming/scripting in particular). I worked my ass off to learn it well and a couple years ago I landed a great job with those skills. The other reason I got the job is that I was just really honest about how I am and what my limitations are (that is, after listening to Stef's podcasts on doing job interviews well). This trend toward being more genuine, connected, me, is something that happens more and more. And recently I had a little episode I'm not going to go into here where I was tempted to withdraw, to hide myself and wait it out. I had prepared for this sort of thing in therapy so instead I decided not to hide or compromise on my values even a tiny bit. I was taught in many ways not to reach out, be myself, to challenge others. I was myself a kind of political prisoner at home and at school, rejected for not conforming to the culture. But why a woman? What the feminine represents for me here is (I think) Jung's anima, a completeness of a yin and yang. That's why the couple is getting married and why there is a lot of optimism I feel. Also the feminine symbolizes (at least for me) compassion for myself, self care, and (as Jung says) it animates me. I do psychoanalysis with a Jungian psychoanalyst. A woman in fact who I greatly appreciate working with. And why is the symbolism for my unconscious a library? I think that the reason I imagined a library is that it's a collection of knowledge and stories. It has things I can take with me (i.e. books) back to my everyday life and place back at a later point. It's collected a lot of cobwebs in there because I really don't like reading in real life, but also because it's something that's been long neglected. And so for me accessing this library involves dreaming more and reflecting on my dreams, taking things with me and coming back to them later. And toward that goal I've recently been going back through old dreams I had and coming to new understandings about the symbols within and of my life in general. Something that I like that my therapist suggested was to ritualize my dreams in some way so that the symbolism sinks in more, and so toward that end, here's a picture I drew of a previous dream that I like.

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.