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Nov. 9, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:05
499 Climbing To Behold the Horror of God
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Time Text
Hi everybody, it's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
It's 12.35 on the 8th, 9th of November 2006.
And the dream skeptics are provoking a dream analysis.
I'm going to read this. I'm just sort of sitting downstairs.
I'm going to go for a short walk. The reason is that I won't get a chance to read this anytime soon.
Certainly not this afternoon. I wanted to get feedback on this right away.
Because it takes a little while to read this.
Dream, and also some more information that the person has given me.
This is a person who does not examine his own dreams, and there's quite a debate on the boards at the moment, which I hugely respect, about the validity of dream analysis, and isn't it just kind of astrology and voodoo and so on?
Which, of course, it could be.
I've just found that from my own experience, in two years of pretty intense therapy, three hours a week, dream analysis was incredibly powerful, and some of the people who, I think most of the people who I've done a dream analysis on, I've found it helpful in one form or another, which again doesn't mean that it's true.
It's just that one of the things that I believe is that I'm an artist as well as a philosopher, and I'm aware that there's a lot of truth in metaphor, right?
A metaphor is the dreams are the moral tales of the unconscious, the moral art of the unconscious.
And again, I know that's a really fruity thing to say, and it doesn't prove anything, but that's sort of the approach that That I'm going to take.
And so this is the person who's writing in.
I will call him Bob. And he gives the dream and I ask him for some background.
So he says, at the moment I'm at university in the middle of my first semester.
My dad is co-signing my student loans, but beside that my family isn't giving me any financial support.
I work 10 to 15 hours a week in a food service job.
I am indifferent towards the job.
The biggest source of stress for me is that I have not been able to save the $80 a week that my dad told me I had to, and have only managed about $60 a week.
I don't spend a lot, $15 to $20 a week, but it's just about the extra amount that I need to be saving, and my father has always gotten angry whenever he found out that I'd spent money, or I do spend money, no matter how trivial the amount.
My classes are mostly easy, especially economics, anthropology, and English composition.
Geology is hard, but interesting.
I'm also in a vigorous water exercises course, which I both enjoy and dread, if that makes sense.
I am gay. I am not, quote, out to my family, but I'm sure they know anyway.
My dad is a preacher. I'm sure he doesn't approve.
Actually, I think he was under me from a very young age, say 11 or 12, because he used to take me on long car rides and tell me stories about gay people who died of AIDS and syphilis and other things to warn me not to be gay.
This seems a tad bit weird in retrospect.
Gee, really. I'm not in any relationship right now, but I felt a growing need to have one, especially in the last month.
This isn't specifically sexual desire either, which seems kind of weird to me.
I have a few friends here at school, most of them lady friends.
This is probably because the school is almost 80% girls.
I am a bit odd.
I always have been. My parents have thought that I am mildly autistic for a while.
This would fit me somewhat, but I don't care.
I think voices in my head.
I think voices in my head is a bit incomplete, but...
I don't hear them, but I think them, argue with them, etc.
I don't speak to them out loud, of course.
I have been using my school's free counseling service for just this.
I have never been comfortable talking to my parents about it, and my current course doesn't seem to be doing much good for me either.
I think that means of therapy. My therapist is good, but the doctor she referred to me to pretty much just gave me a list of medications to try, and then told me to pick one.
Any one. A bit of an exaggeration, but not really.
I don't want to until I know if I am normal or not.
My roommate is blind.
I posted an article I found about his brother shooting him this summer, and you all told me to ask for a different roommate, but I was too scared to.
He is weird. When he is not in class or eating his one meal a day, he is curled up in a funny position in his bed doing math in his head, or that's what he says he's doing.
I don't know. I don't like him at all.
He annoys me. He sometimes locks me out, so I have to find someone to unlock the door and then pretends to be sleeping after I've pretty much knocked in the door.
He also gets up every morning at 3am and does other nasty passive-aggressive things just like you guys said he would.
If you need any other info, I'd be glad to provide it.
