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Jan. 12, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:08
595 Nate's Second Dream: Coming to life...

A listener's powerful life dream

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Alright, so let's try part two of a dream.
We'll try a two-parter, giving double the dream value to a valued listener.
So I hope that this is helpful.
I wanted to try doing two dreams in a row from somebody who's going through some psychological activity, to say the least.
So this is from Nathan again.
This is the second dream.
I don't believe this was in two consecutive nights, but fairly close together.
He said, I had another weird dream.
This time I managed to remember just about everything, if not all of it.
Last night I had listened to the Tornado Dream podcast.
Maybe this had something to do with it.
I woke up noticing that something was different.
It was just a little lighter outside than normal, but not much.
I realized perhaps I'd overslept just a few minutes.
I went to the bathroom.
To find that the door to the closet in the bathroom was severely damaged as though it had been bashed in.
I thought it was very strange and I looked to my right and saw that the bathtub was also ripped out from the wall and sitting diagonally resting against the side of the toilet.
Pipes were dangling out the wall.
It was as if a giant force had come through and torn everything asunder.
I went out of the bathroom into the bedroom and looked at the wall, just on the other side of where the bathtub is.
There was a giant gaping hole.
I could see pipes showing through.
I realized I was definitely going to be late for work.
A strange tangent occurs where I try to rush to find my roommate and show him what's happened.
I walk with him into the bathroom and he gives his usual, whoa, dude, response in his normal stoner or surfer dude accent.
I'm showing him all the damage.
I walk into the closet and strangely it's much larger than usual and I'm pushing my way back through some hanging clothes where the clothes don't normally hang.
My roommate then does something very strange, as if he's following me and the lights go out, and I'm asking him what he's doing.
He tells me that he's finally got me where he wants me after years of hunting me down.
He says this in a cold voice, as though he was some kind of evil villain who's been hunting me for years, looking for vengeance.
As he closes in on me, I find myself too weak to push him off me.
Then suddenly I manage to push him away.
Run out of the closet and then suddenly forget all about it as though it had never happened.
I rushed into the bedroom, realizing it must have been even later.
I checked the time and saw that it was 11am, not 6.30am, like I thought.
A rush of horror ran through me.
I knew I was going to be late, but I had no idea that I was already running four hours late.
I verify the time with my roommate, who is strangely still in the closet, both of us acting as if we'd forgotten the strange tangent completely.
This being a new job, the last thing I want to do is suddenly not show up for work.
I rush to find the phone so that I could call and let them know.
I call my recruiting agent first so she can help me with the PR work and calm my worries.
She doesn't answer the phone, however.
Instead, some guy answers her phone and doesn't seem to be too concerned.
He doesn't seem to want to help me at all.
I'm also having trouble hearing and understanding him.
As we're talking, I'm walking out towards the garage.
And suddenly, without realizing it, I'm in my parents' old house where I grew up.
I'm not shocked or confused by this and think it quite normal.
I walk out the back door and out the driveway, onto the driveway, hyperventilating, while I'm talking to this guy on the phone in sheer horror about being late.
I sit down on the driveway, still my parents' driveway, trying to breathe deeply and slowly to calm down.
I'm trying hard to think of my manager's name, but I can't remember at all.
I keep remembering the old manager's name instead.
A manager from years ago, who does sort of remind me of the current one, both females, both in the oil industry, and one Hispanic, and the current one is black.
Suddenly I realize that the call on my phone was dropped.
But not only that, but the battery was dead.
I keep trying to press the button to turn it on.
At this point, I'm not only hyperventilating again, and not only that, but I'm bawling.
As I'm running back through the kitchen of my parents' house and into a bedroom that seems to look like my current bedroom again, I'm still not aware of the strangeness of this.
I'm still crying as I hear a voice coming from the dead phone.
I put it to my ear, and it's the guy I was talking to earlier.
He's still barely intelligible, but I recognize that he's complaining about my crying.
I ask him how it's possible that he could still be on the phone.
For some reason, I'm not shocked that my house suddenly becomes my parents' house when walking out of my bedroom, but I'm shocked that I'm talking to a guy on a phone with a dead battery when I didn't even call him.
So, My alarm goes off at this point, waking me up.
I realize with great relief that it was all a dream and I had not overslept.
