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Feb. 9, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:01
641 Electric Awakenings - A Dream Analysis
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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's 1 o'clock. It's Steph. We are going to have a quick look at a dream.
It's so cold here in Canada that even two floors down, I can feel the cold, so I'm not going to go outside.
I'm going to lurk and stalk in the garage, which is what we truth tellers do.
We lurk and we stalk.
So this is Nate. Yes, it's that time again, he writes.
Another very strange, vivid dream.
And the only thing I would suggest is that if you keep calling the dream strange rather than the life you had before introspection strange, you may be missing the point.
Maybe! Just maybe!
I had two intense dreams last night, but now I can only remember the first one.
I was at a strange combination, the inside, at my grandmother's old house in Corpus Christi, and the outside of my aunt's old house in San Antonio.
My entire extended family was there.
I remember walking into what seemed to be the garage, oddly attached to where the entryway to my grandmother's house would be.
I walked into that garage finding an old white pickup truck.
The truck began to move.
At first I assumed someone was in it, but oddly it moved as if it were being pulled by a gigantic electromagnet, the front end moving towards the garage entry door facing the driveway.
Not the main garage door.
It was then that I realized the truck was unoccupied, and that those I assumed were occupying it, my cousin Wes or Shane, were actually outside somewhere else.
I thought it very strange that such forces could be moving an entire pickup truck.
I overheard someone in my family asking if it could be electromagnetism of some kind.
But it wasn't a comment on the truck's odd movement.
I followed the direction the truck was moving, and went outside to find the usual driveway of my aunt's house in San Antonio.
But beyond that, instead of a street, was a courtyard bordered by a wall of arches covered in ivy, which was like the wall of stone arches bordering the Alamo Courtyard.
The colors were vivid, from the color of the stone in the arched walls to the magnolia trees planted in great square-shaped raised garden beds bordered with stone.
I remember the deep pink blooms amidst the leaves and that their trunks were surrounded by bright purple flowers, violets perhaps.
The sky was dark, but no rain.
Instead, what I noticed was at the corner of each wall of arches were thick redwood telephone poles carrying power lines from one courtyard to the next, each one spewing bright-colored sparks from the top as arcs of electricity came cascading down towards me like blue and red forked whips.
There was nowhere to run when this contained electrical storm began.
I looked to the courtyard ahead and to the driveway I left far behind.
There were telephone poles in every courtyard doing the same, and only where I stood near the raised bed and magnolia tree was safe from the rain of sparks.
I recall seeing who I thought were my cousins nearby next to a truck, hiding under an arch.
I couldn't move to hide with them.
I had nowhere to run, but ran anyway, back towards the house where my family was.
That instant, two whip-like forks of electricity, red and blue, struck me from behind, over the head.
I felt a jolting electrical shock, but kept moving.
Despite making it back to the house, where I found my extended family gleefully walking around and playing in the front yard, I felt I had been partially blinded and stunned.
Though I walked, I stumbled and could barely breathe.
My sight was growing dim.
No one walking near me seemed to care or notice.
I was afraid. I was dying.
Then I woke up.
Fantastic. What a dream.
What a dream. Isn't our true self the most amazing magician?
Isn't it the most amazing storyteller?
That we have these treasures within us.
That we have... These deep and powerful stories within us is absolutely astounding.
And when you think of the tiredness and the shallowness and the pettiness of how most people live their lives, when you see just how much power is within us, how much depth of understanding and how much voltage, in a sense, of truth we can handle, I just find these kinds of dreams...
Absolutely fascinating.
And the reason that I spend time on dreams, other than the artistic and intellectual challenge, is because I am totally desirous that you take your inner life with utmost seriousness.
That you take your inner life with utmost seriousness.
Because we do have pantheons of deities of wisdoms within us.
And we ignore them and are emptied out thereby.
And we're really trained and taught to ignore them because they are not comfortable to power structures.
They are not comfortable to false fantasies like the virtues that we talk about, the false virtues that we talk about.
So I really want, if I can, to make the case that you really need or you will really find enormous and powerful value In taking your inner life and your dreams and your impulses very seriously indeed.
Somebody just posted on the board that his mom had sent him a care package which was composed of a very large amount of candy.
And this is a gentleman with weight issues and weight problems and so on.
So he felt an enormous amount of rage and anger.
And I would just say take that very seriously.
Don't act out on it, but take it very seriously.
It's a very real read on the map of what's occurring.
Of course, if you have weight issues and your parents send you candy, they are trying to screw you up.
They are trying to harm you.
I mean, there's just no question.
The rage that you feel is an accurate perception of what is actually occurring.
The rage feels so strong that it makes us feel crazy.
And of course, people... To bring us down will provoke us all the time in unconscious ways and then will let us twist in the winds of our own self-doubt about our own angers because the anger then becomes so strong that it feels disorienting and crazy.
But it's not. But it's not.
There is nobody who can lead us where we're going.
We are in a new world.
We are in the real world, I think, getting closer and closer.
And there is nobody ahead who can lead us To where it is that we are going.
To truth. I think we're carving more channels than have been carved before.
I think we're further beyond the edge of map.
We're in the land of here be dragons and the dragons are friendly despite being scary.
So let's have a look at this dream.
Now, the inside of my grandmother's old house in Corpus Christi and the outside of my aunt's old house in San Antonio Well, this is very interesting.
What I think this dream is saying by transposing these two houses is the dream is saying that there's no difference between these two places, though they occupy in the real world different places in time and space, or particularly in space. There is no difference.
They are undifferentiated.
They are identical. They are nominally separated by space, but they are not separated in terms of what is occurring within.
So when you get a merging of two physical locations, the dream is trying to point out that there are some very identical similarities down at the bottom in the root in the emotional reality of the spiritual reality of these places that you need to pay attention to because separating them is not Helpful or useful, given that they are in fact more identical than they are separate.
