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June 30, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:53
307 A Holey Vision

A deep-symbology analysis of a gripping dream

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Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph. I hope you're doing well. It is just before 8.
I have a job interview this morning.
And it's just before 8 on the 30th of June, 2006.
So I hope you're doing well.
And we're going to do a dream analysis this morning.
And this comes out of a post on the board, or a thread on the board, which says, you know, what the heck is up with dreams?
Now I, for one, believe that dreams are enormously important.
Guideposts and signposts from the unconscious to help you with your life.
So there's a gentleman whose pseudonym, we're going to call him Candy, we're going to call him Rex, and he posted this dream on the board.
Imagine a flat, smooth landscape made of a chalky white marble or stone.
It stretches around you in all directions for thousands of yards at least, but you can see the edge of the landscape just on the visual horizon.
You notice the sky has a pinkish-sunset hue, but it seems insignificant in retrospect.
Now, Imagine the landscape is pockmarked by rows and rows of perfectly spaced but tightly packed holes roughly two feet in diameter and four feet deep, like a connect-four board turned on its side.
You and someone very familiar to you, but strangely unidentifiable in any specific way, are standing in the centre of this vast landscape, and you know it is your goal to somehow reach the edge of this perforated field.
However, the holes are spaced so closely that traversing the gaps between them is treacherous, so you must proceed slowly.
So you look down at your feet, and at the honeycomb they are perched on, in order to make sure you are stepping carefully, and you can't help but see into the holes.
In every one of the holes you see a miniature horse submerged shoulder-deep in water and desperately trying to escape the holes.
Each cylindrical cell is far too narrow and deep for the horse to climb, and so they struggle and bay and winnie and vain.
There must be hundreds of them trapped in this landscape, but you can't bear the thought of abandoning them to their obviously tortuous fate.
So now you're paralyzed.
You can't proceed because you must save the horses.
You can't save the horses because there's just no apparent means of rescue, and you also know that if you don't reach the edge by nightfall, something dreadful is going to happen, but you don't know what.
And it's a great dream.
I stared at it.
Christina had a patient last night, so I stared at it all through dinner, puzzling it out.
It's a very complex dream.
And I asked for one clarification, which Rex provided.
I asked, are the horses trapped because of their size?
Are they too big for the holes? Are they embedded in the holes?
Are they underneath the holes in some manner?
And he replied, the horses are miniature.
And I don't know why the horses are miniature, but they're like maybe the size of a Rottweiler.
It's too deep to reach down.
From where I'm standing above them, I can't reach into the holes far enough without risking falling into a hole myself.
And there's no rope or anything like that around.
And I also asked how many brothers he has, and he has four brothers.
Okay, so let's take a tour through one possible way of looking at the dream.
Now, dreams can work from many, many different dimensions and many, many different directions.
So let's just look at one possible way of examining this dream.
Now... My accuracy is going to be questionable simply because normally in these conversations you have a little bit more back and forth.
So I'm going to have to use more universal symbology than personal symbology because I just don't get a chance to ask Rex, what are your associations with horses?
Have you ever been to a desert landscape like this?
And for me, most importantly, the most important question would be, what happened when you were younger with a Connect Four game?
Because that, I think, is quite important.
So, the first thing that we'll do is we'll have a look at the landscape.
Nothing in a dream is accidental, just as in nothing in a book or any other piece of art is accidental.
And so, the first thing to do is to look at the landscape and say, well, why this?
Why this rather than a jungle, than a cloudscape?
Than a palace, than a dungeon.
It could be anything.
And the unconscious is producing this particular symbology.
And so the first thing to do is to look at the landscape.
Before you start to understand the symbols within the landscape, you need to understand the landscape itself, or at least I think that's a useful approach.
So, I'm just going to go on this theory, and we're going to see if it makes any sense.
I'm sure that Rex will let us know.
So, the reason that I asked how many brothers Rex had is because the whole landscape, as he points out, is a Kinect 4 board.
Kinect 4 is a childhood game where you drop these little round discs into a vertical sort of, it's like tic-tac-toe, but you drop these discs in.
Now, here we have a landscape where we have four brothers, and the entire landscape is something that is, as he points out, a Connect Four, right, four brothers, a Connect Four game on its side that has become a landscape.
So Connect Four, to me, is very interesting because it is the illusion that we all have when we're young, and men with brothers, perhaps women with sisters, perhaps brothers with sisters, all I can talk about directly from my own experience is men with brothers, that we all believe that we're all connected and we're all close, and it's playful and it's, you know, challenging.
It's a competition, but it's all friendly and blah, blah, blah, right?
Like a Connect Four game.
So I think that this Connect Four game, probably played as a child with his brothers or with friends, has been co-opted by the unconscious as a metaphor for family relations.