I thought the roommate thing was weird, considering he's so laid back and a pretty decent guy so far.
He's very respectful of my things and I of his.
What a very, very interesting dream.
Now, I'd like to talk a little bit about how you can see the commonalities that are going on between these two dreams.
The one that we talked about last night and the one that we're talking about this evening.
It's currently just before 5 o'clock on the 12th, I think, of...
Of January 2007.
I didn't do a podcast this morning.
I'm enjoying Life in the Emerald City.
I think it is a book on Iraq.
Very interesting. Well worth having a listen to.
It's a little bit factual and a little bit dull, but jaw-droppingly informative in its way.
Now, what I talked about, and I actually had not read this dream when I did the dream yesterday, so I think that it's going to be relevant enough.
But I just wanted to point out that what I talked about yesterday, as far as your dream goes, Nate, I did not correlate it with any of this.
So I think that given that I didn't correlate or read this dream before just now, I think that it gives some credence to the themes that we were talking about in the last podcast about your dream.
I mean, maybe.
You can let me know if you think it makes sense what I'll be talking about.
Now, you wake up and the light is different.
And you think it's only a little different.
Again, these details are absolutely crucial, absolutely key.
Everything in a dream is a clue.
And you think it's just a little bit lighter.
The light's just a little bit different.
You think, oh, gee, I overslept only a few minutes.
Things are only a little different.
But that's not the case.
Things are enormously different.
And we'll go through that as we look at this dream.
So the first thing that happens is you go in to your bathroom and you see this rather staggering amount of destruction.
Somebody has just taken a real bat or a club or something to your bathroom and has smashed it up left, right and center, up and back and forward and up.
And you don't Become alarmed.
You're like, wow, that's a very unusual amount.
I mean, if I woke up in the morning, and I've lived with roommates quite a bit in my life, and if I woke up in the morning and my bathroom was smashed, I would be kind of frightened of two things.
One is that somebody had smashed it.
The second thing is that I hadn't woken up.
So, I think that this violence that's occurred, that you're not frightened of, is similar to what we talked about last Sunday, and very similar, of course, to what was going on in the dream we were talking about yesterday, which is about self-protection.
So, you wake up and just run it through as if you were in the real world, right?
If you woke up, like for real, tomorrow, and saw that somebody had smashed up your bathroom, wouldn't you be terrified?
I would be. And I would immediately suspect my roommate.
And I would immediately suspect that my roommate was, you know, psychotically insane or dangerous or something like that.
But you don't feel that at all.
You feel that it's an interesting thing to point out to your roommate what has happened to your bathroom.
And even in your bedroom, if I understand the physics of the, or the layout, the architecture of the dream, even in your bathroom, sorry, even in your bedroom a wall has been caved in.
Thank you.
So you rush to find your roommate to show him what's happened.
But unless you sleep smashed, in which case you would probably feel it, because the dream would then have you wake up and your arms would be stiff and sore, And there'd be splinters in your fingers from the bat or something like that.
There'd be some indication that you yourself had performed this violence.
But there's no sense of caution.
There's something that you want to show this guy who would be, in any reasonable investigation, suspect numero uno in the smashing up of your bathroom and your bedroom.
But you want to just show this to him.
And that is an indication that you lack elemental self-protection when it comes to evaluating what is occurring around you.
And this is what we talked about on Sunday and was very evident in the dream, I think, that we talked about in the last podcast.
Because I'd freak.
I'd be like, oh my God, this guy's insane.
And your lack of processing of the cues of danger, and this one's pretty significant.
Somebody just smashed up your bathroom and part of your bedroom.
That's a pretty key, that's a clue.
That's a clue that there's danger in your environment.
And you don't call the cops, you don't, whatever it is you do, you don't run screaming, you don't sort of say to your roommate, hey, nothing happened, and then like, wait till he was gone for the day and move out, or something like that, right?
You don't do any of that.
What you do is you show him this.
Now, the clothing, I don't really understand.
The clothing showed up in the last dream, in the fact that this is how your time was expressed in the dream, that you kept trying to approach this school with no entrance.
With different clothes on, and you had the shorts, and then you had the pants, and the pockets, and so on.
Clothes showed up there, and then clothes showed up here.
Now, I don't know. I would guess that you're a fairly snappy dresser.