Thanks, guys. Bob.
Not his real name. Now, the dream that Bob has been generous enough to share with us goes something like this.
My dad and I were hiking up a big mountain on a broad, steep path through the woods.
I was behind him a couple steps, but was keeping up with him.
We were talking, but I don't remember what we were talking about.
At one point, I decided to walk slightly faster than him, to show him that I could lead, and that I had more strength and endurance than him.
Just as I passed him, a bus station appeared, and he told me we'd be taking a bus to the top.
We got in the bus, he was near the front, and I was near the back.
Suddenly I had a store-bought loaf of bread in my hands, and he wanted to know how many carbohydrates were in a slice, so I started looking on the package.
I couldn't find the nutrition information, even after looking for several minutes.
My father got angrier and angrier with impatience and others in the bus started sniggering and laughing about one of us.
I couldn't tell if they were laughing at my dad for being upset about something so trivial or at me for being so dense.
Eventually I found the nutrition info on the card in the bag next to the bread.
The bus eventually took off climbing crazy steep paths until it got to this village that was full of trailers and a few nice houses.
It stopped and pulled off to the side because a firetruck and an ambulance, which I didn't actually see, were going the opposite way, carrying a boy who apparently got shocked by an electric wire after a huge tree branch fell on it and pulled it off its pole next to his house.
After the ambulance and firetruck were gone, the bus continued up the mountain, which seemed to have snow on it.
There were more and more nice houses near the top, nestled in the snowy world.
Finally we were at the top.
There was no snow, just rolling plains with a huge observatory, and also a museum or village set up to look like buildings from The Wizard of Oz.
I went into Dorothy's house.
It was filled with high-tech things.
I set my iPod down on a chair and continued on the tour of the house.
It had lots of levels with steep ramps going everywhere.
The guide said that This was because it was built right on the steep mountainside, but this didn't make any sense to me because it was supposed to be in Kansas.
At the end, he told us he had a surprise for us, so he opened a door that went down a steep well-lit staircase.
Big Bird was lying upside down on the stairs.
I decided I wanted to go, but got worried that people would think I was stealing the iPod I had left at the entrance.
Then, I woke up.
Alright, so now we can go for our walk, and...
Hopefully the wind won't tear up the language too much, but this is a great dream, and thanks a million-fold to Bob for sharing it.
And let's have a look at and see if we can't unravel some of the common themes and metaphors within this dream so that we can see if this kind of dream analysis that we've talked about over the last little while makes any sense or not.
Now, the first thing that I would say with regards to this dream is that this is a classic dream, in my humble opinion, of a son and the question of the relevance or the possibility of overtaking or superseding the father in the Luke Skywalker sense, I guess you could say.
And from that standpoint, You can get a lot of understanding about family history from this dream.
I think the first thing that's important to note is that there's a mountain which figures throughout the dream from the base of the mountain to the top of the mountain.
And at the base of the mountain is competition.
Competition between the father and the son.
And at the top of the mountain is an image of death and impossibility.
And so, I'm going to sort of step through it and then give the general theory at the very end of what I think the dream's about, but let's just step through it.
So, his dad is hiking up in a broad mountain, and the father is ahead.
The father is ahead.
Now, there's something about the relationship between two people and the dream that's very, very important, physical proximity and relationship, that I think is very important.
And... One aspect of that is if somebody is really very far ahead of you in a dream, then there's no competition.
Right? So, for instance, if you have a sibling that's like 10 years older than you, then there's not going to be a whole lot of competition.
My brother and I had mad and manic competition when we were younger because we're only two years apart.
So, there was some possibility of competition, but he was not so far ahead that...
That the competition was impossible, yet neither was he of an equivalent that the competition was even.
It was all sort of weighted. And there was a constant sense of frustration that sort of occurred to me in this sort of process of competing with my brother, which, of course, he engendered and focused on and so on as well.
So, the fact that your father is slightly ahead of you means that he's competing with you.