Connect Four being the brothers, And the interesting thing about Connect 4 is that you don't actually connect anything, and everything goes into these holes, right?
So we have these holes in the landscape.
So you're sort of supposedly playing with your brothers, having fun with your brothers, so there's supposedly a connection, but in the actual game, and there may be some more symbolic metaphor of this game, maybe something occurred while playing a game, That was revelatory about a lack of connection, but I think that the landscape as a whole is that it is Connect Four, and that is, I think, something that is important to understand.
This is about family, this is about brothers in particular.
So, the second question to ask, before we even start looking into the symbology of the dream itself, is to say, well, how did I get here?
How did I get into this dream?
And... That's something that, in a particular environment like this, where he's in the center of this hole-filled marble landscape, of course, the question is, if it's hard to get out, well, how did you get in, right?
He's having trouble escaping this landscape because these holes are so close together.
It's marble. It's slippery.
Now, the holes are only four feet deep.
Rex is, I think, six foot tall, so he's not going to fall in and not be able to get back out.
But there are these horses down there, and because his nightfall is occurring, then he doesn't want to keep falling in and not make it to the edge of this area by nightfall, wherein something terrible is going to occur.
So the question is, since it's very hard to get out of this sort of maze, how on earth did he get in?
Now, I think that the...
The other important thing is the dimension of the holes, and we'll get into the holes in a minute or two, but the dimension of the holes is important.
They're two foot wide and four feet deep.
Now, this gentleman is six foot tall, and I think more than two feet wide.
I'm not positive of that, but I think more than two feet wide.
And so my particular thought on this is, well, how did you get into this landscape?
Well, I think that he's now outgrown these holes, right?
So the dimension of the holes is important.
There's no reason why the holes in the dream couldn't be 100 feet deep and 50 feet wide, or 6 inches deep and 2 inches wide.
So everything in a dream is symbolic, and everything in a dream has a purpose.
It's trying to tell you something. And so my particular guess as to where Rex came in this dream, where he came from, was from a hole himself.
So my guess is that he himself was trapped in a hole.
And lost in this landscape and inarticulate in the way the horses are.
And now he has grown out of his hole.
He's popped out of his hole.
And according to the math within the dream, where he's six foot tall, the holes are four feet deep, he's a third out, right?
So whatever journey he's on psychologically, he's a third of the way done.
And that sort of makes sense.
So to me, this dream has three components.
The first is, I've got to get out of the hole.
The second is, I've got to get out of this landscape of holes.
And then the third is, what am I going to do about the holes afterwards?
So, well, we'll get to that in a second.
So, he's a third of the way through his journey, his psychological journey here, which I'm sure began when he began chatting more about on the board and listening to lots of free-domain radio.
I'm telling you, it's powerful stuff, you know, I mean, not because I'm just some alchemical wizard, but simply because this is very deep stuff that we're working with, and the free-domain radio goes directly to your unconscious as well as to tickling your conscious faculties.
Now, the question then to me is, I don't think you can assume anything in a dream, and it's always worth looking at it from both sides.
And so I'm not sure that it's sunset that is occurring here.
He says that the edge of the landscape has got a pinkish sunset hue.
I'm not sure that that's sun down or sun up, and there's not enough indication except near the end he says, I've got to get out by darkness, but...
I'm not sure if in the dream the landscape is getting continually darker, because if my theory about the dream symbology is correct, then sunrise would be a terrible thing as well, as sunset.
In fact, sunrise would be even more terrible.
So, my theory then about these sorts of holes that are everywhere...
The first thing that he sees is these holes which he has to navigate between on this narrow slippery surface in order to escape this area.
And there's a time pressure involved here as well.
So this is a challenge dream, right?
So he's got a thing which requires a requirement of physical dexterity and care and speed, right?
So if he's got three weeks to get out, no problem.
He can pick and choose his way among the holes and so on.
Now, if you are in a hole, you can't see the other holes, right?
Now, I'm going to put forward the idea that there are three things in this hole.
That's not the idea. This is the fact, and the idea will come afterwards.
There are three things relevant.
There's the hole, there's the water, and there's the miniature horse.
So let's just say he was in a hole and he's popped out in some sort of macabre, alien kind of way.
And now, if you're in a hole, you can't see the other holes, right?
So when you're in your false self, your compliant self, your conforming self, you can't see anybody else's compliant, conforming self.
The false self is blind to the false self.
That's exactly because it's an excess of false self that causes, in your parenting or your siblings, that causes your false self to be created and to harden.
So once you're in your false self, you can neither see other people's false self nor any distress.
The false self is fundamentally cold and almost sociopathic.
It is a very cold and alien entity, no empathy, and it conforms with pleasure and it supports power structures.
All of the other emptiness around itself it supports, but it can't see any true self, it can't see any distress.