I'm not sure what your relationship is with clothing, so I'm not going to try and unpack that, though I bet it will be fertile ground for you to introspect about.
But then your roommate, as you say, your roommate does something very strange.
As he's following me, he follows you into the closet.
He follows you into the closet.
And it would appear, maybe this is where the clothes things come in, that he's rearranged the clothes in your closet.
So you now have three indications that your roommate is dangerous.
And I'm not talking about in real life.
I don't know this guy, but if he's a stoner, then he's got problems.
And if he's got a kind of attitude like, whoa, dude!
You know, if he's got one of those very stereotypical personalities, then he's been heavily traumatized and he's adopted a false self persona, like those good old boys in the South, or like the rap black guys, or like whoever takes on this brittle, handed down or like whoever takes on this brittle, handed down persona.
They've done so because they have been taken over by the false self, and this renders them to be dangerous, right?
Because they have no identity and they'd rather kill you than have you expose that.
So, again, I'm not trying to provoke problems with your roommate.
You know him obviously better than I do, but if he's got a stereotypical personality, I'm telling you, he's dangerous.
He may not be dangerous in a violent way, but he's certainly going to be dangerous towards self-growth, towards you when you grow.
So now we have three indications that your roommate is very dangerous.
Your bedroom has been smashed up, your cupboard has been rearranged, your closet has been rearranged, and he's following you into the closet.
This is not a good sign, my friend.
This is not a good sign of the safety of your environment.
So again, back to your friend, back to your mother, back to your ex-girlfriend, people who are destructive, you can't see them as yet.
You can't see them as yet.
You're still growing this self-protection, this evaluation of others.
Because you're not used to evaluating others, you are much more used to being brutally evaluated yourself, which of course comes up later in the dream.
And, you know, a million hugs and...
And tenderness is about this, because you had the cold, beady eye of horrible sociopaths on you when you were growing up, and this cold, beady, judging eye, you know, with a whip, you know, it just lashed you whenever you put a foot wrong, and there was no way, in fact, in general, to know when you could put a foot right.
So I totally sympathize, and I think the size of the scar is the size of the evil.
And we don't see evil when we can't see our own scars.
So, this is, I think, about seeing evil.
So then, after your roommate appears to have, and there's nobody else, right, there's no sign of forced entry.
The dream would point that out.
So in the dream, and you say you remember every detail, and I'm sure I believe you, but in the dream, if you were looking at the bathroom, and the dream said, oh, and the window is broken, and there's muddy footprints that go out to the backyard, I don't know if you live in an apartment or not, but something like that, there would be some indication of forced entry.
But there's no indication of forced entry, and therefore, it's got to be somebody inside the house And the only person who's mentioned in the dream, other than you and the people who come later, is your roommate.
So, these are clues that the dream is saying, okay, you might want to watch a movie called The Fourth Man.
It's a French film. It's very much around this, people being unable to see the signs that danger is approaching.
It's a very important thing.
Have a read-through, almost, in the dangers that led up to World War II, where the people didn't.
It's one of my novels. People didn't.
Let me know. I'll send you a copy, because I think you've given some great stuff with these dreams.
People's ability to see danger coming up, but look at the world today, right?
I mean, it's very hard for people to see the danger that is coming up in the world.
So the dream is saying, it's your roommate, no forced entry, and you run to tell your roommate about this thing which he has done.
This may be a stretch, but my gut tells me that this may also be that when people hurt you, you try to tell them, you say, look at this damage.
So when your friend, this female friend who attacks you, you say, this is what we were talking about on Sunday.
I was saying that the next step is to say, you've hurt me, and that's great, but the step after that is to get them out of your life.
The step after that is to be so assertive that it just doesn't happen to you, so that you don't have to defend yourself and move out of the bad neighborhood, so to speak, rather than learn how to use a gun.
Oh, we're back to the hookers and blow parties.
So the dream has said, your roommate...
Sorry to repeat, I'm just going to keep my threads going.
The dream has said, your roommate, most likely, not for certain, but most likely, your roommate smashed up your bathroom, smashed a wall in your bedroom, rearranged your closet, and is now following you into the closet, which is a very strange thing to do.
Following somebody into a closet is...
Kind of like no boundaries kind of thing.
