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Nov. 2, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:07
488 Paralysis in Flames - A Dream Sequence Analysis

How 3 dreams from a single listener tie together thematically and metaphorically

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well, Estef. 8.36 on November 2, 2006, a few minutes just before I start my drive.
So I thought we'll start with a dream analysis, and I haven't read this one yet, so we're going to do a dream analysis.
And this is going to be live.
I have no chance to prepare.
So let's see what happens when I'm shot out of the cannon.
Let's find out where we land, shall we?
So this is from a lady who is a poster and it goes like this.
The latest dream of a couple of nights ago was as follows.
One. I was driving on a familiar roadway.
I traveled in the past where I used to live.
I was thinking of going straight across the intersection but then changed my mind.
I backed up and turned around in a strip mall, which I did not need to do, only to turn left and head west.
I then realized that there was some commotion ahead and only kept going.
All of a sudden I'm driving into a fire, a huge, huge, huge fire, very intense.
I don't turn around, I just keep going, and I'm amazed at how vivid the picture of driving through flames that are engulfing me are.
I keep driving and realize I am starting to burn, yet there is no sensation of how this pain might feel.
I just keep going, and I'm trying to steer the car when I realize I'm going into a skid, so I steer into it, trying to control the car.
Thinking the fire must end soon and I would drive out the other side of the fire and come out of it.
I don't ever do that and next thing is I'm at the hospital.
Question mark. Hairdressers.
I know this is retarded. Everyone is trying to get me to lay down and they all want to help but the doctor I want to help me is not in on Mondays.
Sort of like a hairdresser that doesn't work on Mondays.
Anyway, it just gets convoluted after that and I wake up.
I had this one right after listening to the Megan Dream podcast.
It's one I did recently. The heart is an organ of fire.
I think it's called. I can't remember the number. Two.
Second Dream. The one before this was about Rick.
And we were sitting on a couch and above us was a window.
There were shots, and Rick was hit three times.
He was not slowed down by the shots, but was ready to take himself to the hospital.
And I was going with him.
But I got the feeling he was okay, and I went on trying to do something else.
I can't remember what. And that's about it.
I was a bit like...
I had something on my mind that I had to do, unable to focus on any of them.
The dream just ended like that.
Number three. The most bizarre dream was about one month ago, before I made the decision to stop homeschooling and put the kids into French immersion.
Rick and I went out to get away.
It seems like we had a lot of people at our house, and the interruptions were so much that we were not able to be intimate with one another.
So we set out to get a hotel.
We get to this hotel, and it's as tacky, and the place is clean, but decked out with red and white.
The whole place down to the pens and phones are red with white desk and walls.
Oh yeah, and tacky red shag.
Anyway, we are heading to our room, and we get stopped, and later interrogated by this bellman-slash-cop person who thinks I have drugs.
Next thing I do is start to flirt with the guy, thinking, this will help us.
The guy tells me I need a coffee.
I decline, and he says, I will get one now, so I do.
All the while, I am playing with the now-appearing uppers ECT in my pocket, question mark, question mark, question mark?
Oh, uppers, etc.
Sorry, I guess they were not there before.
Now he takes us to a room, large, like a banquet room.
There is a wedding going on, and we are made to sit down, implied that we have no choice.
So we sit there, and the guy proceeds to introduce me to his twin brother and three kids, two boys and one girl, whom is the boy's girlfriend.
Who is the one girl who is the boy's girlfriend?
Sorry, yes, he's got two kids and there's one girl who's the boy.
As I check out the place, I see the bride and groom, but not so I notice anything about them.
I just notice they are there, and beyond them, an altar and a baseball field with a beautiful lake further back.
All this, and we are in the banquet room.
The altar is decorated with followers.
Flowers, I think she means. The altar is decorated with flowers all over the cloth, and the cake is also decorated with the flowers.
Next thing I know, I am at the dryer, dyeing my skirt, because it had got wet.
And when I get back to the room, there's been a massacre, and lots of people are dead.
I don't see them, I just get a sense that it has happened.
And when the crazy man that did it sees me, he sends me off to the corner, where people are, and they tell me that it happened, and that some other people have been moved to the adjacent room.
All the while I have a vague feeling, where is Rick?
But I never really actualize it.
Then I attempt to talk the madman out of killing himself, and see he has two guns, one silver and one gold, old-fashioned.
He picks one up to use it, to blow his brains out, and it won't fire.
He next picks up the gold one, and I am still trying to work very hard to say something to stop him.
It's like he is thinking about my words, and while doing so, is playing with an ice cube in a bussing tray with the end of the gun.
I do something else, like look away or walk away, and now the cop-slash-bellman guy takes him down, and all is over.
The people from the other room come out, and I'm so relieved to see...
You would think it was Rick, but no, it is a friend from the past that I have not seen for ten years.
Our friendship was not very long, maybe a year or two, and ended not great, and with no confrontation or talking, just me realizing she didn't want our friendship anymore and being right about that.
Well, that's a bunch.
Pick the one that works for you, and they're all kind of bizarre to me, yet I feel like I understand them somewhat.
I'm like that a lot.