So when Rex in this dream, theoretically, I'm not sure if this is true or not, but I think it is, gets out of his hole because he gets in touch, he recognizes that he has his false self, well there's a horror that goes on when you first understand and outgrow your false self.
And the horror is seeing the distress and the emptiness of everyone around you.
That is, the price that you pay for your true self is seeing the pain of everybody else and the fact that they have no idea that they're in such pain.
So, when you outgrow your own false self, I'm going to sort of posit that...
The holes around Rex are the false selves of the people around him.
And it's not just a familial issue, although certainly it's within the environment of this Connect Four game, so it's something to do with family and brotherhood, but there are hundreds of these holes, so what he's conceiving of in the dream, or what his unconscious is revealing to him, which he already knew, of course, since he was a very little child, is that everyone around him is empty.
And treacherous. And his fear is that he's going to fall into these holes as he tries to get away.
Which is, of course, when you try and get away from the false self, you become a threat to the false self.
In your family, when you try and get away from the emptiness of your family, and we're just going to pretend that your family is empty and false self-y here.
We'll just go with this as a mental exercise.
When you try and get away from the false self, then the false self loathes and hates you.
Because it views you as a complete enemy.
Because you are revealing to the false self that it is in fact dangerous and deadly and you want to get away.
Stifling, crushing conformity and support for violence and all the things that go on with the false self.
When you try and escape, then the false self realizes that...
It is dangerous and empty, and in order to survive, it then lashes out at you.
Because there's two words that are used to describe these holes.
One is a hole, which obviously is an emptiness, a vacuum, a danger, and the other is a cell.
And, of course, the false self is both empty and a jail cell.
Yet, of course, it thinks it is virtuous, right?
Or it pretends to be virtuous.
That's the great danger.
Now, as to the water and the horses, Both water, and again, there may be personal symbology here, which I don't know about, so I'll just talk about it in a general context.
Both horses and water are generally symbols of the unconscious.
And horses are symbols of the unconscious, especially in North America, because horses are the only animals that North Americans ride.
And of course, when you are a rider with a horse...
You are in a symbolic relationship between the conscious mind, which is the rider, somebody who directs but has to cooperate with the horse, and the unconscious is represented by the horse, which is the body, the instincts, the gut, the feelings, the muscles, the motive power, the speed, everything.
So the relationship between a rider and a horse is often symbolically interpreted as a relationship between the conscious mind and the unconscious.
So, horses are a symbol of the unconscious, and water is a symbol of the unconscious, because when you're looking at the sea, it seems to be inert, it's a little bit of wave action at the edge, it seems to be dead, yet, of course, it's absolutely teeming with life.
It is the source of all life, and there is a great deal of energy and, to some degree, violence that goes on in the sea, of course.
Sharks eat seals, and whales eat krill, and all this kind of stuff.
And of course it is the source of all life, right?
We all came from the sea originally as organisms, so the unconscious is often represented by water and a horse.
I mean, there's other symbols for the unconscious, but those are common ones.
And so what you're seeing here, and Christina and I went quite back and forth on this last night, and so we won't give you the ins and outs of that discussion, but here you see a false self that has completely dominated the unconscious, right? So there is no consciousness of the false self in the people around him.
To him, sorry, to the people around Rex, the false self is not a false self.
It is the personality.
And the reason that we know this is both the water and the horse are contained within the whole.
The water and the horse are contained within the whole.
The false self is the whole.
It is completely enclosed, certain aspects of the unconscious, and there's nothing underneath it.
And this is important, because the dream could be anything.
There's no physical limitations on what can be represented.
The dream is like the nightly CGI paradise.
It's the nightly industrial light and magic.
That's what's going on every night.
So the dream, of course, if this was a false self where there was some consciousness of it being a false self in another person, then the dream would look very different.
The dream would be that there would be a hole, and underneath it there would be a cave, and in the cave there would be children trying to get out, or there would be horses that wanted to get out, but you couldn't get them out through the hole.
And so, in that case, the false self would be small relative to the chamber underneath, and so the chamber underneath would be, or there would be this big lake underneath this hole, or whatever.
There would be something that would dwarf the hole, but in this case, the hole is marble, or stone, is completely enclosing the unconscious, which means that the only aspects of the unconscious that can be accessed by the false self are those which it can use to manipulate others.
So in this particular instance, What's happening is as this person, as Rex, has emerged from his own false self, he now can look around this landscape and he can see these other false selves, and so he wants to get away.
Now, the reason that we know it's manipulative, that the distress that the horses are putting out is manipulative, is twofold.
One is the effect, because it's threefold.
One is the fact that it's inarticulate.
So, this could easily be a miniature child or a small child trapped who's saying, help me, Uncle Rex, help me out, and you could have a dialogue with them.
But it's a horse, right?
So it's inarticulate. It's blind.