Like if somebody's talking to you and it's sort of like, you know, you're chatting with someone and you have to go to the bathroom and then they walk into the bathroom with you.
It's just like, dude, you know, take a step back.
And the same thing is occurring, that this person has no boundaries.
So after these three warnings, which you are heedless to, and even in your waking state you're heedless to, Again, this is not something to feel bad about.
It's not something to feel guilty about.
It's just the size of the wound.
The size of the wound is the size of the evil that you survived, the size of the evil that you experienced.
So, the rational and healthy and just response to your inability to defend yourself is empathy and sympathy for the horrors that you went through.
Not sitting there saying, well, other people defend themselves and I can't defend myself, so I must be weak.
Don't do that. Don't, don't, don't do that.
That's a false self-reaction.
That's your parents' reaction, and that's how humiliation continues down the generations.
The size of the wound is the size of the attack.
The size of the hole is the size of the knife.
So, if you have little to no ability to defend yourself against predatory people, you are not weak.
You simply can see the amount of abuse that you went through.
And that, what some would call weakness, I would call a sensitiveness, a tenderness, and something that you should be very gentle and positive with.
So then your roommate attacks you and you say, this is strange, and I don't think it's strange at all.
I think the dream is saying it's not strange at all.
Why would you think that your roommate wouldn't attack you?
He just smashed up your bathroom.
Maybe this has something to do with how your girlfriend treated your things.
Maybe when she stayed over your bathroom, maybe she left towels on the floor and, I don't know, didn't flush or whatever, right?
Maybe there was, I don't know, this is just guessing.
Maybe there's something to do with a bathroom and destruction, and then you then wonder why she doesn't, like, why she smashes up your car and you're hot.
I'm just, I'm just spinning here.
I don't know for sure, but there's, there's a reason why it's your bathroom other than the fact, and you're asleep while all of this occurs.
And this indicates a profound unconsciousness towards the escalation of violence around you.
And then the attack occurs.
After all of the clues, this guy smashing up your place, rearranging furniture, following you into the closet, he attacks you.
The cold voice.
He's been hunting me for years, looking for vengeance.
I'm not sure what that means.
And I don't know enough about your family history to know who in your family was avenging themselves against you.
And not that you had done anything wrong looking for vengeance.
You find yourself too weak to push him off you.
And there's a lot about the past and the present in this dream as there was in the dream that we discussed yesterday.
You are too weak to push him off you.
This indicates that you are young.
This indicates that when these kinds of attacks began, for you, as for all of us, we were in the crib.
When somebody wanted to make us pay for whatever wrongs they had experienced in their life.
And it is very, very common with these primitive personality types that we talked about on Sunday and we've talked about off and on throughout this show.
It is very, very common that people take vengeance against their children for the wrongs that were done to them when they were children.
So their parents attacked them, and then they take vengeance for that attack by attacking their own children.
So I'm not sure who this is.
I couldn't tell you, of course, but you can certainly let us know.
So, there's a two-phase thing.
The first thing is that you're too weak to push them off, and that's, of course, being a child.
And it's not weakness. But then, there's a change, which is that you are strong enough to push them off.
And I would say that that has something to do with the reaction, which was very positive and which you should be very proud of.
It was very honorable and courageous.
Your reaction to the woman who attacked you, I think it was last week.
Which was to question her reasoning.
Not to fold, not to crumble, but to question her reasoning.
Well, that's you pushing this person back.
But then there's an unconsciousness.
So this roommate attacks you, as is foreshadowed very clearly in the dream, which you do not see and do not feel alarmed about, and go into an enclosed area.
Maybe you had an experience in hide-and-seek where somebody sat on the lid of something or locked you in a closet or something, but you voluntarily go into an enclosed area with a very dangerous person around.
And then you get attacked, and initially you don't have the strength which is your youth, and now you do have the strength you can push him off, but then the problem is that you pretend that nothing happened.
You pretend that nothing happened.
You pretend that nothing happened.
And this is an indication of the danger.
When we do see evil, when we finally can see evil, when we've developed enough strength to see evil, to see danger, let's say, if you find evil too provocative...
Then the great danger is we see it and it vanishes again for us because it's very hard to keep seeing evil.
Oh my God, is it hard to keep seeing evil.
It's stomach-turning.
It's horrible. It's dangerous.
It's dizzying. It's repulsive.
