I’ve been on a blogging hiatus, writing things in notebooks that I may or may not share. Still not ready to post on the reg, but I felt moved to share this. Seems like the time.
Passed a few fireworks stand and really wanted to buy some, but I don’t know anyone who wants to have a good firecracker fight and tbh I’m too old. So another fireworks season will pass me by.
And I got to wondering how much I care about American Independence Day anymore, now that democracy may be on the ropes.
I wondered if this might be the last Fourth of July I really care about, or if maybe that happened the day Dad died, July 4, 1997.
I’m of two minds I guess…
Which reminds me of a dream I had in October:
I was getting on a bus with some friends.
There was a lot of anger on the bus, because Superman had turned evil. It was all over the news.
The driver wanted to throw us off, because Superman was with us. Sort of.
I apologized to the driver and said “Don’t worry. There’s no way Hollywood is going to let Superman stay evil. There’s too much money in Superman being the good guy.” Superman was represented by an Igloo ice chest that we stowed near the front of the bus.
I said Superman had temporarily been changed into a “sorp.” (I bet that took a LOT of kryptonite.)
I haven’t managed to make a backronym for SORP, but in the dream it meant superposition. Good and evil at the same time. No way to know which until you opened the box. Schrodinger’s Superman.
Superman – in my dream, and in the collective unconscious – symbolizes the USA.
Hollywood meant Hollywood, but not just Hollywood. American culture at large. We live in an empire and we want to be the good guys.
Unfortunately those two conditions might be mutually exclusive. For me, for the time being, I think Superman will remain a Sorp.
My drawing capabilities aren’t what they used to be, but this is close.
When I was two I dreamed I was inside a playland of soft clear tubes, inflated with air like the bounce house at the kiddie park.
Countless children filled the tubes, which appeared to be endless. It should have been a fun dream, but it wasn’t.
Children slid down slides. They shouted and squealed. They tossed beach balls around.
There were no adults, only small children. Everyone could play and play as long as they liked.
And all around was that clean yet cloying smell. The smell of fun, the smell of a new toy, the odor you could taste when you stuck it in your mouth.
It should have been fun. But that clean yet cloying smell was wrong in a way I couldn’t explain.
The fun went on forever and no one was in charge. I was uneasy. I didn’t know how to feel.
Anytime I smell a beach ball, buy new shower curtains or blow up an air mattress, I get a flashback to that dream. It’s the fragrance of fun, but still I feel uneasy.
I put a lot of stock in dreams, especially the ones that stick around. Sometimes it takes years to understand them, sometimes I never do. But they feel like messages.
I’m not sure why the above dream stuck around. Maybe it was toddler’s version of the Rapture Machine dream. A hint of falseness about the world I was being sold.
I’ve made a habit of writing down my dreams when I can remember them. I figure it might help me be a little more creative. I’ve had a few “hits,” ones I’ll remember for a while, but to be honest they can be a bit repetitive.
I’ve noticed a pattern over the last several weeks: dreams that feature a “reality generator.” Pretty derivative really. They one I remember most clearly looked like a big metal donut, mounted on the back of a military vehicle.
I had helped create it, but was I was now unsure if that was a good thing. It was designed to project a worldview on the population. I was told there had been other versions, but this one was more powerful and worked on more people.
Pretty sure the donut shape was a ripoff of the “Everything Bagel” in Everything Everywhere All At Once. One day they’ll find a way to sue you for dream plagiarism, but we’re not there yet. Anyway mine looked more like a steel washer.
Last night I dreamed about a “reality generator” that at least didn’t plagiarize anybody’s design. This one consisted of steel poles planted in a circle with bends at the top, pointing inward. It replaced a less effective version that had been planted by a crooked cop.
The purpose of this “reality generator” was to eliminate suspicion and allow criminal activity to go unnoticed. Obviously inspired by Ozark which I watched last night. (No spoilers. I’m still in season 3.)
I have about figured out what these dreams are actually about. Perception, the only reality we humans know. You can’t make a reality generator, but a perception generator? We’re using one right now.
Propaganda, misdirection, dots connected every which way, like new constellations in a sky with too many stars. That’s what the Internet is giving us. A simulation that can look like literally anything.