He's not walking with you, equal to equal.
He's not ahead of you, encouraging you and turning and encouraging you, but he's just walking slightly ahead of you.
We were talking, I don't remember what we were talking about, you say, which means, of course, that everything that is occurring between yourself and your father is occurring at an unconscious level because the dream is saying there's a physical proximity to your relationship that he's ahead of you and wants to stay ahead of you, which we'll talk about a little bit further.
But he also wants to compete with you.
For a parent to compete with a child, as it is for an older sibling, to compete with a younger sibling, is a revolting practice, entirely destructive, entirely false self, a horrible and hateful thing to do, and depressingly common.
But you are talking, right?
So you have this relationship with your father where you're talking about things that mean nothing, that have no relevance or bearing on anything, that are empty words, generalities, nonsense, how's the weather, blah, blah, blah...
You know, are you saving 60 or 80 bucks?
There's all this nonsense that's occurring, and there's no direct communication except in an oblique way, right?
So you're talking about nothing, but you're actually competing with each other very fiercely, or rather he's competing with you, which provokes competition in you and anger and hatred, because it is absolutely brutal for a parent to compete with a child.
It's a vicious undermining of the child's sense of self-esteem.
So you...
You decide not to say anything to your father directly and say, Hey, Dad, I really feel like you walking ahead of me is kind of like a put-down.
Maybe you can walk beside me or, you know, I feel the strong urge to walk ahead of you to show you how much stronger I am and so on.
You don't say that because you can't because you're only allowed to talk about like nothing, empty generalities and so on.
So you don't do that.
What you do is you pull ahead of him.
Right? You pull ahead of him to say that you are...
You have more strength and endurance and so on.
Now, just as you pass him, just as you pass him, right?
So again, this is the dream talking about the competitiveness that is occurring between your father and yourself.
Just as you pass him, what happens?
Well, he doesn't race ahead of you, right?
Because that would be to display the competition that is actually occurring, right?
So your father, like if you pull ahead of someone...
And then they pull ahead of you again, they obviously look pretty petty.
Because you can pull ahead of them saying, oh, I just wanted to go in front for a while.
But then if they get in front of you again, it's clear.
It becomes very clear how petty and ridiculous and silly that person is.
And your father doesn't want you to see his pettiness and contemptible desire to compete with his son and to master and to defeat his son as a way of keeping his own hollow shell, fragile, empty, religious, non-ego intact.
So, what happens is that when you begin to beat your father at anything, he simply changes the rules, right?
And this is, I'm sure, something that shows up within your own life, that the purpose of most people's rules and the purpose of most people's, what they call morality or religion or anything, statism, is simply a way of establishing dominance over another human being.
And then, when that other human being ends up Winning or beating the original person in some manner, then all that happens is that the rules get changed.
And so, what happens when you pull ahead?
Well, your father can't say, well, I'm now going to pull ahead of you because that would show him up as being petty.
So what does he do? Well, he says, oh, now we're going to take a bus.
Right? And it's important that the bus station appears, right?
The moment that you start pulling ahead of him, just as you pass him, the moment that You become stronger than your father or begin to beat him in some unconscious competition.
He just changes the rules, right?
So now he says, oh, we're going to take a bus.
We're not going to walk anymore. Now that you're pulling ahead of me, oh, we're not going to walk anymore.
Now we're going to take the bus. Right?
And then it's not accidental, of course, that you get in the bus.
And lo and behold, who should end up near the front of the bus?
And who should end up at the back of the bus?
Well... You, my friend, of course, end up at the back of the bus while your father ends up at the front.
So he's still ahead now. He's changed the rules so that he's in the front and you're in the back.
And he's not sitting with you, which, of course, you don't say anything about, like, hey, Dad, why the heck wouldn't you sit with me?
Because you get that this is the whole purpose, that you're in this constant agonizing, horrible, hateful wrangling for superiority with your father.
And everything's expressed in oblique and bullshit kind of ways.