It's not able to communicate.
And, of course, the fear is, since the horse is panicking, that if you fall in the hole that you might get bitten by this small ruttweiler horse or whatever.
So it's inarticulate, which is one of the reasons we know it's manipulative.
Another reason that we know it's manipulative is that the horses do not evince distress until Rex looks into the hole.
That's pretty important.
So when he's sort of standing at the beginning of the dream, and he's looking out across this Connect Four landscape, and he sees all of these holes, and he knows he has to get away, well, that's him seeing that other people are false self.
They're just lying to him. They're lying to themselves.
They're conforming, but they think they're virtuous.
They're just a total maze of emptiness.
As I said in a poem once with my brother, my brother is a hole with a hide of bright armor.
My brother is a hole, is a false self.
A hide is an external shell, but it's also the sort of slate of hand deception that goes along with the false self.
And bright armor, right?
It's shiny, it's glossy, it's impressive.
But it is to defend an emptiness, right?
It is a moat around a hole, right?
That's the false self, because it's empty, right?
So he stands up, he sees the emptiness of everyone around him.
Those are the holes. But the moment he looks into a hole...
The horse starts whinnying.
Because otherwise, everything in dreams is very particular.
Otherwise, he would stand up, and he would hear, or he would be standing at the beginning of the dream, and he would hear all this whinnying.
Because the horses would be trying to get out, and blah, blah, blah.
So he would hear all this whinnying, and then he would look in the hole to see the horses.
Because he wouldn't know where the whinnyings come from.
He'd look in the hole, and he'd see it.
But in the dream, the horse only starts whinnying when he looks into the hole.
This is entirely consistent with what happens when you sit in front of someone talking to them and know that everything that they say is a lie, mostly to themselves and peripherally to you.
And once you start using the argument for morality with people, they can't argue back because they're a false self and the false self is manipulative, not rational.
I mean, it knows the rationality cause-effect of manipulation, but not of reality.
It's a second-hander, right, in the Ayn Rand or Objectivist lexicon.
So when you start using the argument for morality, or even when you just sit there, you don't have to say anything.
If you just sit there and look at someone and know that they're lying to themselves and they're lying to you and that they're pompous and that they're empty, and you don't have to say anything, it all occurs in the look on your face, in what your eyes are doing, 90% of communication is non-verbal, right?
So if you just sit there and look at someone and say, wow, you really are a liar, and you really don't even have a clue that you're a liar, and then what happens is you start to sense the rage, right?
It's like when you're around a pathological liar, and I'm not talking about just regular false health here, but somebody really pathological.
Then the moment you start to confront them, you'll get the rage, right?
The moment you start to confront them on their contradictions, you'll get the rage.
Well, the same thing is true in the false self.
But what happens is that with the false self, when you just started the confrontation process with the false selves around you, which is not yelling at them or anything, but simply saying, oh, so you know the answer to these things and you've worked out all these moral things, perhaps you could explain to me...
Because I don't understand this and I don't understand that.
And it very quickly becomes revealed that the false self has no idea.
It's just using it to control and manipulate others, which is also an answer to somebody else's question on the board about my aggressive phrases, let's say.
So, the fact is, when you look into a false self, when you stand and you're higher up, right?
Because you're out of it. You can only look into a false self when you're out of your own false self, or at least to some degree out of it.
So, when you look into someone else's false self, what will happen is they will, in some form or another, They will emote distress.
This is, I think, a little bit more true of women than of men.
Men will emote more aggression, right?
So in the bottom of the Connect Four is a feminine thing, perhaps, which is his mother.
But I would need more information to make that determination.
But what's happening is he looks into the hole, and then the horses start whinnying.
That's what's manipulative about it.
So if the horses were genuinely in distress, they wouldn't care whether he was looking in the hole or not.
They'd just be whinnying. But he looks in the hole.
They start whinnying. And so that's the second way that we know that it's manipulative.
And so the first is that it's not non-verbal.
It can't be reasoned with. The second is that it only occurs when the horse gets seen.
It's like this old poem.
I can't remember who wrote it, but it's something like, a child slips on a deck.
He stands up, his father looks, he starts crying, right?
I mean, that's manipulative, right?
So if the kid gets up and dusts himself off, and then he starts crying when his father looks at him, I think it was a lifeguard in a swimming pool.
But anyway, that's the sort of example of manipulative behavior.
That's not the child's fault, it's just something to learn from the father.
And the third way that we know it's manipulative is that it paralyzes, right?
The whole point of manipulation is to paralyze.
So this person wants to save these horses, but has to escape by nightfall.
Now, if nightfall occurs, what happens is, and this is a very dangerous thing, when nightfall occurs, he is paralyzed.
It's going to be dark, right?
He can't pick his way through these holes without getting out.
And so when nightfall occurs, he's paralyzed.