To continue to see danger and the brutality of the human natures or the empty souls or the dead souls around you, oh my God, it's hard.
It is so hard.
It's like propping your eyes open with toothpicks for two weeks.
Keeping this stuff conscious.
Keeping the danger conscious.
Dangerous that you forget.
So, you are already concerned that you're going to be late for work.
I'm not sure about...
because I don't know the history of your work relationship or whether you have a problem with being on time or whatever.
But... you had no idea...
That it's four hours later.
Because I don't think that you look at the clock when you wake up.
You feel the light is a little bit different, so you think there's a small change, but there's actually a very large change.
You think that you're a few minutes, that you slept a few minutes too long, but you actually slept four hours too long.
So the cues that you are getting, both from your internal sense of time and from the external cues like light, aren't valid at the moment.
And that's good.
That's good, because the dream is also saying, don't trust just your internal states.
Look at the facts.
And that's partly what you're doing when this woman attacked you and you began questioning the logic behind her attack.
So, the dream is saying, you can't trust your internal states just now.
And I know that I talk a lot about trusting yourself and so on.
But the dream is saying, don't trust your internal states.
Look at the facts, right?
Because the facts are the bathroom was smashed up, the facts are that your closet was rearranged, the facts are that this guy trailed you into a narrow place or an enclosed place like a closet, and you don't feel the danger.
So to use a metaphor I used in a podcast many moons ago, the reason that we feel pain, the reason we must feel pain, is because otherwise we continue to climb the tree and the bees keep stinging our ass and we don't feel it and then the poison overwhelms us and we fall out and die.
Sorry, I mean too dramatic, but you know what I mean.
So right now you can't feel danger very well.
You're beginning to slowly wake up to it, but you're still in a very vulnerable position.
And in the dream, you don't react to the dangerous stimuli around you, the smash-ups and so on.
And your own sense of time and your own perception of the world around you is very much off.
And that's good. That's good.
Out of doubt we grow.
Out of doubt we grow.
Doubt, fear, insecurity, all of these are beasts to be hunted down and eaten.
Feeling doubt, feeling insecurity is very, very important.
But it's important to feel insecurity about the right things.
To feel insecure at the moment for you about your ability to defend yourself is very helpful because you don't seem to have that ability in the way that is really going to defend yourself at the moment.
So feeling doubt about your ability to defend yourself There's something I write about in my novel Just Poor, about a woman who begins personal growth, and I say that she goes through a phase of perceptive paranoia, where everything just frightens her.
And that's good, that's healthy, that's a return to the childhood that we actually had.
And it's not skipping over or bypassing the childhoods that we actually had.
So, feeling a lot of fear, feeling a lot of insecurity is very, very helpful, and that's where the dream, I think, takes you next.
So, you then verify the time with your roommate, who is strangely still in the closet, and both of you are acting, you've forgotten the strange tangent completely.
So here again, this guy has smashed up your place and blah, blah, blah.
He attacked you in the closet and now you're pretending that nothing happened.
You're saying, hey, can I check the time with you?
This is nothing that is deficient in you.
This is simply scar tissue.
This is the scar tissue of 30-odd years of never being able to protect yourself, of never being allowed to protect yourself, of having your personhood, your physical space, your mental integrity, your emotional space invaded and overtaken.
Our bodies and our fears and our neurological biology is a weapon against us.
This is what the torturers do. The torturers will lie you down on a slab and they'll feed bamboo up your nails and they'll cut your toes off and stuff.
And they're using your body, your sensitivity, your susceptibility to pain, which is supposed to help and save you, they're using this to destroy you.
So, the experience of being tortured as an adult is much, much less worse than the experience of being brutalized as a child.
You take a healthy man who had a good childhood and you torture him, it's going to be horrible, but it's not going to result in pathology.
He's going to have some PTSD, traumatic stress disorder, it's very unlikely to result in pathology.
In the same way that a soldier, an adult soldier in a trench in wartime, is much, much better equipped to deal with the danger of his surroundings than a child.
It's an adult personality.
It's an adult reasoning. It's adult options.
You can choose to desert, or whatever.
You don't have any of these choices as a child, and it's your first impression of the world.
So, I think it's absolutely essential that we look back upon our own histories and our own childhoods with all of the Universe-cracking sensitivity that we can muster.