Things are not super clear to me intellectually, but instinctively, intuitively, I just know I've got to move into a new direction and begin to examine my life.
And what is going good and what needs some attention?
Then I find something to make it better and do it.
We have been doing a body cleanse and I wonder if this is part of the weirdness.
We are clearing yeast and the naturopathic doc says you can experience flu-like symptoms.
I have been feeling odd and fuzzy in the mind.
I'm a little worried, insecure, about putting it all out there for your analysis, but I am...
But yet I am intrigued by your insight and honesty so much that I had to try.
I'm grateful for all that you are doing.
I appreciate all you do. It is really helping me to find the direction I need to go to learn more.
This is important so myself and Rick can raise informed, healthy, aware, critical thinking children.
Sincere thanks, listener. Sincere thanks, listener.
Well, these are fantastic dreams.
Very powerful. You're quite right that they need further analysis.
Now, I either don't have or can't recall whether or not I have a lot of history on this woman, but I will sort of try and make a decent stab at having a look at this dream, because there's, I think, commonalities enough with some dreams that I've had in my life and some dreams that Christina's had in her life.
And so I think it's well worth going over these.
I'm going to be driving, so I won't be able to refer to them quite as much as I'd like to, sort of individually, but let's go for a swing and see what happens.
Now, the first thing that I get about this is that there's a general theme that follows this way from these dreams so you can let me know if this means anything to you but what I'm getting from these dreams in a very strong way is that there are indications of danger and these indications of danger are ignored and after these indications of danger are ignored things get a whole lot worse And I think that's a very,
very important thing to understand about these dreams.
This is a very common thread.
And I'm not going to imagine why these feelings of danger are ignored and why a path is taken that leads to real risk.
The general emotional state that I get from these dreams is a dissociation and a helplessness in the face of growing risk.
So I think that's very important to understand and to sort of think about in your own life.
There is a historical thing that we all get from our childhoods, which I think is very important, which is that, you know, we're street-proof, but we're never foo-proofed, so to speak, family of origin-proofed.
But we are not taught as children how to, within our own families, how to proactively work to avoid danger.
And that's something that's really worth meditating on.
It's really worth thinking about because it is so essential to our own development to recognize that our capacity to avoid danger in our lives, to identify, to prevent danger, to avoid danger, is incredibly stunted and repressed and broken when we are children with regards to our family.
This is, of course, almost entirely because the source of danger that we're facing is our own family, which we can do nothing to avoid, right?
So, I would guess that this woman went through a family situation where there was danger of some kind or another, either emotional or physical violence, and...
She was not allowed to take the steps that would be required to protect herself.
In fact, the moment that she took any steps to protect herself, she would be further attacked.
Now, the body has sort of two or three primary defense mechanisms, two of which are related.
The fight or flight, we all know.
We've talked about that before. But the flight can be, has sort of two aspects.
It's physical or mental, right?
So when we are put in a situation of danger, there's a difference between attack and torture.
At attack, you know, the bear jumps at us and we climb a tree, we run away, we hit it with something, we do that, you know, what one man can do, another man can do.
We can hold the spear and let the bear fall on it or whatever.
And... That's the natural, healthy response to an attack.
Now, the other kind of thing that we...
Sorry about my voice. I've got a little bit of a cold going down.
But... The other thing that occurs for us when we are in a situation of torture, in other words, where our movements are restrained, but we are attacked.
That doesn't occur in nature.
There's no torture in nature.
Torture requires the elevated moral sense of mankind to be achieved.
And then we face another kind of flight, or we are provoked into another kind of flight, and there's no dishonor in it.
There's no personal responsibility or blame.
It's simply what you do in a situation to survive, and it's the healthiest thing you can do.
It's when you're in a situation where you're being both attacked and restrained, or in a situation of torture or in a situation of family relations where there's emotional, sexual, or physical abuse.
You are both attacked and restrained, and the inevitable result is dissociation.
You leave your body, right?
So, of course, it's not surprising that this woman is doing body work, attempting to reintegrate her consciousness back into...
Her body because she has the habit or the risk or the danger or the tendency towards dissociation in the face of danger.
And dissociation in the face of danger does, of course, make the horrors that you're going through that much more bearable.
Because you kind of space, right?
You leave your body, so to speak.
You disassociate yourself from your nerve endings.
And it's the right thing to do.
I mean, it's absolutely the right thing to do.
I mean, if you're going to be in a situation where you're going to be tortured in one form or another for the next, you know, I don't know, 10 years or whatever...
Then, yeah, you're not going to say, well, you know, when I'm 30, I might have problems with dreams, so I'm going to stay fully present to all of the emotional horror that's going on in my family at the moment.
Who would make that? Who knows if you're going to make it alive?
So you do the dissociation thing, and that's perfectly rational, perfectly healthy, perfectly sensible, and that's your true self drawing itself into a little ball to hide and to attempt to retain its capacity for sensitivity by dulling the pain of the moment, right?
So that's an important thing to understand that occurs when we have these kinds of family situations.
And it's healthy and helpful in the moment at the time when we're children.
Unfortunately, It is not so helpful when we get older.
So the same dissociation from danger that occurs when we are children, that is very helpful, is not helpful when we get older, right?