And I think that the dangerous thing...
I don't know what the dangerous thing is.
I don't think he does either in the dream.
I would guess, though, that if the interpretation of the false self enclosing manipulative aspects of the unconscious is true based on these metaphors, Then what is going to occur is that he can't get out if nightfall comes because it's too dark to wend his way between these holes.
And so he's going to be really stuck there with all these whinnying, echoing, screaming horses.
You know, not good, right?
This is the Silence of the Lambs phenomenon.
And so that's one possibility.
If, however, the other possibility is true, or possible, that in fact what's occurring is daylight and not nightfall, then the terrible thing that can occur is that...
He is going to see that there's no end to the landscape, that the whole world is false self and so on, other than this shadowy figure that is next to him that is very familiar but strangely unidentifiable.
That could be one of two things.
It could either be his true self or it could be me, right?
I mean, not to sound pompous or anything, but strangely unidentifiable in a specific way is because, like, I'm just a voice in your ear, right?
It's not interactive and you don't want to see a picture of me maybe, but...
That's not really much to go on.
So, strangely, but very familiar is probably a combination of me and the true self.
It could well be the true self.
We're very familiar, but strangely unidentifiable because he's looking in the mirror, but it's an aspect of himself that's been lost for many years.
So, it could be me, but if it was me, I might be sort of beckoning or guiding because I've gone down this road a little bit further than some people, so I might be useful as a guide in that sense.
So, that was either the true self or me or some combo of the two, but...
And so, if it is nightfall, then what's going to happen is he's not going to be able to see people's false selves.
See, once you get out of your false self, the reason that I say you have to get corrupt and empty people out of your life is because now you're vulnerable, right?
When you were in the false self, you were invulnerable.
These false selves cannot harm each other because it's stone between them, right?
This is important as well. It's stone, right?
So it's absolutely impervious with the tool sets that he's got.
You'd need, like, I don't know, a jackhammer or something.
And it's not crumbly clay.
It's not... It's not chalk.
It's not something that you could scratch or crumble to widen it.
It's stone, right?
So it's impervious, right?
So it's a very strong defense.
And of course, it's a strong defense in those around him.
They're incredibly strongly defended because it is a stone hole, right?
So the false half is incredibly strong.
And also because it completely encloses the two symbols of the unconscious, the water and the horse.
And so there's no...
Like, it's impermeable, right?
There is no possibility of returning, of helping.
The false self has completely overtaken the personality.
And, of course, the distress...
And the funny thing is, of course, that the distress is both manipulative and very real.
The true self...
I'm not going to try and get into this as a definitive answer, but because I'm not concluded on it, maybe I'll put it out as a possibility.
The true self can't be killed.
In its entirety.
But what happens is when the false self dominates the personality completely, the only way that the true self remains is in agony, is in psychological distress.
This manifests itself physiologically.
It somatizes. So it becomes eating disorders.
It becomes depression.
It becomes sleeplessness.
It becomes alcoholism.
It becomes drug addiction.
It becomes physical fighting.
It becomes... It somatizes.
The pain of destroying or overrunning the true self with false conformity, the pain cannot be erased.
You can't get rid of it.
You can't cut off your arm and still have your arm, right?
You can't get rid of your true self and still experience pleasure.
Otherwise, why would we be bothering the false self?
The false self gets well paid.
The pain is real, the true self agony is real, but it is being manipulated by the false self into paralyzing anybody who sees it.
So in this particular instance, I would say, in general, that the analysis of this dream would be something like this, sort of overall.
You have now emerged from your false self, and you are standing in a landscape.
You are now seeing...
The Christ image of what occurs, and I'll do a podcast on the Christ myth as a whole, because it's quite a powerful one, of course.
But what's happening is...
You are seeing the pain of the world now that you're out of your own false self to some degree.
You're not out of your false self environment because you're still in among all these holes, right?
So you're still in a community and in a family that is false and manipulative.
But you're out of your own false self and so now you have a time...
Scale, you have a ticking bomb.
You have an hourglass situation because once you're out of your false self, you're vulnerable to attack.
People stay in the false self so they don't get hurt.
Once you're out of your false self and you're into your true self, then you're vulnerable, you're sensitive, you're delicate, you are incredibly robust, but incredibly susceptible to pain.
It's like the physical body. It's very strong, but very susceptible to pain.
And... If you experience enough pain, then what happens is you're very tempted to go back into your hole.
You're very tempted to go back into your false self, which is going to be a very difficult thing to do.
You can't unlearn a fact.
You can't not know 2 plus 2 is 4 anymore.
So you're going to get stuck.
So once you get out of your false self, you've got to start moving.
You've got to start cleaning up your relationships.
You've got to get the corrupt people out of your life.
Because otherwise you really are going to get stuck in a kind of agony that you didn't experience before because you were in your false self, right?