I don't mean sort of on your side, because your father's responsible for this relationship, not you.
So, what happens next?
Well, there's this incident with the store-bought loaf of bread in my hands.
And your father is shouting back to say, well, how many carbohydrates are in a slice?
Which is, I mean, he's not eating it, who cares?
But he's shouting down the length of a bus for you to get a piece of information.
And so you start looking for the nutrition information.
You don't sort of say, why do you want to know, or we'll get it later, or hand him the bread and say, find it yourself, or anything like that.
You start to look for, and you look in a logical place.
You don't start looking, sticking, the dream could do this too, which would be communicating something quite different.
But you don't end up saying that you want to crane your head out the window and look in the sky for writing on the clouds about how many carbohydrates and a slice of bread.
You don't do that at all.
What you do is you start logically looking upon the wrapping of the loaf of bread to see where the carbohydrate information is.
And your father is getting angrier and angrier with impatience.
So again, here we have a situation that is set up to purposefully humiliate you as the child.
Right? So, that is something where he's sat at the front, you're at the back, you've got this loaf of bread, he's asking you for information, and then he's...
He's getting really angry because you're taking a few minutes to find it.
And of course, the funny thing is he's not asking for the loaf of bread.
There's absolutely zero time pressure in this situation from any kind of real standpoint, right?
And again, I don't know what your own emotional associations are with a loaf of bread or whatever.
I wouldn't even hazard a guess, but I will tell you this, that the dream is telling you very clearly that there is no urgency here whatsoever.
There's no urgency whatsoever.
What the hell does it matter?
What carbohydrates are on a loaf of bread?
I mean, if your father were drowning, right?
The dream could have done this too, right?
But the dream is very, very clear.
If your father were drowning and you were looking for a rope, right?
Then it would be quite clear that...
And I think it would be valid for your father to be frustrated if you couldn't find the rope and to get tense and angry.
But this is about long-term...
The long-term effects of a pretty...
In different piece of nutritional information, it's not a matter of life or death, right?
And, of course, bread is largely composed of carbohydrates, so what does it matter?
How much there is in it, right?
So, again, I don't know what your associations are, particularly with this bread.
Maybe you have a weight issue, or your father does, or somebody else does, I don't know.
So then everyone's laughing, and you don't know if they're laughing at you, or they're laughing at your father.
I think this is important as well.
Because remember, everything that goes on in a dream could happen in a completely different kind of way.
So, it could easily be the case that in the dream, your father starts berating you about this stupid nonsense about the long-term effects of the carbohydrates in a single slice of bread, which is obviously completely irrelevant and who cares and means nothing.
And what could happen in the dream is that the people in the bus Could sympathize with you, right?
There's no reason why. They could say sort of things to your father like, you know, what the heck do you think you're doing?
And, you know, what kind of nonsense are you pulling on your kid here?
And so on, right? But they don't do that.
What happens is that the people are laughing and you don't know nervously and you don't know if they're laughing at you or laughing at your dad.
And what that expresses to me is that you experience, and I'm sure exactly rightly so, that within your community, any kind of Conflict simply makes people uneasy, and they would rather that the conflict go away, and in no way, shape, or form, are they at all even remotely competent or willing, or let's just say willing, to judge conflict on moral grounds, right?
So, again, your community has no capacity or desire or willingness to evaluate conflict on moral grounds.
They just get nervous and start tittering, Because they themselves are uneasy or contemptuous or whatever, right?
But there's no sympathy for you in this obviously humiliating situation.
And of course, the other thing too is that the reason that you wouldn't tell your dad to stop being a jerk and to relax, to take a chill pill, man, or switch to decaf, is because you have a long history of being abused and humiliated in this manner by your father, right?
Where everything's kind of like a game that puts you down.
And this is depressingly common.
Between parents and children that interactions are a game designed to humiliate the children, right?
So anyway, the nutrition info is in a card in the bag next to the bread.
I'm not going to go into much detail on this.
It would seem to me that the answer is in something that is separate.