This is the general problem with the time lag of defenses, right?
That they're useful at the time, productive at the time, and counterproductive later, right?
So that's something we kind of need to get a handle on and to understand.
You know, lashing out wildly is very helpful when the bear is on you, but lashing out wildly at the nurse who's trying to put stitches on you is not so helpful, although it's understandable why, you know, if you sort of wake out of being unconscious, that might be your first reaction, but it's important to tame it and to redirect it and to understand it.
It's hard for us when we're...
And this is just an efficiency principle from biology.
There's nothing wrong with it. It's perfectly healthy.
When we're exposed to continual danger, our neurological system, our biochemical systems, All stay on permanent alert.
It's called hypervigilance.
They all stay on permanent alert.
So if you've got a dad who you smell, maybe even coming in the driveway, you smell the scotch, your heart starts pounding.
And eventually what happens is your nervous system simply no longer goes into a state of relaxation.
This is not too hard to understand, I'm sure, and it's a perfectly logical thing for the body to do.
And, you know, if you need to tap for 23.9 hours of the day, you're just going to leave it running, right?
So that's what happens.
Our fight-or-flight and dissociative mechanisms, psychological self-protection, remains in a state of perpetual activation.
Hypervigilance then becomes the issue, and along with that comes all of the associated bowel disorders and sleep disorders and...
Possibly even things like arrhythmia disorders, all of the things that are associated with hypertension, perpetual stress, acid reflux disorders, and so on.
So that is, and for God's sake, don't take any of my medical ramblings with any seriousness, right?
I mean, look this stuff up yourself.
I don't need to tell you that.
You're all very smart people.
So this state of perpetual hypervigilance occurs, and What that means is that people can then become chronically angry, they can have panic attacks, they can be chronically afraid, but what often happens is that people end up being chronically dissociated.
I have this line which has sort of been running through my mind for a little while, which comes out of The God of Atheists.
It's a novel I wrote, available for donations of only $50.
And the line is that careless children Can lose mittens and gloves and hats.
As adults, they can lose entire decades.
And that's something I think that's quite important.
The sadness and loneliness that is associated with dissociation.
See the way that I did that antonym sandwich?
It's something that can really creep over you and steal your life.
It's like a ghost that's sort of feeding on you that you can't see it.
It's where the metaphor of the vampire works for so many people is this idea of dissociation, that you simply are not alive to your own life.
That you are passing by your life in a state of perpetual hiding, no longer from other people, no longer from external threats, but from yourself and from every passing moment.
And it's amazing how much time can vanish down this blank hole of absence.
And this is something that I think would be a particular thing to look at in these dreams, because they really are all about warning signs not being heeded, followed by catastrophes.
There is also a bit of a salvation fantasy in this, in the hopes that other people will save you from what your lack of sensitivity to the warning signs.
And we have a lot of this kind of stuff, of course, in our relationships, right?
So the dissociation and lack of attention to warning signs, which I only learned in my early 30s, so, you know, don't...
Don't feel bad.
This is just an examination of the etymology of a certain defense mechanism.
You're bad for being dissociated.
I mean, it's good that you dissociate it.
It's one of the healthier ways to deal with trauma.
Acting out rage is one of the less healthy ways to deal with trauma.
So, you know, you see these women and men who talk about their partners and this bad thing and that bad thing and so on.
And it's all when you sort of say, well, what happened on the first date?
You can say, boom, right there.
You know, that's exactly what was occurring.
There was no way that it was going to be any different.
You know, he's cheap.
What happened on the first date?
Well, he didn't pay. Well, you know, he wasn't hiding anything.
You just chose to ignore the warning signs.
That's not something that is that hard to spot.
And people are very honest with you when they meet you.
They'll tell you everything that you need to know.
We have no way and no habit for protecting ourselves, for having what are called boundaries or whatever you want to call them, for standards or principles or the discipline to avoid bad people.
Most of us feel like we're on sort of a slow, dreamy free fall through our life.
And, you know, sometimes we hit a ledge and we'll change direction and sometimes someone will come along or there'll be a wind which puts us in another direction.
But most of us feel like we're on this slow, dreamy...
Slowly turning, brightly lit, vaguely pleasant, vaguely frightening kind of freefall throughout our own lives.
And no decision that we make is really going to make a difference.
And whoever wants to spend time with us, we will then spend time with.
Whoever we feel sexually attracted to, we will pursue.
Whoever pays us the most money is the job we will take.
And none of this really has anything to do with making choices and having a real active purpose and goal and control of your life.
But we're not taught any of that.
I mean, we're just taught to... Let things happen to us and try and find, like a river going down the side of a mountain, the quickest and smoothest and least confrontational route to the end of our lives.
So we're just sort of running and hiding and ducking, but in a sort of slow, dreamy way through our lives.
So that is something that's very important to understand about your history.
And I don't just mean the woman in this dream or the woman who's having these dreams, but all of us, right?
We all have this tendency towards dissociation because...
And school, my God, let's not even get started on what school does to people's capacity to concentrate.
Oh, my God. It's just a nightmare.
It's a complete torture of dissociation and horror and boredom.