The child is the father of the man, as they say.
And I think for us, there is no degree of sensitivity and empathy for our own childhoods that is too great.
That there is no such thing as too much self-pity.
There is no such thing as too much sensitivity to the horrors that we all experienced.
So, the great danger is we have to get on with our lives and we want to forget this kind of stuff, but it's very dangerous to do so.
And I'm very sorry that this was your history, of course.
I mean, I'm very, very sorry that you have to go through this.
You don't have to, but balls rolling now.
You either ride it or it rides you.
But this is how we are going to save the world.
These dreams, this reasoning, this sensitivity, this empathy, this understanding.
So you call someone.
You try to do the responsible thing.
You call the recruiting agent so she can help you with the PR work.
And I'm not sure what that means, but I'm assuming it's something to do with smoothing things over.
And calm my worries.
And calm my worries. Now, I think that...
And this may or may not be right.
I mean, I don't know. But again, I'm just sort of going with my gut here.
I think that for you to call your recruiting agent and ask her to calm your worries is not appropriate in a professional context.
Again, this is nothing to feel bad about.
This is just when we're drowning, we reach for any length of wood that's going to help us float.
But if you are looking for other people in your life to fill up or to stitch up the scars from your childhood, then that is unjust.
And in some ways, there's a continuation in a very minor way.
And this is very, very minor. Nothing to do with your parents in any fundamental way.
But... People take vengeance against their children.
Narcissists will take vengeance against their children because those children don't provide all of the love and the happiness that the narcissist feels entitled to, but never lives a goddamn virtuous finger to earn.
So... This...
The situation where we attempt to fill in the holes of our past with the souls of the people around us in the present is fundamentally unjust and is an echo of the original abuse.
So it's interesting that you would call this person with the expectation or with the hope that they would calm your worries.
That is a kind of blindness to the other person in the same way that being blind to the violence of your roommate is important.
You are blind to the relationship you have with your recruiter.
Who is not your mother, not your therapist, not your friend.
And so expecting or asking her to calm your worries is another way of trying to escape the pain of your childhood, right?
Because you have these fears and these worries because you were so brutalized as a child.
And then thinking that other people can make up for it in the present or treat you in some sort of different way in the present is a way of saying that I can solve this problem by taking from others in the present.
And that's not going to help you.
That's not going to help you.
She doesn't answer the phone, which is, I think, tied into what we were saying.
Some guy answers the phone, and he doesn't seem too concerned.
He doesn't seem to want to help you at all.
Now, by help you, I don't know if you mean help calm your fears, which I think is what you are expecting or wanting, or help you get in touch with your employer to tell them that you're not available.
So, I'm not going to spend much time on that.
As we're talking, he says, I'm walking out towards the garage, suddenly, without even realizing it, I have a parent's old house, where I grew up in.
Right? This is important. When you expect these people to manage your emotions, you're back in your parents' house.
Right? This is the way back to the past, and not in a good way.
Right? This is expecting...
Expecting other people to manage your emotions, to calm you down when you get to, and so on.
I mean, other than friends and lovers, right?
This is a sort of sign up for this in a mutual kind of way.
But expecting professional people, right?
There's a dream that this, there's a reason that this wasn't a friend or a lover or someone, but this was professional contacts.
So now, you're back in your parents' place, and you're trying to, and it doesn't seem shocking.
It doesn't seem shocking. This transition doesn't seem shocking at all, which is, of course, I think also important.
And you're hyperventilating, and now, the messing around with time that is occurring in the dream...
I don't know if this is the house.
I don't think you mention it.
I don't know if this is the house as it was when you grew up, which would be a real-time fuck, so to speak, right?
It would be that you're back, that you're running late, but you're actually back 20 or 25 years, right?
So you're four hours late, but you're 25 years early.
I don't know if that's occurring in the dream, but if it is, that's a pretty strong indication.
So then you can't remember the manager's name.
That you're trying to...
And you remember some other manager from the past and so on.
And you blend these two people in your mind.
Your current manager, the black manager, and the previous manager, the Hispanic manager.
I'm not sure that...
If you have female managers, I'm not sure to what degree you may be attempting to resolve maternal issues with them.
I have a feeling that you are...