Fortunately you carry a reality generator in your head. If you can resist all the “realities” blasting into your eyeballs, you might get close to the one that machine can’t touch.
Dreams can tell you a lot about yourself. If you decipher them correctly.
In fact, I think the unconscious gives us some best guesses about the big questions from time to time. And some of its guesses are pretty good. Unfortunately it’s damn hard to figure out what it’s saying.
I don’t think guides or charts are any help either.
Some dream symbols are probably common enough. I always considered tornadoes to mean, “chaos ahead.” I looked it up on some dream interpretation website and it said something close to that.
But I’m a weirdo. I read a lot of weird shit. I think a lot of weird shit. I like science fiction and trippy movies. The trippier the better. So you never know what my brain is going to throw at me.
I had a bizarre one years ago that I think I understand now.
I was in the kitchen of a house that I wanted to leave. But in the living room was a creature I was told was “the god of the house.” It was around three feet tall, with a gray body shaped like the base of a sea anemone.
I think it may have been sitting on top of a table.
Around it was a blur of tentacles, whipping around the room faster than I could see.
I had to go past it to get to the front door. Its tentacles could touch every book, every piece of furniture in the house. And it could see my every move.
When I stared at the god of the house, its eyes proliferated. When I looked away, they diminished. I don’t know how many eyes it had. I just got the impression of “too many.”
Someone said, “It has no power outside. It is all-powerful in the house.”
I was afraid to run past this thing. Its tentacles might grab me if I tried to leave. In the dream I stayed in the kitchen, but in real life, I did leave, bit by bit.
I think the house was me, and the “god of the house” represented identity. You know, the “you” that you’re proud to show off, to yourself and others. I think it must have been one of those times in my life when I was becoming a different person.
If you’ve ever been through a big change, losing your religion, changing your worldview, you know how scary it can be. Can you leave that part of you behind? If you do, will you be anybody at all?
The “god of the house” must have been the part of me that didn’t want me to change. As long as I remained the same, it could control me. When I became somebody else, it could not.
Here’s a puzzle to think about before you go to sleep tonight. Who are you, who experiences dreams? And who are you, who WRITES dreams? Who’s in charge of your inner world when you’re asleep?
I had a dream the other night that has me pondering those questions.
I was talking to a group of people and one of them said, “Did you know that you’re God?”
“No I’m not,” I said, because I didn’t believe it and the idea made me uncomfortable.
But then I began to wonder, was I God to these people? Where did they come from? It was my dream wasn’t it? At that point I was in a lucid dream, on a knife’s edge between sleep and the waking world.
I thought, “reality is emanating from me.” I free-associated a few important-sounding but meaningless phrases. “Shocking blue paisley.” “Reality is in superposition.” “The structure of the world is the skeleton of the dream.” “Geometry geography.” “Perspective and personality.”
I remembered a previous lucid dream where I was in the kitchen of my childhood home looking at a scarab and noticed ice cubes in the toaster, letting me know I was free to walk around a bit.
I thought, there’s proof. I’m not God even in my dreams, because even in a lucid dream, where I’m free to walk around, I still don’t make the environment. It would not occur to me to put ice cubes in the toaster.
Oh and, after a little Googling, it seems that my dream people are courtesy of Morpheus and the ice cubes in the toaster were apparently Phantasos‘ idea.
Strange dream last night. I was on a spaceship so large it had geography. It had a sky. I could look into the distance and see bluffs and trees and mountains.
I was told I was not on a planet or inside a space habitat, but a landscape on the flat surface of a gargantuan spaceship.
Suddenly I realized I had a job to do. I tried to find my work space. I opened a drawer that appeared to be in my childhood dresser. It was empty except for a smashed orange with white fuzzy tendrils coming out of it.
The seeds were beginning to sprout. I wanted to plant it.
My coworkers were talking about something we needed to do. It occurs to me it was in the newsroom at a place I used to work. They said we needed to talk to “the queen.” We needed to ask her permission to do something.
Not sure who the queen was. I just accepted it. I went outside, where I saw the sky and the mountains in the distance. I saw a lady with a contingent of people around her. I didn’t get a sense of her personality, just that she seemed confident.