Or boredom is also a fundamental thing that occurs with dissociation.
And let's not underestimate, of course, the pain...
That boredom inflicts, ennui, inflicts upon us from our family of origin.
We're always looking for the big, amazing, powerful, horrible, you know, I got beaten and I got hit and I got yelled at and I got screamed at and I got this and I got that.
But I would say that certainly as adults, what's far more important for us to understand is the boredom and dissociation that our family provokes.
And it's not just because of our historical relationship to their abuse, but because there's no connection.
And things within a family are grindingly the same at all times.
I have this scene with Joanna in The God of Atheists where she goes over and has an afternoon with her family, and it's like a train on a track.
Everything that is said is predicted.
Everything that goes on is foreseen, and there's no substance to any of it.
It's one of the things that, well, anyway, you'll see if you hear or read if you read the book.
So, in this, the first dream, I'm driving on a familiar roadway.
I traveled in the past where I used to live, and this is, of course, an example of how the dream is setting up the scene so that it's telling you this is about your history, this is about your childhood.
I was thinking of going straight across an intersection, but then changed my mind.
I backed up and turned around in a strip mall, which I did not need to do, only to turn left and head west.
I realized the commotion ahead, but only kept going.
Then I'm driving into a fire, and I keep going.
And she's starting to burn.
There's no sensation of how this pain might feel.
Right? So you have a desire to go straight.
And then, for no particular reason, you change your mind and you go in another direction, towards a commotion.
So you've changed your course and you're now heading towards a commotion.
You don't know why you've done this.
This is the sort of dream telling you that you don't have any mechanisms by which to protect yourself from external danger.
That you're kind of blind and naked in a hail of arrows.
That you have no way of protecting.
You don't even have a little shield. There's no shrub.
There's no tree. You're out in a plane, naked, blindfolded.
There's a hail of arrows. You can hear them whistling in the air.
And the dream is telling you to wake up to the dangers around you.
And it tells you this by pointing out what happens when you don't, right?
So you are going in a direction.
You change your mind for reasons unknown.
And then what happens is you see that there's a commotion ahead and you keep driving.
And So there's a warning ahead of time, and then immediately you're in the danger.
And of course, this is an example of dissociation, right?
So when you have dreams where things blink in and out, where time sort of lapse occurs, like that time lapse photography, but with big jumps, that's an example of dissociation.
So you see this commotion ahead of you, there's danger, and the next thing, I mean, but you don't stop the car and turn around and say, well, I don't even know why I'm going here.
So why would I even bother with this?
I'm going in one direction. I change my mind for no particular reason.
I'm going in another direction.
I see this commotion ahead. I don't stop.
I don't turn around and go back the way I was.
I keep going. And, of course, partly one of the things that dangers do for us, right?
The true self is trying to work these levers way down in the bottom of our mind to try and get us to the truth.
But the false self has control over the emotions and perceptions.
That's the whole point of dissociation, that these things get disconnected, these plugs come out.
And so the true self can't get you to recognize danger until you're in danger.
But by then, sometimes it's too late, right?
This is the risky, not exactly three-point landing that occurs when you're trying to get to your true self.
Any crash you can walk away from is a good crash, and any growth, any contact with reality, the true self that you can walk away from is progress and growth.
But it's risky. So it's very vivid, right?
She's driving through flames that engulf me, and she's starting to burn.
She herself, flesh, is starting to burn.
So this is similar to this dream that Megan put out about the column of fire associated with romantic love.
And so she's thinking the fire has to end soon and drive out the other side and so on.
And then the next thing that occurs, right, so she's just blindly plowing on thinking that this is going to change somehow.
This is going to change somehow.
And then what happens is the salvation fantasy intervenes.
And the salvation fantasy is the next thing, she's in a hospital.
Right? So, she goes into danger.
She goes into danger. She herself does not make a decision.
She doesn't say, damn it, this is just getting worse and worse.
I'm actually on fire here.
I'm going to turn this car around and I'm going to get out of this fire.
You know, I'm going to, I don't know, imagine myself cocooned in a sheath of ice and I'm going to walk out of the fire or something.
There's no... There's no inner-directed purposefulness to what it is that she is trying to achieve here.
What happens is there's just this wink and a blink and she wakes up in a hospital.
And everyone is trying to get her to lay down and they all want to help.
But the doctor who she wants to help her is not in on Mondays.
So this may be associated with work.
There's a Monday there for a reason, but I can't tell.
Maybe because Monday is the first day of school when our kids go back out of a homeschool environment.
And so she's out of the dream, but she's not able to be healed.
The salvation fantasy will get you out of immediate situations of danger, but it won't prevent you from those situations recurring.
The salvation fantasy, and this is a bit more common for women than for men, is basically the idea that somebody will come along and make it all right.
And this is partly due to the fact that women are just dependent on men during childbirth and early child rearing and so on.
And so there's nothing wrong with this...
I'm trying to think of a good way to put it.
This... This dependence upon others, right?
I mean, this is the basis of motherhood and early childhood raising that you're dependent on other people to protect you and bring you food and so on.
And so there's nothing wrong with it, but it is a great danger for women to imagine that this is going to occur for their life in general, right?