The answer is in something that is separate, right?
So normally you expect the wrapper of the bread to have the nutritional information, but this is kind of thrown into the side.
So where there is a merging of people's personalities...
Objective answers and information can't be found, but where something is separated, then we can.
Again, that's a bit of a stretch. I'm not going to say that the whole thing hangs on that, but there's something in that.
Now, the bus is your father's life and viewpoints.
The bus is your father's religion.
The bus is your father's emotional competitiveness and pettiness and viciousness and all of the stuff that you associate with religious leaders.
This is all very, very common.
You're on the bus of your father, right?
And the reason that we know that, of course, is because your father chose the bus, right?
I'm not coming up with anything too wacky or wild here.
Your father chose this bus.
Your father is in the front of this bus.
And this bus is full of people who can't tell right from wrong and victim from perpetrator.
Because they just giggle and giggle like idiots, right?
So, it's not a stretch to say, I think, that you are on the bus that is being run by your father and chosen by your father going up the mountain...
That your father was leading you up to begin with, right?
So the mountain is a particular kind of worldview, and it could be religion, or it could be being straight, or it could be, quote, being normal.
I don't know enough about your history to know what it is, but it's whatever is the most important thing to your father, which the dream is indicating, is petty competitiveness and humiliation.
So this is where your father's life and philosophy, for want of a better phrase, is going to lead you, right?
So it's climbing crazy steep paths until it gets to this village that's full of trailers and a few nice Nice houses, right?
So the dream is sort of saying that you're not going to a good place, right?
So the majority of the houses here are trailers, which is not a good thing, right?
There's a temporariness, there's a poverty, there's...
and so on, and a few nice houses.
And then it stops and pulls off to the side because a fire truck and an ambulance are going the opposite way, which means that they're coming down the mountain, right?
They'll be coming down the mountain in your dream.
So, what is the dream telling you with this?
This is the boy who has been shocked by an electric wire after a huge tree branch fell in it and pulled it off its pole next to his house.
Well, we can ignore the obvious phallic stuff here and just focus on the fact that up ahead is danger for children, is danger for boys, right?
It's sort of my belief that going up this mountain is both going forward with your father's philosophy, which I'm not saying you are, but the dream is warning you about the consequences of even thinking about it or doing so.
You are not only going forward in life with relevance to your father's philosophy or showing the path of your father's philosophy or ideas, but you're also going into your past, right?
And the reason for that, this is a boy, right?
And I assume that, I mean, you're a young man, so this is an indication that this is a younger self, right?
So whenever we have someone in our dream that we can't recognize from the outside world, it's almost always a fragment of our own identity or personality, and I'm not the first to observe this.
I think Jung... Ment talks about it as well, but what this means is that you're also not only going into the future of your own life on your father's course, or on the course of blindness towards your father's corruption, but you're also looking at, you're going into your past, right? The further we go into our future, if we are unconscious, the further we also go into our past, right?
I mean, we can talk about that a little bit more another time, but character is destiny, and unconsciousness is fate, and this is, again, And this is, I think that was Freud or Jung who talked about that.
So there's a boy who up ahead, right?
You're going up the mountain, up these crazy steep paths, which already indicates danger, right?
You're going up these crazy steep paths in this bus full of people.
Your father's at the front and nobody's worried about this danger.
So already we have danger going on here, right?
And then the dream gives you another signal of danger, right?
And what is the other signal of danger?
Well... You have a fire truck and an ambulance coming screaming down the mountain and the bus has to pull over to one side because a boy further up the mountain, further in the past, further down the path of your father's religiosity and grandiosity and hyper-competitiveness and pettiness, a boy has been injured.
You didn't say killed, but he got shocked by an electric wire after a huge tree branch fell on it and pulled it off its pole next to his house.
So up ahead is danger, right?
Further in your past was a grave danger and there was a grave shock that occurred to you, right?
A shock, of course, has...