I was told she had the ability to “turn off reality.” I asked her a question I can’t remember and got an answer I can’t remember. Who was she? What did it mean that she could turn off reality?
I think the dream had to do with something I read about online about Alfred Korzybski who came up with the phrase “the map is not the territory.” I posted a blog entry about that concept before. Descriptions and even the evidence of our eyes and ears don’t really capture reality. There’s always a layer of perception and always something missing.
I think my dream was about maps and models of reality. Like maybe this was the territory? If so it didn’t make sense. Outside changed to inside. Furniture changed or was forgotten. People were vague. I somehow accepted I was on a spaceship, but it didn’t seem like a spaceship at all. It seemed like earth.
Maybe it was flat because it was the map?
Anyway it occurs to me that it’s probably maps all the way down. Turn off one layer of reality and you find another. They’re all “accurate” maps, depending on the scale you want to look at. You don’t really need a globe until you pan out far enough. Flat works as long as you only care about a small area of the earth.
Maybe that’s how you your “spaceship” moves. By turning off the models that don’t fit anymore.
I stood on a hill with many others, excited and terrified. The Rapture was upon us. Those found worthy would ascend to heaven. The rest would be left behind on a doomed earth.
The Rapture would take place inside a building in the valley below. I don’t remember what it looked like on the outside, but inside, it looked modern. Businesslike. I tried to put aside my doubts.
A loudspeaker directed us to a row of turnstiles, where you would learn if your name had been written in the Book of Life, or if you would be left behind to burn.
My name was called.
I was so relieved I didn’t think to ask questions. Like why was I not flying to meet Jesus in the air, like I’d been taught to expect? Why did God need technology, turnstiles, or loudspeakers?
The next part was jumbled. I was on my way to heaven when I realized I was lost in a maze. Then I had a monotonous job operating machines, then another, then another. Heaven never followed. I had to escape.
I’d been fooled. This was some kind of trap. A trap full of traps.
I don’t know how, but I found my way out. Only to find that everything was gone, charred, replaced by rubble, charcoal and ash. It looked like the aftermath of Hiroshima.
There was no Rapture. The building was a machine. Wealthy men built it to destroy the world, using our faith and labor. The machine was meant to eliminate the population so they could start from scratch. We had helped bring about the Apocalypse we sought to escape.
Last thing I remember I was wandering through rubble, feeling dejected and used. Feeling like a fool.
U2 – Until the End of the World
What it meant
That dream has haunted me for half my life. What was the Rapture Machine? I’ve spent the last 30-plus years trying to figure that out.
It took a long time, but I understand what the dream was telling me: The religion I knew, the one that taught me my values, had been seduced and hijacked.
The Rapture Machine promises a materialistic version of Heaven. You don’t have to die to get there, just be willing to sacrifice others or look the other way.
The Machine makes it easier by distributing the sacrifices widely. No one may opt out. They can only be cast out. How could any kind of spirituality survive that?
The Religious Right had turned Christianity into a doorway to The Machine.
I had that dream in the late 80s, when I was still trying to be a Christian, though I was souring on the Baptist church.
Churches I attended in college only seemed to care about the offering plate. One church started every service with, “The Bible Teaches it, God Commands it: Tithing.” As a college student with no job and no money, that left a bad taste in my mouth.
I went to Baptist Student Union events, hoping to make friends and meet girls, but ended up feeling lonelier than ever.
I couldn’t discuss my doubts with anyone. “Read your Bible and ask the Holy Spirit” was the signal to quit asking questions.
Meanwhile the influence of the televangelists, of Prosperity Gospel, was overwhelming the version of Christianity I learned in my little unadorned Baptist church, with its old farmers, teachers and other small town folks.
Poor Man’s Poison – Give and Take
It’s not just a Christian thing
What does the Rapture symbolize? Escape. Everyone is born in a vessel that must toil, suffer, fear and die. For Christians who believe in the Rapture as I once did, it’s a promise of heaven, the antithesis of suffering.
It isn’t just a Christian motivation. It’s universal. If you find yourself in a trap, you want to escape. Unfortunately, life is full of traps. Escape from one trap inevitably leads to another.