Rather than specific material goods when they're young mothers, right?
So... So she's in a hospital, she's out of the fire, but she's not able to get the help that she wants.
So this is both a salvation fantasy in that I'm out of the worst danger, I'm out of the fire, but I'm not able to heal.
So this is a dream about the dangers of passivity.
The dangers of passivity.
And she's going in one direction, passively turns around, goes in another direction, doesn't ask why, sees the commotion, doesn't stop her car, sees the fire ahead, doesn't prevent herself from going in this direction, and then ends up in the fire, in the car, burning up, and still doesn't make as dreamy, dissociated, notices she's burning, but doesn't feel anything, just as Megan did in her fire dream.
This is an example of a great danger.
You're not able to process danger.
Which means that as a mother, not only are you defenseless in the world in a bad way, but you can't pass along self-protection paradigms to your children.
You can't people-proof them.
You can't foo-proof them.
And you can't also proof them against your own dark side and dangerous side.
That's the first one.
Then her husband gets shot three times.
And again, the dissociation shows up, right?
So there's clear danger, and I don't know what happened before this dream, and neither does she.
Oh, sorry, this dream came before the other.
So again, here's an example.
Husband gets shot, and he's dissociated too, because he's just saying, oh, you know, maybe I'll just tootle on down to the hospital and get taken care of.
So he is dissociated.
And the other thing that happens with the passivity that is all inflicted upon us as children is that we will take our cues from other people.
And this, of course, is absolutely required by people in government.
If they appear confident, stay the course.
If they appear confident, then we go, okay, well, I guess they're confident, so let's just go with that.
We just fall in line, like salmon in a current.
We just fall in line with the emotional patterns of others, and we don't intervene with our own.
And this is, of course, what we're taught to do with children.
We just fall in line. With the brutalities, bigotry, abuses, and angers, and dissociations of appearance.
We're not allowed to have our own independent emotional existence.
And so what happens is we just end up in this situation where we just fall in line.
This is conformity in a very fundamental way.
We just fall in line with the emotional currents of everyone around us.
We don't question.
We don't oppose. And why would we?
Because when we question and oppose, we are brutalized.
So why would we?
And that would be a bad thing to do, right?
So we don't... You don't put yourself out for fruitless pain, right?
I mean, that's not what healthy human beings do.
You don't put yourself out for fruitless pain.
And I guess masochists do, but they're really trying to reconnect with the original trauma that they experienced, but they sexualized it, so usually it doesn't work, right?
It's a continuation of the self-abuse because they can't deal with the original pain.
So her husband gets shot three times.
Now, in a sort of healthy, sane world, you would sort of jump up and scream and duck away from the window, and you'd call the cops, and you'd call the army, and you'd call the fire marshals, and you'd call the SWAT teams, and you'd call the hospitals, and you'd get an armed ambulance, and you'd be freaking out, and you'd be like, my God, what the hell's going on?
But because your husband is not upset, you take your cue from that.
So what this is saying is your husband is also in danger and your husband is also at risk.
And he's getting hit.
Something negative and dangerous is occurring for your husband, but he is not able to process it.
And of course, it would be absolutely astonishing if he was able to process it because dissociated people end up with dissociated people, right?
People of like self-esteem end up together.
You don't get a high self-esteem person ending up with a low self-esteem person or vice versa.
And you don't get people who are in touch with themselves Married to people who are not in touch with themselves, right?
So if you want to look at your essential nature, just look at your partner, right?
Everything that you criticize about them is part of you.
It's the part of you that you've rejected, which is why you're locked into that behavior.
So your husband is being hit, and he is dissociating as well.
And because he's dissociating, you're taking his emotional cues.
So what this dream is telling you is that you both are feeding off each other's dissociation.
So even where you get a clear sense of danger in a way that you get a clearer sense of danger when your husband gets hit by bullets than when you get hit by fire, because at least there's a startleness to it.
There's a like, oh my god, that's not so good, right?
So he's not slowed down by the shots.
He's ready to take himself to the hospital, and he was going to go with him.
But you kind of get the feeling that he's okay.
And, of course, you get that from his own dissociation.
He's just been hit by three bullets.
He's not okay. But he's dissociated from his own body and the own danger and his own sense of being hit.
And so he doesn't process the fact that his interests have just been smashed.
His body has just been peppered.
So... There's something on your mind.
You've got to do something. You can't focus on any of it.
So this is an example of a danger, a startling danger, that you're not initiating in the way that you initiate driving into the fire, because you want to wake up.
And the dream is saying, even if you can't feel danger, there's danger.
This is the whole gaining the elemental skill or ability to self-protect is to say, well, even if I don't feel bad, I can logically judge a situation to be that.
So in this situation where you have a fire that is burning you up, you can see the fire, but it's kind of dreamy, slow, kind of cool, pretty, like those multicolored car washes or whatever.
Even if your true self is saying, look, I can't get the feelings back from the false self because the false self's got a lock on dampening down the emotions, which is how we survived as children, I can't get a hold of the feelings.
But I can at least point out to you that there are indications that you're in danger, that even if you don't feel it, that you're in danger, right?