Two connotations in language, well, more than two, but the two that are interesting here, I think, is one that shock is associated with electricity and also emotional shock, right?
So again, something occurred in your past, or if I'm corrected, something's going to occur in your future, not in a sort of predetermined sense, but just in a sort of unconscious inevitability sense.
The bus continues up the mountain, and it starts to have snow on it, right?
Now, of course, driving up crazy steep paths in a bus in snow It's more indication of danger, right?
And the true danger here, just so you sort of understand what I'm trying to get at here, which I'm not being particularly explicit about, but I might as well be now.
I can be more explicit than your dream.
The true danger here, my friend, is not the fact that up ahead is a place where kids get shocked and almost killed, that you're going up this crazy steep incline and that it's starting to snow, which means that there's considerably more danger occurring.
The problem, the real danger here, which the dream is trying to tell you, I think, fairly explicitly, the real danger here is not the accumulating dangers around you.
The real danger here is your own passivity.
And passivity is the hallmark of children who've gone through considerable and unconscious abuse and corruption at the hands of parents.
Passivity, which you talk about in real life with not wanting to get rid of a roommate or change to a different roommate from a guy who's obviously deranged, This kind of passivity is the real danger that is occurring in your life.
The accumulation of dangers in dreams is not...
All they're trying to say is that, look, all these dangers are accumulating and you're not doing a goddamn thing about it.
So the real danger, of course, is then your own passivity, which, again, I have full sympathy for.
Please don't blame yourself for it.
It's like being latched into a wheelchair your whole life and then feeling that you're a weak runner when you get up.
You're not. You just never get a chance for those muscles to develop so you're going to have to go through some painful rehab To get that stuff back on track.
So, it's continuing dangerous.
Finally, you get to the top of the mountain.
Right? There's no snow, just rolling plains and a huge observatory.
And I don't quite understand how the top of the mountain has rolling plains, but there's a lot of contradictions up here.
And a museum slash village set up to look like buildings from The Wizard of Oz.
Now, of course, again, you know, you're gay.
And I'm not even going to hazard a guess as to whether or not that's environmental or genetic, because nobody knows, but gay people are often called, well, often sometimes called friends of Dorothy, because of their affinity for Judy Garland and so on, right?
So this Oz-slash-homosexual thing is not uncommon.
So you go into Dorothy's house, right?
You're at the top, and there's a lot of contradictions going on, right?
Is it a museum or is it a village, right?
The Wizard of Oz is full of all of these multicolored, silly-looking houses...
Home to Munchkinson, of course, there's no economy.
There's nothing real about it. It's a child's contradictory fantasy associated with a kind of dissociation, at least for me.
So you go into Dorothy's house.
It's filled with high-tech things.
I set my iPod down on a chair, continue on a tour of the house.
Lots of levels, steep ramps going everywhere.
The guide said this was because it was built right on the steep mountainside, but that didn't make sense because it was supposed to be in Kansas.
So this is a place of pretty significant contradiction.
It's a museum, yet there are houses...
It's a movie set, yet it's real.
And, of course, there is no high-tech in Dorothy's house, right?
Dorothy's house in the movie.
It's been many, many years since I've seen it.
But Dorothy's house in the movie, in The Wizard of Oz, is non-tech, right?
It's sort of like fairy tale stuff, right?
It's sort of non-tech.
And it's the top of a mountain, but there are rolling plains.
And, of course, there is no snow...
At the top of the mountain, though, there's snow on the way up the mountain, right?
So again, we're in a place of complete contradiction.
It's a place of sort of insanity, right?
This is the core of your father's beliefs and also the genesis of your own personal history.
You might want to listen to podcast, I think, 79, the Invisible Apple podcast.
This may be the moment that's occurring for you here.
So it's high-tech, but of course, in the real world, it's not high-tech.
And of course, it's got lots of levels with steep ramps because it's supposed to be built on a cliffside, but of course, it's supposed to be in Kansas, which is flat.
So you've got a real contradiction here, right?