Promise of a better life is strong motivation, no matter your religion or lack thereof. Modern life, with conveniences our forefathers never dreamed of, will tempt anyone who wants to survive.
The Machine
The Industrial Revolution gave birth to the monster we refer to as the Machine. Or maybe it’s been with us since the dawn of civilization itself and modern machinery just raised it to adulthood.
I don’t know if it’s sentient (yet), but the Machine has a purpose: Never stop growing.
Now, with advanced AI threatening everybody’s livelihoods, it seems we’ve decided to make The Machine smarter than we are, when most of us already serve it without knowing. Feels like my old dream coming true.
The ultra-wealthy only think they control it, but they’re in a trap just like the rest of us. The more they have, the more they feel like targets. They grow their castles to keep out the poor and before you know it, they’ve built their own prisons.
The rest of are kept in The Machine by promises of heaven or wealth. Someday, always someday. False promises are the carrot, Poverty is the stick. Miserable, degrading poverty.
Premonitions and Predictions
Was my dream a premonition? Did my dream predict the future? Almost certainly not. My head was stuffed full of science fiction and literature as well as religion. My unconscious made an educated guess.
I think the unconscious part of us, the part we mostly deny in the “rational” West, can solve problems and draw conclusions based on fewer clues than our conscious minds. The problem is, the unconscious communicates through symbolism we cannot easily understand consciously.
I tried Carl Jung’s active imagination technique and it kinda worked. The fact that I was just returning to bed after an old man bathroom break probably helped.
The visions that led to Jung’s Red Book (aka Liber Novus) and ultimately informed most of his psychological theories were produced using this method, so I thought I’d give it a try.
I read that while doing active imagination, you can talk to the characters you imagine and they will reply. They did. It was brief but impactful.
Of course it’s still you – it’s imagination – but you can still learn something. It gives you a bit of access to the unconscious mind, which can in some ways be wiser than your ego, the part you think with.
It’s just that it doesn’t talk in words. It communicates through images and symbols, though it can take years to understand what they mean. Sometimes it’s good to ask your unconscious for answers.
Sometimes it solves puzzles before your thinking mind does. You just don’t always have enough pieces of the puzzle to understand what it’s saying right away.
I decided to use Jung’s technique on a nightmare that had been bothering me since my early 20s, back when I was still trying to be a Christian, though I was beginning think I might not be a Baptist. I think I just figured it out.
The Nightmare: Being a demon against my will
The nightmare involved a plot to assassinate Jesus. Race also played a minor role, but I wanted to understand it. It was disturbing, but the bad dreams are usually the interesting ones.
The decades-old nightmare I chose to investigate really ate at me. I hated even thinking about it. I decided that made it a good target for Active Imagination. One of those subjects I was avoiding.
As I said in the last post, this post involves religion and race. I promise not in a mean way, though if you’re religious you may quibble. I go my own way when it comes to spirituality.
In my nightmare, I was one of the unclean spirits mentioned in Mark Chapter 5. If you went to church, you probably remember that one – it’s the “My name is Legion” story where Jesus unclean spirits out of a troubled man.
The spirits were on their way to assassinate Jesus. The man we possessed ran through tunnels and culverts, looking for Jesus as I yelled “Stop! Stop! Stop!”
I was desperate not to take part. I kept yelling, “Noooo! Noooo! Let me out of this! I love Jesus. I would never do that!”
But there was no way to stop it.
I exited a tunnel and Jesus was sitting on a log in a dry creek bed, his back turned to us. Suddenly he turned and I knew he saw me, not just any “unclean spirit,” but me.
His sad look told me he was very disappointed in me. That was more than I could take and I woke, covered in sweat. My uncle said I cried out in my sleep. It was a fear I’d picked up in church, that I might one day become irredeemably bad.
The nightmare nagged at me for decades, more than a decade as a self-proclaimed Christian. What the hell was that dream trying to tell me?
I thought I’d figured the dream out years ago, though I knew nothing about Jung at the time.
Two themes jumped out right away: The first was betrayal. I feared I was betraying Jesus, and yet I felt betrayed because he never acknowledged I didn’t have free will.