So even if you don't feel that your husband is really in a bad way because he's been shot three times...
The dream is saying, but there is, in fact, the basic reality that he's been shot three times, and maybe that's what you could cue yourself off, and that's how you could start to at least recognize the disparity between your emotional reactions and the stimuli around you.
So if your husband gets shot, but you end up kind of dreamy, that's a pretty powerful separation of stimuli and response, right?
And that's what your true self is trying to point out by sending you these dreams.
Look, you're burning up and you're not feeling anything.
Your husband's getting shot and you're distracted and dissociated.
There's a pretty huge gap here between the stimuli and your response that is huge masses and plains and mountains and valleys and continents of scar tissue.
And you need to start working on this scar tissue so that you can begin to have more rational responses and healthy responses to the external stimuli.
You've got to get that there's danger that you don't feel that's totally obvious around you.
And you can't just cue yourself off your feelings because your feelings don't work in this situation.
They've been hijacked into the dissociative vacuum of the false self.
So they can't give you the impetus you need.
They're disconnected. You're typing on a computer that's not plugged in.
And you need to understand, first of all, stop typing.
Stop typing. The computer's not even plugged in.
And start to notice that there's no plug.
Then you can start to take action.
I'm plugging the computer in. You get the metaphor, I'm sure.
But the first thing you've got to get is that your stimulus response is not working.
You're not even feeling when you're burning up.
You're voluntarily driving into a massive fire with the vague hope that somehow on the other side, things will be okay.
You'll get through it. You're totally passive.
In your life. And I feel for that.
There's not a criticism. I feel for that totally.
This is what you were taught.
Be gentle with yourself.
Have empathy with yourself.
this is all you were taught this is what you had to do to survive but you don't have to do this anymore you You don't have to do this anymore.
You can be alive to your environment.
You can be Awake to your circumstances.
And in fact, you must.
You must, for the sake of your children, wake up to your circumstances.
Wake up to the dangers around you that I can't even guess at, but are close.
Are close. When I was first married to Christina, three and a half years ago, We were going to go to Ireland for a vacation, and we were going to drop by my father.
Of all the mad things to think about, eh?
And Christina saved us.
Christina had a dream that we were in a hotel, and there was this weird, half-rotting man around in the hotel, and we were just kind of saying, well, that's kind of odd.
We should probably leave, and we were packing, and this and that and the other.
And then I went to the bathroom to get something that we'd left behind there, and then she opened the door, and then she got trapped behind the door in that sort of little sort of closing sandwich between the door and the wall with this guy's rotting green face looming around, and, you know, she woke up screaming, literally. And so, of course, as a good husband, I went, boo!
And this saved us. This saved us from a disastrous decision.
To go and see my father.
What a terrible thing that would have been.
What a terrible sanction and what a terrible repudiation of my history that would have been.
So she saved us.
She woke us up to the danger, literally, that I could not perceive and that she could not perceive.
Because I was dissociated from it.
It was very hard for her. One of the things that we do when we get married is that you become sort of a neural net.
Your emotional dependence then becomes very great on the other person.
That's great. Nothing wrong with it.
It's a good thing to do. But it is a risky thing.
If I'm dissociated, it's harder for Christina to wake up, which is why we had to have this terrible dream that she had.
And when she's dissociated, it's harder for me.
But we look out for each other. We watch each other's backs.
So this is an important thing to do.
And so this dream is certainly telling you this, to wake up and all this kind of stuff.
Now, I'll just touch on this third one.
I'm sure you can get the pattern as a whole.
So you're trying to get away from your kids, right?
There's lots of people at your house.
And again, this is kind of passivity, right?
Instead of saying to these people, instead of taking control of your home environment, where there's all these people around that you can't have any intimacy with your husband, you decide to leave.
You decide to leave and to go elsewhere, which is very passive.
I'm going to abandon my house, abandon my kids, not assert my own right to a space that I enjoy living in, but I'm just going to go elsewhere and end up in some other place.
I'm going to run away from conflict and dissociate.
Again, this is just running away from your home, and you end up with this tacky red and white...
Now, this could be a stretch, and I'm sort of aware that this is a stretch, but this is still tickling in the medulla part of my brain, but I do get the feeling that, I mean, colors in dreams are also, everything in dreams is highly relevant.
You could spend like two days talking about these dreams, but I won't.
But everything is, every detail is important in a dream.
So red and white, red and white, I think are very important, right?
Red, of course, is the color of danger.
And white is the mingling of all colors so that no color can be discerned.
It's a washout. It's a whitewash color.
It's all colors, right?
So I think it's important to understand that this red and white in the dream is a possible, I think probable, but let's just say with possible.
It's another clue, right?
That red and white are the two states, right?
So Red is danger, red is blood, red is trauma, red is harm, red is pain.
And you don't have any blending of these two.
What happens is you have red, and then next to it, starkly and only, you have white.
So you have pain, and you have dissociation.
Because dissociation is a too-muchness that results in a shorting out.
Too much emotion, too much horror that you can't act on.
So it's attack with neither fight or flight.
It's the response to torture. And so when things are too much, you shut out the details.
You shut out the pain. And so when all colors blend together, you get no colors.