And the fear of disapproval of a mother figure, of a maternal manager, of a female manager, the fear of disapproval, right?
You're in a situation, if you're running that late, four hours late for a job, and you can't even remember the person's name, you're facing significant disapproval from a female authority figure.
And the fact that you're experiencing all of this while sitting in your mother's house is not insignificant, right?
I mean, that's a direct correlation. And it's saying, go back to your parents' house and don't try and deal with your history by dealing with people in the present.
Go back to your parents' house.
And don't ask other people to manage your fears and to manage your worries.
That has to be done through a resolution with the past.
Through a re-examination, re-experiencing a therapy situation and a resolution of the past.
When we complete the past, we no longer expect other people.
We no longer demand that other people step into the roles of comforting us or helping us or pretending to be our parents in some sort of odd way.
And we free them from the prison of our past as well as ourselves.
To be able to deal with another human being in the present is a very difficult thing, right?
It's easy once you go past certain things, but I think the dream is saying that you still have to go back, that your history is still unclear to you, and thus you are attempting to deal with your history by expecting or wanting or manipulating things from people in the present, and that's not going to work.
That's a reproduction of what hurt you.
So the phone is dropped and then the battery is dead.
So if you go back to the past, then the conversations that you're trying to have with people to manage your emotions in the present that were provoked by the past, the battery goes dead.
That's good! That's really good because you're hyperventilating, you're asking these people to calm you down, you're probably upset that they're not taking your emotional, your panic attack more seriously.
But when you go back to your parents' house, the phone goes, Dad, that's good.
That's good.
That means you're not, if you go back to the past, you're not trying to manipulate people to make up for what you did not get, unjustly did not get when you were a child.
And you keep trying to press the button to turn it on.
Thank you.
And you're hyperventilating, and now you're bawling.
And that's a wonderful, good, and sensitive thing to be doing.
So you've gone from fear to pain, right?
Fear is the reaction to repetition of pain.
If someone hits you with a bat and hurts your arm and then they pick up the bat again, you're going to feel fear, not exactly pain, but you only feel fear because of the pain.
So when we move back into the past, we go from fear to pain.
And then we go from pain to anger.
And anger is where we get our self-protection from, so.
Terror, tears, rage.
That's what I said.
Tears, terror, rage can work that way too, but...
That's a little bit more with women.
So you're bawling. And that's great.
Running through the kitchen of your parents' house and into a bedroom that seems to look like my current bedroom again.
So it's saying that you're in your parents' house and you go into a bedroom.
And I don't know if it's your bedroom, but it seems like your current bedroom.
So it's smashed and there's...
So this is all saying that what's going on in the present, that your inability to protect yourself in the present is directly connected to everything that happened in your parents' house when you were young, when you were a child.
Because these two are blending.
As you ball and you go back into the past, you can see the present for what it is, that there is risk and danger in it.
And you're not aware of the strangeness of it?
Of course not, because it's not strange.
Psychologically, it's perfectly sensible and rational.
And then you hear a voice coming from the dead phone.
So you're crying, and you've made this connection, your bedroom in your parents' house to your existing bedroom.
And you put it to your ear, and there's a guy you were talking to earlier.
He's still barely intelligible, but he's complaining about you crying.
You ask him, you say, I ask him how it's possible that he could still be on the phone.
For some reason, I'm not shocked that the house suddenly became my parents' house.
Walking out of the bedroom, I'm shocked that I'm talking to a guy on a phone with a dead battery when I didn't even call him.
When I didn't even call him.
What does that mean? He's complaining about you crying.
Who's complaining about you crying?
I can't quite get this one.
The only thing that I will say about it is that it is that you are now getting...
Ah, maybe this is it.
You are now getting...
Something back from other people.
You know, one of the great dangers of narcissism, of being raised by narcissistic parents, as you were, is that you yourself become narcissistic, right?
You become very fragile, you become prone to panic attacks and emotional overwhelmingness, and then you kind of grab out again to other people, right, to keep you afloat.
So you need other people to reassure you, to comfort you, because you lack the ability to self-comfort, to comfort yourself, to say, oh, it's not that bad, I'll be fine, good Lord, so let's say I get fired, so what, right?
I mean, I just slept in, it's not the end of the world, and so on.
Self-protection and self-care and self-soothing, self-soothing is very important, right?