And at the end he told us he had a surprise for us, the guide, right?
The person who tells you the most about this contradictory realm, which is at the heart of your own history and your father's mad beliefs, he opens a door that goes down a steep, well-lit staircase.
Again, steep staircase is dangerous, well-lit is it's easy to see, right?
So again, what's happening is the dream is continuing to pile on danger after danger, contradiction after strangeness, and it is attempting to get you to wake up and to act, right?
It's saying to you that You need to be more alert to the signs of danger in the world around you, coming from your family, coming from your roommate, and probably a large number of other people that we have not heard about from you, because we only have had a short intro to your history.
So at the end, the guide says, you're going to be surprised.
Opens the door that goes down a steep well in the staircase.
Big Bird was lying upside down on the stairs.
Right? So, I mean, this is the moment, right?
This is the catalyst. I'm not going to guess what big bird means to you.
Always seemed a little gay to me, but I didn't really spend much time watching it as a kid because I was in England where we didn't get it.
But hope is also the thing with feathers, right?
Birds, of course, flightless birds is another sort of contradiction, right?
Big bird is like an ostrich or an emu or whatever.
I'm not going to guess what the associations that you are, but obviously this is a thing that is quite contradictory.
And it's also early childhood, right?
Because it's around Sesame Street and so on.
So this is a very early experience of shock or horror for you.
But most fundamentally, right, is that in the heart of this contradictory top of the mountain, root of your soul, depths of your father's madness, in this environment, there's a special, there's a treat, right?
You think there's a treat. You think it's a good thing.
You say, oh, I've got something special for you.
And what does the guide reveal to you but a dead childhood icon of innocence and education and curiosity, and I guess Big Bird has a pretty pleasant nature, so again, I don't guess your personal associations, but what I get from it is that this is a murder of a childhood.
This is an early brutalization.
What's at the heart of all of these contradictions which cannot be resolved, right?
The museum or the house versus the mountain with the plains...
...versus the fact that it's supposed to be in Kansas...
...versus the steepness of the house itself.
At the root of all of these contradictions...
...is a dead childhood, right?
Which is very much the case...
...with people who suffer from these kinds of mental ailments, right?
These kinds of crazinesses, like your father...
...that what is at the root of all of this...
...is a kind of murdered innocence.
And that's a very important thing to understand...
...so that you can begin to unravel...
...your own history and everything that has occurred there, right?
So, of course, now, finally...
After all of the bullying and humiliation and weird unconscious competition with your father, and we haven't even talked about the way in which he tried to communicate to you about homosexuality, which is really around telling you that gay people will die.
So death, of course.
And sort of what he's saying around that, the unconscious communication when somebody suspects that you're gay and talks about gay people dying, the unconscious communication is that your father would rather see you dead than gay.
So your true identity, if it's genetic, is homosexual, and your father would rather see you dead than gay.
So the fact that there's a dead childhood icon here is not too unusual or unlikely, I guess.
So that's sort of another aspect.
But finally, there's enough danger has accumulated now that the guide to this crazy, contradictory, mad village, the guide is saying that what's special and a big treat for you is looking at a murdered childhood icon...
You finally get a sense that this is a pretty bad place to be, right?
That this is an insane and evil, contradictory, horrible, destructive, murderous, now murderous, openly murderous place to be.
Who knows what's even further down those stairs, right?
But there's ugliness and childhood murder below where you are.
So, finally, you act.
Finally, you act.
And, of course, the dream is saying... Look at all these signs that came before.
You don't have to wait for things to get this bad with your roommate, with your identity, with your family, with any of these things.
You don't have to wait for things to get really, really, really bad before you act.
The dream is saying, look at the signs and act ahead of time.
Look at the signs and act ahead of time.
You don't need to wait for things to get so bad before you act because you can look at the signs.
And of course, that's one of the things that I talk about in my podcast.
Look at the signs, look at the signs, look at the signs.
Don't wait for things to get bad.
The whole point of philosophy and morality is prevention, not cure.