So when too much... When emotional stimulation occurs that's negative, you get no emotion.
So this is, I think, where red and white kind of key in.
Because there's a reason why it's red and white.
These things don't just sort of pop up out of nowhere.
It's not random. There's no sort of random decorator in the bowels of your brain, so to speak, that's just popping this, that, or the other.
It's all very specific, and it's all very purposeful.
So... That, I think, is important to get a handle on, that even the colors are very important in your dreams.
And then, you're heading to Rome, you get stopped by this copper or bellman or whatever.
Who is dealing with you in a destructive manner.
I think that's fairly clear.
So he thinks you have drugs, and he plants the drugs on you, right?
So this is an example of a relationship, I think, to your parents or your family, right?
This is probably your father, who says you're a bad person, and then, what do you know, he's turned you into a bad person, right?
So somebody posted feelings about their father on the board this morning, wherein...
Sorry, let me just figure out my transfers here.
I think we will go to the collectors.
Or will we? We don't know.
Alright, let's stay in the express for one more little bit.
Sorry, I just want to make sure I don't lose my concentration on this very tricky dream.
Okay, one more exit. I missed my exit yesterday.
It's kind of funny. Anyway, so...
This guy stops you on your way to your room, right?
And the funny thing is, of course, here that you are trying, and this is sort of another example of how the dream is trying to communicate to you something very useful and very healthy, which is that you're trying to get away so that you can have some good time and intimate time with your husband.
And the dream is saying that that doesn't work, right?
So you have all these people over at your house and you can't have any intimate time with your husband so you decide to go away.
And the dream is saying with the red and white that that's the result of trauma and dissociation, right?
That you can't assert your property rights in your home and say, listen people, get out of her face, so to speak.
So you then run away but it doesn't work because then you end up in a situation where you have even less chance for intimacy with your husband because you're getting interrogated by this cop who's planting drugs on you.
So, running away from assertiveness doesn't help.
It doesn't work.
The dreams are pretty, I think, pretty clear.
Now, the cop takes us to a large room like a banquet room.
There's a wedding going on. You sit down and all that.
And it's implied that you have no choice, right?
So this is, again, family situations.
I don't know what this means about your own relationship with Rick, but it's definitely worth examining the degree to which it may be a continuation of your childhood history.
This would sort of be an indication, but I'm not going to guess on that.
That's fairly serious stuff, which you need to think about yourself.
But certainly let me know what you come up with.
So, the guy producing a twin brother, I don't know what all this means, and I'm not even going to try and guess what the twin brother means, and I don't really have time.
So you see the bride and groom, and that's all working.
And by the way, the traffic's very slow.
If you hear the paper, I'm not doing anything risky.
And you can see all of this stuff that's out there, the baseball diamond, beautiful lake, and so on.
And so it looks pretty, right?
It looks pretty, right? You've got a bride and groom who have no emotional content.
You don't have any feelings about them, which is important as well.
So you have this bride and this groom, and you also have this beautiful view.
You've got flowers. You've got cake.
You've got a baseball diamond.
I don't know what that means. Some metaphor that works for you.
I have no idea what it is. A beautiful lake, so it looks pretty.
You're there by force, but it looks pretty.
Again, dissociation.
Dissociation. You haven't sort of said to yourself at any point during this time, hey, this guy planted drugs on me.
He's forcing me to sit down at a wedding.
This is not good. I'm going to call the manager of the hotel or whatever and get this guy arrested.
You just sort of dreamily go along with all of this, right?
And then you check out of the scene.
You dry your skirt at a dryer because it got wet.
Maybe you had, I don't know, a peeing disorder when you were a kid.
Who knows, right? There's something that goes along with this.
Although this could also be birth, right?
This could be a metaphor for breaking water.
I don't know, but... So you dissociate, right?
So you have all these dangers, right?
The first danger, people are in your house, you can't be intimate with your husband.
You don't deal with that danger, you run away.
Second danger, a guy stops you, starts interrogating you.
You don't deal with that proactively.
You don't say, officer, what the hell are you arresting me for?
You've got no right to do this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Third danger, he plants drugs on you.
You don't do anything about that. You don't call him on it.
You don't say, I don't have these damn drugs.
You just pretend that they're not there, right?
So, next danger, you get dragged into a, basically, into a wedding.
you're forced to sit down, and then you have to pretend to be social by chatting with this guy and his twin brothers if nothing's happening.
Danger, danger, danger, danger, danger, danger, Will Robinson, and you do nothing about it.
And then you check out.
And then when you come back, there's been a massacre and everyone's dead.
The dream is telling you you cannot see the dangerous signals that are occurring around you and they're clear and they're constant and you won't act on them and the result is destruction.
In the first dream, it's destruction of your husband.
Three bullet holes. Bang, bang, bang.
In the second dream, it's destruction of yourself.
You get burned alive in a car and end up in some sort of weird, futile afterlife where you can't get a hold of a doctor.
Or even if it's this life, it tells you that you didn't save yourself and therefore you're not saved.
Third dream, a whole bunch of people get killed.
And there's this madman, right?
