It’s been hard to fall asleep at night lately. Everytime I lie down and close my eyes it’s like my fucking brain refuses to shut down. So I would float between the reality of my led lit room and the wonderland of the subconscious. It’s frightening. One night I dreamt or imagined or thought up – who the fuck knows – something disturbingly interesting. In it, the missionary pastor of the congregation I sometimes go to turned out to be evil. He’s here not because he loves God nor the people he serves. He’s here because he’s a reject from his past life and he needs to feel important again. I figured him out and he wanted me erased from the community he now controls to contain the breach. So we had a duel, and endless duel. It was better than the original Matrix and it would teach Jet Lee a move or two. Then I was back in my dark room, but the next second there I was again back in the duel. I would get tired of it and shift back to consciousness, but then it would pull me back to finish the duel. It’s almost as if I could control the dream or whatever, but I couldn’t. It felt like for once I was in touch with my subconscious. My body was laid there motionless but my state of mind was almost fully alert. It’s been like that for a few nights now, with various twisted (made-up) dreams. I’m starting to think if there’s a demon in my head, or if the doctor injected a nanobot into my brain ten years ago when I had a knee surgery.
I remember when I was little. I would lie down and fall asleep almost instantly. And the dreams I had back then were actual dreams, not some made up or mixed up shit borrowed from my daily experiences. Back then dreams were beautiful. They were hopeful. They were divine.
I have whored myself to the reality of my virtual life.
Hi my name is JErm and this is my blog. I'm just a simple guy living a simple life on a simple island.
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brilliant writing. totally unexpected, JErm, but i like that it’s so personal.
it’s actually transfluenced if you allow me.. you were my inspiration.. but i’m far from being even close to proper..
awww. there you go again, flattering me like crazy.
it’s like an addiction i will never liberate myself from.. not that i’m not glad for though..
Hi JErm, If you don’t mind I will try to repay you for the tremendous comment you put on my blog today. I’m not a half-assed bad interpreter of dreams. In fact it’s my favourite thing. If I could make a living at it, that’s all I would do. So I thought I would attempt yours.
First an observation. The first dreams of the night usually are only about what happened during that day, then less so as the night progresses, until the last one or two are usually symbolic of your life in general, how it’s going (what your subconscious feels about it). In this case, the visual look of the duel is something taken from the movies you watch, and since you watch a lot, it’s partly todays stuff and partly a deeper part of you now. But the rest is certainly heavier, long-term stuff. But since it’s in your first dream, and not the last where it should be, or more importantly, since it’s on the edge of wakefulness and of being asleep, it is for one thing emphasizing that this is very important stuff and you better take notice. What it is doing is preventing you from forgetting it, or ignoring it. This is very rare but I’ve had it and it always is heavy stuff, like a serious warning.
Something I would like to emphasize is that your subconscious is always looking at how your life is going, your real life, in terms of the deep aspirations you’ve always had, but maybe slowly grew away from. That sort of thing. On the other hand, any person’t waking life, their conscious life, campared to that is the fantasy. Most of the time people try to distract themselves during the day from how they really feel about themselves. But the subconscious keeps its eyes open, and sees and records very clearly. That record is illustrated in your dreams.
In this case, the pastor and his congregation are visual symbols (found in the daytime world you live in) that your subconscious has used to represent its view that your life is similar in the sense of being fake, with a congregation of your own in a fake world (as you discovered about him). I suppose that means you with your website and us as your congregation. Somehow you are being a fake, and your subconscious knows it. As the dream says, you are simply trying to feel important because you were rejected before. You are not the real person who you know yourself to be and inside you want to be.
Anyway, your inner stress about this has gotten so bad that your subconscious is battling the fake you. It doesn’t really battle it, of course, because you are the same person, but it is presenting you, the conscious person with the spectacle of the battle, so that you will see clearly the two sides. Basically it is telling you that you had better take sides. You had better get rid of the fake and be who you are. There is no point in it doing this in a regular night dream because your conscious mind wouldn’t see it. This is a battle between your subconscious mind and your conscious mind, so it has to wake you up during the dream so that your conscious mind can partake. It must be so desparate that it will not let you sleep until you’ve resolved the conflict.
You should think about the other waking dreams you mentioned and see if they relate to this interpretation too. They probably do. They may be other ways of seeing the same conflict. The subconscious mind is a genious at coming up with endless symbolic stories all saying more or less the same thing. That’s how it speaks, in visual stories. It can’t speak in words because it resides in the half of your brain that is visual and contains no words (although it can fish for words when it needs to).
Another thing. This battle between fakery and genuineness is something everyone goes through. We are such self-conscious critters that it is just about impossible to tell the fake from the genuine. What must have happened to you is you were terribly humiliated in some way, making you feel deeply like a fake. It may have been so unbearable you had to slam the door and leave. That sort of thing. Your subconscious learned from that humiliation and believed the story because it hurt so much.
What I would suggest is to think deeply about yourself. Take some time off from the computer (the fake world) to do it. Thinking deeply is something you can do that your subconscious will take seriously as being an action. It will see that you have taken sides against the fake person. And so you will have. Thinking deeply is THE way of being genuine.
Wow Stan thanks for taking the time to interpret my dream!