So look at the signs.
And the dream is constantly escalating the signs of danger, but you only act when you're finally revealed as a special treat, the sign of a childhood murder.
So then you decide you want to go, but get worried that people would think I was stealing the iPod I'd left at the entrance.
Then I woke up. Again, the iPod may be associated with my podcast.
It may be associated with other things that you're listening to.
From a moral or philosophical standpoint.
And I'm not sure that I could fully sort of clear this one up.
But you leave. I mean, there is a certain leap of faith from philosophy to personal experience, which is maybe why you leave the iPod.
You leave philosophy behind. You go directly into the heart of the matter, which is this dead childhood icon.
And there is a bit of a leap there.
I can't go there with people, right?
That's an introspective moment.
That's personal. But from that moment...
You then decide that you want to leave, and then people think that you're going to steal something that is in fact yours.
So again, you're here in a very contradictory moral place, where you end up stealing something that...
People are going to think that you're stealing something that is in fact yours.
And I would suggest, quite strongly, that what this has something to do with is that people think that you're doing bad things when you leave your family.
Like, this is a family you should have nothing to do with.
I mean, it must be completely fair.
With you about that, right?
This is a family that you should run from screaming and never look back, right?
Your father is a religious sadist.
And a vicious and horrible and ghastly and wretched and violent and destructive and hateful human being.
I feel perfectly comfortable telling you that.
Not just because he's religious, but because of the dream.
And the fact that you're frightened to, you know, and all sympathy, my brother, right?
But you're frightened to perform his elementary act, an act of self-protection.
As to not wish to bunk with a roommate whose brother shot him.
And who is an untreated victim of horrendous physical abuse.
Right? So you are not...
Your father has raised you to lack even these elemental senses of self-protection.
So the man is vicious and evil and destructive incarnate.
And you should get the fuck away from him as quickly as possible and as far as possible and never look back.
And never look back.
And this is true of everyone...
In your family because nobody helps you in this dream.
If even one person had stepped forward to help you in this dream, I would not pass that verdict.
Not that my verdict means anything.
It's all a matter of what you believe.
But if even one person had stepped forward to help you in this dream, I would say that you should look for allies within your environment.
But you're completely alone here.
And you're the only one who's appalled by the murder of this big bird.
So you've got to get away from these people.
You've got to run and run and run and not look back.
And whatever you've got to do to do that, drop out of school, take a job somewhere else for a while, figure anything out, but get away from these people.
60 bucks versus 80 bucks worth of savings.
Are these the kind of petty assholes that you want to be around for the rest of your life?
Of course not. Right, so...
What's going to happen is that the dream is also telling you that you're going to have to leave your family, and you're going to have to leave the social circle that you were around when you were growing up, and I hate to say that, but I'm just telling you what the dream's telling you.
And... That people are going to think that you're stealing something, but you're not, right?
People are going to accuse you of a crime, i.e.
you abandoned your family, you left your mother and father, they miss you, you're a terrible son.
People are going to accuse you of a crime and you're just taking what's already yours, which is your true self, right?
As represented by the iPod or the podcast or whatever, right?
Because this is my true self, attempting to talk to your true self through the fog of dissociation and through the fog of humiliation and through the fog of brutalization and contradict to you.
Contradictory behavior in a father who'd rather see you dead than gay.
As if gay means anything.
Bad. So, anyway, I hope that this helps.
You know, the most important thing that I want to get for you, my friend, is a real sense of the ability to be able to perform some of the basic and elemental aspects of self-protection that are really, really absolutely essential for you to be able to achieve in your life.
Because you cannot go through your life being frightened of protecting yourself.
That is a desperately dangerous situation to be in.
It's going to lend you to live a life of being exploited and undermined at every turn.
I don't want that for you.
I want you to have such a better and more wonderful life.
And it's going to require the courage to uproot this dead tree that is at the center of your heart called the family and strike out on your own.
Let me know if this dream makes any sense to you.
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