Dream entry
I don't often dream. Every once in a while I have a really vivid and emotional dream. I once ran across a hypothesis about dreaming, that our dreams are our minds going through scenarios related to our waking lives, in an attempt to run through possible solutions to them.
My vivid dreams, when they happen, tend to leave me with a strong emotional resonance upon waking. Sometimes I feel like I've accessed an emotion I feel like I've forbidden myself from feeling in my day to day life, under any circumstances. Other times I feel like my mind is trying to run a scenario for me that addresses an issue I face, but without me having any idea what the issue I face actually is.
Last night, I dreamed. I think I may have actually primed myself for an emotionally resonant dream by the way I meditated last night. Just for a minute or two, I stopped worrying altogether about whether or not I was breathing "correctly" and focusing on my breathing "correctly". It was euphoric.
Part of the problem I face emotionally is that I self monitor at an emotionally unhealthy level. I don't think a single thing that I ever do is spontaneous. There's always that reflexive hesitancy, that need to feel like I have everything in me and around me fully under control, even as I'm aware that such total control can never happen.
After the release and relief of having no urge to force my meditation under control, I went to sleep and I dreamed. It was actually a kind of rerun of a recurring scenario I encounter in my dreams. I'm back at school, at the age I am now. In the recurring scenario, usually I'm either enrolling in school at a level that's ludicrously inappropriate for me at my age, like going back to primary school, or I'm repeating year 12 again in an attempt to improve my results, and finding it a struggle. This time around, however, that wasn't the focus.
This time around, I was at school, and at a level that was very basic, but I couldn't say what year. What actually mattered for me was that I was getting a test back. My mind decided that the way the assessment work was that the teacher marked the test in front of the class. The person before me got a very good mark. I was confident that I would get a better one.
Instead, first I saw the teacher mark me wrong on a very basic mistake, based on not reading the question properly. I accepted that. But then the teacher deducted 3 marks apiece from other questions, stating that it was a deduction for the fact that the answers were written in such bad handwriting. I remember not thinking that this was wrong of the teacher, but also being really angry about it.
At this point, my mind threw up a choice. Somehow I felt that I should respond to this. The teacher, sensing my anger, suggested I retain the test and use it as a guide to improvement in the future. What I wanted to do in my anger was to tear up the test and throw it in the bin, in front of the teacher.
There have been any number of times in my life where I can point to the same kind of scenario. I'm in a bad situation, a person offers some sort of advice about what I should do, or what change of approach I should take, in order to improve things. Yet all I can feel about being offered the advice is anger and resentment. I want to reject it. I don't want to do it pointedly, but I want to "do my own thing".
I felt the same kind of emotion in my dream: the desire to just reject what I'd been offered out of hand, combined with no ability to coherently explain why I wanted to do this. Only this time, I wasn't entirely incoherent.
The teacher asked me why I wanted to reject her feedback, that I should see it as an opportunity to improve. From somewhere inside me, came an answer, which appeared in my mind as the dream was dissolving, halfway between dream scenario and internal monologue: "why can't anybody like me as I am now?
I woke up feeling like I'd finally admitted to myself something really important. It's hard to let in what that is, hard not to force myself to connect to it through force of will rather than through emotional openness. I have a lot of questions about what, if anything, various aspects of the dream presentation actually mean. But I do feel, very strongly, that I've let out something important. It's something to do with why I would rather stay the same and reject advice on improving my lot than try to work on changing some action or some aspect of myself that people point out to me as problematic. I don't want to make myself different for the sake of others, and I think it's because I'm constantly, even perhaps subliminally, trying to force myself to think and act in a certain way for (what I imagine to be necessary for) the sake of others.
My vivid dreams, when they happen, tend to leave me with a strong emotional resonance upon waking. Sometimes I feel like I've accessed an emotion I feel like I've forbidden myself from feeling in my day to day life, under any circumstances. Other times I feel like my mind is trying to run a scenario for me that addresses an issue I face, but without me having any idea what the issue I face actually is.
Last night, I dreamed. I think I may have actually primed myself for an emotionally resonant dream by the way I meditated last night. Just for a minute or two, I stopped worrying altogether about whether or not I was breathing "correctly" and focusing on my breathing "correctly". It was euphoric.
Part of the problem I face emotionally is that I self monitor at an emotionally unhealthy level. I don't think a single thing that I ever do is spontaneous. There's always that reflexive hesitancy, that need to feel like I have everything in me and around me fully under control, even as I'm aware that such total control can never happen.
After the release and relief of having no urge to force my meditation under control, I went to sleep and I dreamed. It was actually a kind of rerun of a recurring scenario I encounter in my dreams. I'm back at school, at the age I am now. In the recurring scenario, usually I'm either enrolling in school at a level that's ludicrously inappropriate for me at my age, like going back to primary school, or I'm repeating year 12 again in an attempt to improve my results, and finding it a struggle. This time around, however, that wasn't the focus.
This time around, I was at school, and at a level that was very basic, but I couldn't say what year. What actually mattered for me was that I was getting a test back. My mind decided that the way the assessment work was that the teacher marked the test in front of the class. The person before me got a very good mark. I was confident that I would get a better one.
Instead, first I saw the teacher mark me wrong on a very basic mistake, based on not reading the question properly. I accepted that. But then the teacher deducted 3 marks apiece from other questions, stating that it was a deduction for the fact that the answers were written in such bad handwriting. I remember not thinking that this was wrong of the teacher, but also being really angry about it.
At this point, my mind threw up a choice. Somehow I felt that I should respond to this. The teacher, sensing my anger, suggested I retain the test and use it as a guide to improvement in the future. What I wanted to do in my anger was to tear up the test and throw it in the bin, in front of the teacher.
There have been any number of times in my life where I can point to the same kind of scenario. I'm in a bad situation, a person offers some sort of advice about what I should do, or what change of approach I should take, in order to improve things. Yet all I can feel about being offered the advice is anger and resentment. I want to reject it. I don't want to do it pointedly, but I want to "do my own thing".
I felt the same kind of emotion in my dream: the desire to just reject what I'd been offered out of hand, combined with no ability to coherently explain why I wanted to do this. Only this time, I wasn't entirely incoherent.
The teacher asked me why I wanted to reject her feedback, that I should see it as an opportunity to improve. From somewhere inside me, came an answer, which appeared in my mind as the dream was dissolving, halfway between dream scenario and internal monologue: "why can't anybody like me as I am now?
I woke up feeling like I'd finally admitted to myself something really important. It's hard to let in what that is, hard not to force myself to connect to it through force of will rather than through emotional openness. I have a lot of questions about what, if anything, various aspects of the dream presentation actually mean. But I do feel, very strongly, that I've let out something important. It's something to do with why I would rather stay the same and reject advice on improving my lot than try to work on changing some action or some aspect of myself that people point out to me as problematic. I don't want to make myself different for the sake of others, and I think it's because I'm constantly, even perhaps subliminally, trying to force myself to think and act in a certain way for (what I imagine to be necessary for) the sake of others.