It’s funny you said that about the fakery. The Battle in My Head, which I use as the title, is exactly what you scanned off my humble post. I was secretly writing about how my mind always conflicts with itself, the conscious and the sub. They’re always fighting each other off, day and night, sleeping or not. What’s interesting, and sometimes freaky, is that I choose to enter this mind mode. Because normally when I keep busy with work and other stuff, my mind won’t even come close to such a battle. But it would forever knock on my scalp for notice. So one day long long ago I chose to indulge, and I guess that’s when the battle started.
What startled me is, that you were able to capture my intent so vividly with your words. I didn’t unravel the story to begin with not necessarily because I tried to be fake around here, but merely for privacy’s sake. So yeah, you unclothed me, and I feel cold now.
And it’s true yes, everyone has to cover themselves with something sometimes, especially in this fake world we call the wordlwideweb. The truth is, it’s about the only place you can be free, totally free. But there’s beauty in covering, for most often the real self is nothing to be proud of. So as much as you were right about the fakery, you slightly got it the other way around. As for me, I’m more real than ever online than in real life.
This brings in another question, why do I fake my fakery? And why do people?
Maybe then your dreams aren’t talking about your online life at all, but you other life, lwhich would make more sense because it’s the life of living with real people that’s so hard. The online life is practically like more sleep in comparison. Definitely think deeply about thinking deeply, and try to uncover exactly how you are being a fake in your day life, or at least how your subconscious whould have gotten that idea.
Well there’s a lot going on in real life that I’m not happy about. I don’t think I try to fake anything but since life seems fake to begin with I guess it’s normal if it seems like I’m acting fake in response.
I do think deeply, and that’s when the battle goes on, most of the time anyway. I can walk around like a robot when I’m in this mode.
You’re getting me baffled, JErm. Are you sure someone close to you, or from whom you wanted to gain respect, didn’t seriously insult you in some way connected to the meaning of this dream? It may not have been recently. It could have built up over time in your subconscious. Or it could have been shortly before these dreams began.
I’m afraid I’m changing my mind back to my original idea about where the fake world is, I think. You said that the virtual world can’t be where you are fake because you feel free here, and more real than you are in real life.
Well, here’s something to think about. You know the people who play Everquest and the other online games? They feel they are being real while they are playing. They are relating with other real people, chatting with them, and bonding and so on. Beating them to a pulp even. However, the setup is fake. The entry into it, and the steps you take are all fake. The business of conquering, increasing your strength, beating others and gathering others behind you, is all fake. Yet that is the main thing that is happening. You have to compare someone trying to climb the social pyramid in Everquest with him trying to climb the social pyramid in his city. Then it’s easy to see that in climbing the Everquest one, he is escaping the reality of the other. In fact, he has completely dropped out of the other, the REAL pyramid. He is in fact playing with toys in his room. Zooming with his little plastic airplane. In this sense you could say that you are playing at being important in this virtual world, to make up for your humiliation and fear of the real one, which is what you said at the bottom of your post. And which the battle in the dream implies. Your subconscious is saying that you are playing at being important, like a boy fantasizing being grown up, instead of actually trying to be important in the real world, which is where your subconscious (and therefore YOU) see real importance to lie.
Maybe you weren’t humiliated outright. Maybe your father, or someone in that kind of role, in subtle ways made you feel he didn’t think you would ever amount to anything, whereas amounting to something is all that matters to him. And so the more you dug yourself into the easy virtual world and away from the real world, the more your subconscious began to get anxious that your father was right. And so it wanted out. If that’s the case, the answer may lie in actually trying to make some headway in the real world that your father values. Or maybe in convincing him that you are making headway – that he just doesn’t understand the kind of headway you are making. Because if this is true, then pleasing your father is really all that matters to your subconscious.
Where I am, life isn’t real. For a while I fantasized myself living in it. I had good friends, many friends. In the end, they were all fake. The web is real to me because it’s where my life is. I make a living there. It’s where my money comes from. Without it, I’m as good as a brain in a vat. So yeah, we’re getting things mixed up here.
But one day, I will return to civilization, and I will agree with mankind’s definition of real once again. Until then, this is as real as it will get.
Everybody gets hurt sometime, it’s only natural. In the case of my dream, I’m not sure if pain has anything to do with it. On the contrary, it’s pretty real since I found out just now that my pastor was rejected from his past congregation. I’m sure he’s not evil though, that might’ve come from a different story in my life. Something neither you or me have mentioned in this conversation yet.
interesting. reality is extremely debatable, i’ve found out. it’s like insanity. there is a certain group where all the standards and definitions come from. but who knows which is which. we’ve only ever heard one side of the story.
Two sides.. the other one of our own. But there’s so many sides of it two will never suffice for greater knowledge.. or heck.. satisfaction!
I’ll tell you what’s real: That big boulder you just posted!!
Oh and the tsunami.. unless of course someone’s making that up!
Sorry to keep going in rounds, Stan. I guess some things are best kept hidden.
I enjoyed this. I have one of my dreams planned for a post coming up sometime soon. Then you get to rip me to shreds. Ha ha!!
Yeah this was interesting.. I can’t wait to disect your subconscious product!
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