So this is why before nightfall or before daybreak or whatever is going to occur, he's got to get out of this situation.
And then, of course, once you're on the move...
Then the false self is going to manipulate you.
It's going to try anger and then it's going to try distress.
And the women are going to try distress first, broadly speaking, so to speak.
And the men are going to try anger first.
Either way, you are going to see a lot of pain around you, a lot of hurt, right?
Like, not real pain, because real pain would be true self, right?
But it's manipulative hurt.
Don't you know how much you're hurting your mother by not seeing her on Mother's Day and then your mother is sniffling in the corner?
It's okay. It's okay.
I understand. Like all this kind of crap, right?
This is these, you know, the horses that don't seem to have any problem until you look in the hole.
And then they start whinnying, and then you feel like, oh, I can't leave.
I've got to help these horses. But if I get into the hole, I'm going to get stuck there, right?
Well, of course. Of course, if you go in, if you fall for the traps of the false self, then you do get stuck in the false self of someone else, right?
Then it's called a fusion, right?
I don't want to get all technical on your psychological heinies, but...
So that would be, I think, a reasonable interpretation of this dream.
So what is the dream telling him?
Or what is the dream telling him to do?
Well, I'm not positive, right?
I mean, I'm not positive about any of this stuff.
This is just an interpretation that seems to fit with the evidence, right?
I mean, examining dreams is kind of scientific, right?
And you have to know that all symbols are there for a reason, and everything you need must fit with the whole evidence and so on.
Well... The first thing, of course, that the dream is telling him very clearly is that the distress is not real.
Because the distress didn't occur until he looks in the hole.
Because he didn't hear the whinnying before he looked in the hole.
So the distress is manipulative for sure.
Now, the other thing that the dream is saying to him, though, I think, is that he needs to absorb the pain of the people around him.
Now, this is a complicated topic.
Maybe we'll talk about it more this afternoon.
But if you don't deal with the pain of the world and absorb it, then you end up in the Christ myth.
Christ, of course, this divine being, came to earth and sees all and knows all and knows the pain of the world.
That man has fallen and everybody's a sinner and all this and that.
So there's the pain of the world.
And what Christ does is he takes action to remediate the pain of the world directly.
And what happens is, of course, he gets crucified, right?
So, I mean, this is one of the reasons why this myth is powerful is, yes, the world is in a desperately bad situation, without a doubt.
I mean, everybody's lost.
They're all conforming. The world is really corrupt.
You don't need me to tell you that.
I need to pick up the paper or look at Iraq or look at the wars all around the world.
The world is in a pretty bad situation, and the West is in a better situation, but not because of any thinkers alive today, other than a few of us, but mostly because there were better thinkers in the past, more honest thinkers in the past.
And so the pain of the world is a desperate thing to experience.
So once you get out of your false self, you then notice that there are false selves all around you in your immediate circle.
Now in this dream, this gentleman is beyond that phase.
He's grown beyond that phase.
He is experiencing that there are hundreds of false selves around him, all of which are empty and manipulative.
And he wants to save them, right?
You cannot manage pain by action.
You cannot manage emotional pain through action.
It's not healthy. It's not healthy.
Of course you can with physical pain.
You get your hand in a fire, pull the damn thing out, and go get some butter.
But you cannot manage...
Emotional pain through action, because emotional pain needs to be experienced as a learning situation.
So, in any paralysis in a dream, the paralysis emerges because of a false dichotomy.
Obviously, the false dichotomy here is that I have to save the horses, but I can't save the horses.
I have to get out, but I can't get out, because I have to save the horses.
Well... The third thing to do is to...
you can't ignore the pain of wanting to save the horses, but you are in fact trying to manage your pain by pretending you can save people, right?
So the horses are causing you pain, and I understand that.
They're in great distress, and it looks very painful to be in the situation that they're entrapped in these little holes, but...
In the dream, Rex is not experiencing the pain of seeing the horses.
So he's not looking down and going, oh my god, those poor beasts.
That's just terrible.
And I need to rationally process this pain.
And what that looks like is something like this, I think.
I mean, this would sort of be a way of rationally processing the pain of these horses in this dream.
It would be something like this.
Well, wow, these horses are really in pain, and that's bad.
And I don't want these horses to be in pain.
Obviously... I can't do anything right now.
Because, of course, the dream is very specific.
Even if you got the horses out of the holes, what are you going to do with them?
Their feet are wet because they're in water.
This is also very specific.
You are having trouble navigating because it's so slippery, you don't even have hooves.
You have shoes or feet or something, and you have hands that you can use to brace yourself to get out of this landscape of holes.
And so, even if you got the horses out of the holes, where on earth would they go?
They couldn't walk out.
You could try and carry every single one of them out, but you can't do that by nightfall.