So when you get worried, can you just, no, it overwhelms you.
And so you grab at other people and you want them to manage your emotions.
You want them to help you.
You feel panic and you call people up saying, I want you to tell me not to panic.
But that's using them.
That's using them. That's not fair.
It's not their fault that you're panicking.
They didn't abuse you as a child.
So if you feel that you require other people To soothe you, and that if they then attack you rather than soothe you, then things get a lot worse.
You're putting far too much power into the hands of others, and that is going to cause them to treat you badly.
Power corrupts, right? The more power that we put into the hands of other people around us to define for us what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, what we should feel good about, and what we should feel bad about, the more that we cede that power to others, the worse they're going to treat us, because power always corrupts.
And so you're talking to this guy originally, and you're calling up because you need some help, but you also need them to calm you down, to manage your emotions.
Very unjust. It's manipulative.
It's a way of using other people, and I understand it, but it's narcissistic in a mild way, and it's something that you need to know.
But when you go back to the past...
Then you can hear this guy complaining about you crying.
In other words, you can hear someone else.
So that's how you cure.
And this narcissism, I know I'm using the same word with your parents and you, and that's very, very widespread.
We all have narcissistic aspects to our personality, because we're all so damn badly raised.
So forgive me for using the same word.
I don't want you to feel that I'm equating you to your parents.
But the overwhelmedness that you feel when you become frightened or upset or angry or whatever it is, nervous, and your need that other people comfort you has narcissistic elements to it.
But when you go back to your past and you reconnect with the nightmare of living in your parents' house and you're bawling, then you can hear somebody else.
You can hear somebody else.
And the wonderful thing, the wonderful thing about reconnecting with the horrors of your past, I mean, this is a weird thing to say, but the wonderful thing about reconnecting with the horrors of your past is that you become free.
You become free.
And I'll tell you why this is important.
You're so terrified.
Well, first of all, you're not terrified of what you should be terrified of, which is your freaky-ass roommate beating up your bathroom and attacking you in a closet.
You should be scared of that, but you're not.
But then you are scared of being late for work, which you shouldn't be.
Would you rather get beaten up in a closet by some guy who says he wants to kill you or whatever, and have your bathroom smashed up, or would you rather be late for work, even four hours?
Well, anyone would rather be late for work than beaten up in a closet.
So you're not frightened of the things that you should be frightened of, and you're terrified of the things that are innocuous.
And again, this is something you need to talk about with a counselor or think about, mull about it with yourself.
It's very, very rich and very, very deep.
These are very powerful dreams and there'll be more.
There will be more. But what happens is when you reconnect with your past when you're bawling, then something incomprehensible happens, right?
A guy talks to you from a phone that is dead.
In other words, what was impossible before...
It's now possible that you can hear other people talking, even though it seems impossible.
You can hear other people's opinions.
Now this guy is disapproving if you're crying.
And it doesn't make you feel bad.
And that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about being free.
That at the end of this dream, and what is so beautiful about the end of this dream, is that at the end of the dream, somebody is complaining about you crying, and you don't care.
You're terrified of somebody criticizing you for being late for work, or firing you, or whatever.
You're terrified of it. But then you're bawling, and that's called getting in touch with your true self.
You're upset, you're crying, you're back in your parents' house.
This is very true self stuff that is occurring, because it's real, relative to the history that you experienced.
The terrible, terrifying history that you experienced, for which I have all the sympathy in the world, my brother.
But what happens is the most wonderful thing in the world, that you are criticized by someone and you don't care.
You say nothing about feeling bad that this guy is criticizing you, is complaining about you crying.
You're in fact saying it doesn't seem odd at all where I am and what's going on.
So I think that is a very powerful story and it's just amazing.
This is the wonderful thing about dreams.
This is why I spend the time on them.
They're so amazing.
They're so powerful.
They're so deep. We are, you know, we are gods.
We are gods.
And people pray to gods, and they're praying to themselves.
This is the kind of wisdom that is embedded in us.
This is the kind of growth that is available to every human being.
This is the kind of wisdom and power and growth that we have within us, and it is the most beautiful thing in the world.
And we stumble through these blind and hiding lives when we have the wisdom of Mount Olympus, the wisdom of the gods within us.
And we just have to listen, and I just want to thank you for sharing these two dreams.
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