And this, of course, tells you that when people have taken away your ability to protect yourself by accusing you of crimes that they have planted the evidence of on you, right?
This is a clear example of what somebody talked about in a post this morning of saying that, you know, when I was a kid, my parents were constantly provoking me and I had this really bad temper.
And then lo and behold, wouldn't you know it, strangely enough, they told me that I had a bad temper and therefore I was a bad kid, right?
So they're not dealing with the provocation that they have themselves inflicted on this child.
So they've turned this child's temper into a rancid attacking bear beast.
And then they say, hey, there's a really rancid attacking bear beast in the house.
You are a bad kid for having it, right?
They accuse you of the crime and then plant the evidence on you.
That's how things occur.
And it's murderous, right?
So you keep ignoring these signs and the danger keeps escalating.
So now there's all this murderous stuff that's going on.
And now you still have a relationship with this crazy old guy.
Maybe it's your father. Maybe it's Rick's father.
I don't know. And I think if you remember rightly, you want to talk him out of killing himself and you sort of care for him.
But this is a murderer.
This is a mass murderer. And you still only have empathy for the other people.
Oh, this poor guy is going to kill himself.
Still no sense of danger for yourself.
No sense of like, fuck this.
I'm out of here. I'm sneaking out.
I'm getting out. You then sort of want to talk the person out of their sort of crazy, hostile nuttiness.
That's not, again, none of this stuff is particularly healthy.
You still have no sense of danger for yourself.
This guy is at risk. You're blowing his brains out and you want to sort of help him.
And so all of this sort of stuff I think is very important to focus on and to understand that the dream is telling you over and over and over again We're good to go.
There is something imminent.
And I don't know if it's the decision to put your kids back in French immersion school.
I don't know what occurred and made you change your mind about homeschooling and so on.
It may have been the right decision because you have things to work out within your own heart and mind that are still significant that you have not been able to solve yet.
And so it might be the right decision, but you definitely do need to figure out your own dissociation.
I don't know if you're in touch with your family of origin.
If you are, I would absolutely recommend that you pursue the vulnerability course that we've talked about here before.
Open yourself up to them and talk to them about how basically scared you feel that you can't protect yourself and how horrifying it is to have no willpower that you feel can affect anything in your life in a self-protectionistic or positive manner.
Talk to them about the frustrations and fears that you feel with regards to all of that and see what happens.
That's going to be one way that you're going to start to provoke.
You need to provoke the reenactment of these dangers within yourself, not through attack, but through vulnerability.
That's how you begin to recouple your emotional apparatus back to your sensual evidence.
You want to make sure that you end up with, there's danger, I feel danger.
Someone's attacking me, I feel fear and I feel anger.
We want to get back to the basics here as far as coupling up our emotions with our sensual stimuli.
Because you can't think through everything in your life.
Your emotions are there to help. And they were helping by decoupling intensely negative stimuli that you felt when you were a child.
So they really are trying to help. Honest to goodness.
But right now they're not helping.
Because in the past you had dangers that you could do nothing about.
In the past, you were strapped to a chair and being tortured.
And that's the definition of an abusive family of origin.
It's torture. It's not abuse.
I can yell abuse at you in a bar and you can leave.
Or talk to the bouncer or something, I guess.
But in families, we really are strapped.
Families are torture. We're strapped down.
We can't do anything. And so dissociation is the only course.
And of course, governments love that and priests love that.
Dissociation? Wow, that's great.
If you dissociate and can't experience danger, then I can keep encroaching on your rights and you'll never figure out that you need to do something about it.
Dissociation. You can't feel danger.
Fantastic. Sign up for the army.
We'll put you in training camp and you won't ever feel that this is a rape and pillage of your very soul.
Dissociation. Can't feel danger.
Great. That means you've got a lot of repressed hostility so we can use that.
Put a gun in your hands and have you shoot people.
Fabulous. Couldn't be better.
And so it's incredibly useful in the past.
It's very destructive in the present because now you're in a situation where you're an adult and particularly all the more importantly so because you're a mother.
And so now, as an adult, you can have an effect.
And I know it's creaky and it's hellish to turn this supertanker around, right?
It's stormy seas and you just kind of want to relax a bit.
You've felt you've been steering forever.
You've got a headache. Your eyes are tired and you want to let go of the rudder.
I got all of that. I know it's hellish and horrible to turn this tanker around and say, oh my God, one more damn change.
Ugh, forget it. But you've got to do it.
I mean, I wouldn't even be this insistent except for the fact that you've chosen to have kids, so...
You don't have that luxury anymore of choosing when to grow.
You have to for the sake of your children.
Just like you can choose to skip a meal when you're single, but you can't when you have kids to feed.
So I hope that this has been helpful.
Thank you so much for sending me these dreams.
I'm so sorry it took me a while to get to them, but I had to wait for a variety of things to sort of coalesce within My schedule, and so I hope that this helps.
Look forward to donations. It has now been six days with no donations.
It's the longest stretch I've ever had without any donations.
So when you get to this, if you could spark up the old visa, send me a couple of shackles.
It would really help with the cost of running this whole puppy and the good that I think we're doing in this conversation to the world.
So put your money where your soul is, and you'll be a happier person.
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