So, a rational option would be, I would say, in the dream, would be to say, wow, oh man, this is really painful.
I can't stand to see these horses, but I'm going to have to stand it, because I've got to get out.
Now, once I get to the edge of this landscape, then I can sit down and I can figure this out without this emergency, without this clock ticking, this bomb ticking down.
I can deal with this in a rational manner.
So I get to the edge of this landscape.
I'm out of the danger zone as far as timing goes.
So now I can sit here and really figure it out.
Maybe at the edge of the landscape there's a rope or a tree or a plank or someone who can help me.
And then what I can do is I can start to deal...
With the horses in the holes at the edge of the landscape when I'm on secure ground and also so that I can pull the horses out of the edge and set them off trotting away on the landscape beyond the holes and they'll be able to walk away and at least I'll start to be able to save them from a rational standpoint.
But right now, when I'm in the middle of this and I've got to get out, I can't do anything to help these horses.
So the dream is saying to you, what you need to do is to accept the pain that the horses are showing, but not act to fix it, because you can't.
And if you act...
This is a false self impulse.
You feel pain and you want to act to fix it, right?
So somebody's crying, you immediately want to say, what can I do to make it better?
But not because you want to help them, but because you feel uncomfortable that they're crying and you want to fix it through action, right?
You can't do that productively.
You cannot productively deal with emotional pain through action.
So in the dream, the false self aspect, this is why this person is still in this landscape and this is why this person is not fully out of these holes, is that when you see pain or you experience pain in the outside world, And you have not dealt with pain within your own personality,
historical injustice or pain of some kind, then the great temptation of the false self is to project your pain onto the other person and then manage them physically.
Manage them in some top-down manner so that, you know...
And men do this really a lot, right?
And women do it through other methods.
But men do it sort of by, you know, fixing it.
I want to fix this, right? So...
So, for instance, there was a posting on the board the other day.
Somebody said, well, I have this really difficult co-worker.
What should I do? And then one guy just said, talk to your boss.
The other guy said, do this. The other guy said, do that.
Being curious and asking, well, why are you so susceptible to this guy?
Or does he remind you of anyone in your past?
All that happens is that they have difficult relationships in their own life, and they're just managing their own feelings of discomfort about those relationships by just telling that person what to do, like it's simple.
I'll just go talk to your boss. Well, the problem is that, of course, in this situation, there is no virtuous boss, because when you have a corrupt person in an organization who has remained there, it's because the management is corrupt, right?
You don't have corrupt employees without corrupt management.
It's... It's not possible, right?
Psychologically, it's impossible. So it's not just as simple as go talk to your boss.
If this guy's been around for many years, then you actually are heading yourself down a dangerous path.
So it's more complicated than that.
But generally, people, when they experience discomfort in someone else, they can't hold on to their curiosity because they have too much unprocessed pain within themselves.
So what they do is they try and manage the other person's distress, which is in fact managing their own distress, by just telling them to go do something.
Fix it this way. Fix it that way.
Okay, tell me about it. But then we're going to do this.
And, of course, that's not healthy.
It's not friendly. It's got nothing to do with helping the other person, right?
So in this particular situation, Rex is facing a problem in that he is experiencing a lot of personal discomfort.
He can't stand that the horses are in pain or in distress and so on.
And so he wants to fix it, but he can't fix it, so he's paralyzed and blah, blah, blah.
So the dream is saying...
Not, don't feel any pain, because of course you're going to, it's genuine that you feel pain, but don't manage your pain by trying to save the people around you.
It's a very, very important aspect of all of this.
Do not manage your own emotional pain by trying to rescue everyone around you.
It is absolutely false.
It is a total false self manipulation.
It is not going to do you any good, and it's a result of the manipulation in the false selves of other people, because you always get this inarticulate discomfort, this inarticulate depression, this inarticulate, sublimated...
The kind of pain that radiates off other people.
And they don't talk about it and they deny it and this and that.
Well, that's the horse in the hole.
This is the false self using the genuine pain of the crushed true self to manipulate you into investing resources and to keep you around.
And of course, these horses have been in there forever.
They're too small to have ever gotten out.
So the horses have been in there forever.
In this dream, right?
They don't get placed there, right?
They don't fall from the sky into these holes.
The dream could produce that, but it doesn't.
So the dream is very much saying this is a system, right?
There's the hole, the false self, the water, and the horse of the unconscious completely contained within the stone, and there's no access to the true self.
There's only the false self that you can get a hold of.
There's no connection between these things, right?
Because once you get out of your own false self, you do realize that nobody talks to anybody else.
This is another important aspect.
That what you think of as connection, connect for, right?
The brothers, the family. What you think of as connection is not connection at all.
Right? That there is no intimacy, that there is no connection between members of a family.