The second theme was doubt. Questioning my deeply held beliefs was frightening at times, ashamed. I’d been warned about “falling from Grace,” something I’d vowed never to do. But my doubts refused to go away, hard as I tried to push them away.
Those two themes alone explained why I would have a nightmare like that. I was going through a transition. But I still felt like I was missing something.
I decided Jung’s Active Imagination might help me find the missing pieces. I was curious as to why it kept popping into my head long after it had quit upsetting me. I’m not that person anymore. I decided to ask my dream characters some questions.
I spoke the man the “Legion” of spirits had inhabited. “Did you find it unfair when Jesus judged you?”
“He was looking at you,” the man said. As I had suspected. The dream was about me and me alone.
It also bothered me that the man in my dream was black and that he, like me, was forced to do something bad against his will, just like me. (We didn’t actually do it.)
I asked him why race had been part of my dream. “I represent unfair treatment,” he said.
That made sense.
I asked Dream Jesus why he had judged me. “You were friends with sinners and tax collectors. You accepted the thief on the cross. You knew I didn’t mean you harm.”
“I was never in your dream,” he said. “I was part of your unconscious. You were judging yourself.”
I think that solved it. There were two main themes other than betrayal and doubt. These were judgment and unfairness. Two characteristics of the faith I grew up in that always bothered me and part of why I had to change my beliefs.
I had a dream the other night that I can’t seem to shake.
I had just watched The Edge of Tomorrow and it got the wheels turning. All those versions of Tom Cruise’s character were different people. He started as an asshole. By the end he was not. How about all those in-between Tom Cruises? What kind of men were they?
I started the dream as “The Angel of Verdun,” then immediately became Lt. Col. Cage. Each wanted to save the other, just like in the movie.
But it stopped being about the movie and I was just regular old me, watching from a hill and seeing a flock of Me’s. Me from a million timelines. Everyone I could have been.
Ranks and ranks of me as far as the eye could see. All the men I didn’t want to be, each one in a trap I had somehow avoided. Lonely men who lived alone and became bitter and isolated.
Men marrying into the church, having to lie to himself and others that he still believed, bitter and isolated. Men who never jumped off the runaway conservative train and didn’t know how to get off. Me’s who never escaped.
It felt like one of those dreams Carl Jung talked about. The ones you are supposed to figure out. Dreams that are clearly messages from the unconscious. I’ve had a few of those over the years. I’m still puzzling over a couple of them.
What did this mean?
I think the fact I changed perspectives at the beginning was a clue. Something about connectedness.
Maybe that we should see a bit of ourselves in the people we don’t want to be if we can. If you’re one of those former conservatives who feels like they’ve escaped, there had to be timelines where you didn’t.
What got you into that backward mindset and what got you out? I’ll try to do that with this blog if I can. If it reaches any young version of me and helps them make better choices, I’ll be happy if it’s just one guy.
I’m also hoping the more enlightened folks among us will make room for redemption and be a friend when a friend is needed. Victims of misinformation are still victims. Many thanks to those who helped me out of my mental traps, even if they never got to see it happen.
I’ve lost most of last night’s dream, which felt like quite an adventure. I was with a team of people and we were on a mission.
Some were NPCs (learned that one recently from gamers) who were there for me to talk to, some were me, trying to make plans. Sometimes I forgot which was which – you know how you sometimes swap characters in dreams.
Our mission was to stop whoever was manipulating our timelines, changing our consciousness, making us over. We all wanted the identities WE chose.
Just before I woke up, someone who both was and wasn’t me said, “These aren’t the clothes I was wearing when I went to bed.”
I’d changed, and no memory of that change. Which sounds rather like a message from my unconscious mind, doesn’t it? Seeing as how my unconscious mind in charge of which dream characters wear what.
I’ve been some very different people over the course of my life. That’s why I believe in redemption and why I refuse to believe people can’t change. People don’t change all at once, but we DO change.
Sometimes it makes my head swim, remembering some of the beliefs I once held. Like, how could that have been me? Yet he was. I have the memories to prove it.
But just like in my dream, all those identities you used to be are in there somewhere, tugging at your sleeve, telling you what to do. But you’re in charge, not them. You get to pick which ones you listen to.
Late Boomer's Den 
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