That's quite shocking. When you get out of your false self and you realize just how empty and ridiculous and vacuous human relationships are, then you start to see the pain at the bottom of that.
Because if everybody has these endless, mindless barbecues where they talk about the weather and what's going on and how the kids are, there's no sharing of ideas or passions or truth or curiosity or philosophy or values.
There's no exploration.
There's no talking honestly about feelings.
There's nothing like that.
Because everybody has this image, it's just going to turn into a tear fest.
False self views the unconscious as unstable and dangerous and sentimental and over-emotional and all that kind of nonsense, which is completely ridiculous.
I mean, unconscious is the source of strength and power and genuine pleasure and happiness.
But once you get out of your own false self, you start to see that nobody's connected and that they're all in pain.
So in this landscape, you stand up from your own hole, you start to see all these false selves around you that aren't connected at all, because there's stone between them.
And then when you look into the false self and you start to see the root or something deeper in the false self, you see all this pain, but it's just there to manipulate you.
It's genuine pain, but it's being filtered through the false self because it's enclosed in this hole, so it's used to manipulate you.
And then you look around and you see hundreds of these, and if you could look further, you'd see billions of them, right?
The world is full of billions of empty and horrified and agonized false selves, and that's why we have governments, and that's why we have religion, and that's why we have war, and that's why we have child abuse, and that's why we have idiots at work who are cruel and mean and vicious, and that's why we have divorce, and that's why we have all of the things that was why we have Abu Ghraib.
I mean, this is all... So, when you look over the whole world, you see the agony and the emptiness of everybody's relationship with themselves, which they don't have a self, right?
The emptiness and conformity and shallowness and mechanical and scripted and puppet-like nature of everybody's relationship with everybody else.
That's a hell of a lot of pain to absorb.
But you better absorb it, because you can't go back into your false self.
You've just got to look at the world and say, the world is in agony, and I can't save people by jumping into their holes and trying to get these horses out, because all that's going to happen is I'm going to get stuck and trapped in there.
And the horse, even if it got out, isn't going to know what to do.
It's just going to go fall into some other hole, right?
You get this slippery little horse on these little ridges of marble, they're just going to fall into another hole.
So you just get out.
It's like the airlines.
First you put the oxygen mask on yourself and then you help others.
You get out. You get out and you get whole.
That's the first thing that you do.
You get the corrupt people out of your life.
And then you see what you can do.
So I spent five or seven years, I guess eight years ago maybe was the last time I saw my mom, and sort of five or six years ago was the last time I had any kind of real contact with my brother, So you get out.
You get yourself established, right?
I mean, I got a new job.
I got new skills. I married a great woman.
And so I got myself stable.
Now I can help others, right?
Now I got myself stabilized.
I got myself out. I did my therapy.
And now I can help others.
Because I've worked through this stuff.
I've worked through my own pain.
So when I see pain in others, I feel sympathy.
But I don't feel a knee-jerk urge to rush in and help them because that would be me managing my own pain and I'm not going to pretend that I'm trying to help someone else when in fact I'm just trying to manage myself in a false self kind of way.
Now, there's lots more that we can talk about with this dream, but I think that there's a lot in the dream.
I think that dreams have an enormous amount of precision.
They have an enormous amount of help.
And I think that it's well worth, whenever you have a vivid dream, it's absolutely well worth.
We can post it on the free domain radio boards.
We can all take a look at it. You can post it anonymously if you like.
Just put your name at the bottom. It's hugely valuable.
If you have a vivid dream where you have a character in a dream, write down a pretend conversation with that character.
You'd be absolutely amazed at everything that you know.
If you look at Rex's dream here, the unconscious has seen the whole situation, so to speak.
The unconscious has seen everything.
Knows exactly what's going on, even knows that he's a third of the way through his journey.
And this is the kind of wisdom that you need to tap into.
This is the kind of knowledge that the true self and the unconscious has for you.
You just need to ask, and you just need to submit yourself to that wisdom, and boy, oh boy, will you ever have a wildly happy life.
So, thank you so much for listening.
I hope this has been interesting for you.
I'm sure that I will be corrected on any mistakes that I have made, and it's not so much the form as the content of what it is that I'm talking about that it's well worth looking over this.
This wasn't the easiest dream in the world to analyze, and I think it's an enormously positive and hopeful dream, although I'm sure it was difficult to experience as a dreamer.
But it is an enormously positive and hopeful dream because you're not having a dream about being in a hole with a horse or being a horse in a hole.
You're actually out and out and about, which is a huge step forward.
And, you know, congratulations on that level of growth.
Fantastic. Good for you. So, look for donations.
It's been two dry days.
Please break the spell.
Break the desert sun with some clouds of cash.
I look forward to that.
Please post on the board. Sign up for FeedBurner.
I look forward to listening to surveys being completed.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
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