So you're walking to, seems to be a garage, oddly attached to where the entryway to my grandmother's house would be.
So this, again, I'm just trying to sort of figure this out.
You think you're going to walk into a garage.
The garage is positioned where my grandmother's house would be, or where your grandmother's house would be.
This dream, I think, is showing you what is common between these places or what is common to your family as a whole.
So you find an old white pickup truck.
Now I know that motorcycles and half motorcycle, half cars figured prominently in the last but one dream that we looked at.
So I'm not going to imagine what this means to you.
But the truck begins to move.
At first you assume someone was in it.
So Where there is motion, you assume that there is a person.
And that's perfectly logical.
Trucks don't really move of their own accord.
And oddly it moves as if it were being pulled by a gigantic electromagnet, the front end moving towards the garage entry door facing the driveway, not the main garage door.
And I assume what that means is that There's a sort of person-sized door that you use to get into the garage, and that's what a truck is moving towards.
And so there's something that is in common between these two places.
The truck is not moving outside.
There's a magnet that is moving this truck, and it's empty.
Someone in your family asked if it could be electromagnetism of some kind.
It wasn't a comment on the truck's odd movement.
I'm not sure what that means, so if you'd like to clarify, feel free.
I followed the direction the truck was moving and went outside to find the usual driveway of my aunt's house in San Antonio, but beyond that, instead of a street, was a courtyard bordered by a wall of arches covered in ivy.
And this is a beautiful but scary place.
This is a secret garden.
This is an underworld.
This is the world at the root of the seeming world.
The real world at the root of the seeming world.
And the dream that you're having is a common mythological dream wherein the hero He goes into another world that is more vivid and more real, comes back to his world, and there's always usually some sort of, oh, is it real, is it not?
You have brought back a scarf from the world that you visited, and so on.
But there's very common mythologies wherein the hero plunges into an alternate world.
You can look at this in terms of the Matrix, or the Thomas Covenant series that occurred in Stephen R. Donaldson's from quite a while ago.
Or even the horrible Narnia world, that the hero goes into an alternate world that is mythologically true, that is essentially or spiritually true, and then is kicked back to the real world, enriched and deepened thereby.
So, you are stepping from the real world, in a sense, to an unreal world.
But the real world in your dream is not real either, of course, because you have an amalgamation of two houses separated by quite some distance in the real world who are the same.
Now, I don't really understand the metaphor of the truck, and you'd have to tell me more about what a pickup truck means to you and so on, and why it's moving towards this.
But it is the first indication that you have that there is a deep power in the world that you're not aware of.
And you think it's human.
In the sense, you think it's others, you think it's conscious, because you think there's people in the truck.
Now, of course, I do know that your ex-girlfriend smashed up your car, and there may be other aspects of cars that are important to you, but you go into this garage and there's evidence of a great force that is working upon this car, and you think that that force is a human being, but it's not.
It's something else. And so I would say that...
There is three potential layers of meaning here.
And again, this is just a theory hypothesis.
The first layer is that if there was somebody in the car driving it, that would be an indication of conscious control.
But there's nobody in the car.
The car is being moved, is being acted upon by a force, the electromagnetic force.
And that, to me, would indicate a personal unconscious.
A personal unconscious.
However, in the real world, there is something that is quite different, which is the unconscious that we all share.
The commonality in dreams, the commonality in the ways that we process sensual information, the commonalities in, if you pull a tooth out, it will hurt.
All of the unconscious and neurological attributes that we share, and I'm not talking about a Jungian collective unconscious, I'm just talking about the common truths that we all experience.
If we are all abused, we all feel angry or bad in some manner.
So we're going from you think there's somebody in the truck, which would to me indicate that you think something is occurring because of conscious control, and then you think that you see the truck being acted on by a force that you cannot see, and that to me is looking at somebody's Unconscious.
So some aspect of them is moving, but they're not driving, right?
So this is when you're in the grip of the unconscious and you don't have conscious control over what it is that you're doing, but you have sort of blanked out and let habit and momentum and history take its course.
So then what happens is you follow the direction the truck's moving, you go outside the usual driveway of your aunt's house.
Beyond that, instead of a street with a courtyard bordered by a wall of arches covered in ivy, Much like the wall of stone arches bordering the Alamo courtyard.
Now, of course, the Alamo, the last stand in the face of barbarism and so on, and the idea that self-defense gets you killed.
I'm not going to go into a big thing on the Alamo because I'm not sure if this is a core association for you or just something that reminded you of it.
But in the conversation that we've been having about your recent dreams with regards to self-defense or self-protection, when we are children...
And our parents aggress against us, and we defend ourselves as we want to do.
I mean, the first time we are aggressed against, we always defend ourselves.
The parent has one of two choices.
The parent is either going to say, yes, you're right, it is unjust what I'm doing.
This would be a sort of fantasy world of some other dimension, or the future, as we would call it.
Your parent is either going to say, you're right, I'm being unjust, I'm being too harsh, I shouldn't be hitting you, I shouldn't be screaming at you, I'm just in a bad mood and it's not fair and it's not your fault.
They can either back down from their unconscious escalations or acting out of their own abuse history or whatever.
They can either do that or they simply ratchet up the hostility and aggression to a level that we instinctively understand is fundamentally murderous.
These are really the two choices.
When you begin to aggress against somebody and they call you on it, you either de-escalate or you escalate.
You can't stay stable because the other variable has come in that the person is objecting.
So parents pretty much, for the most part, simply escalate because they're so much bigger, they have all the power, they have all the control, and they cannot stand re-experiencing the humiliation of surrendering to a child and of recognizing that they're wrong relative to a child.
That's their own history that they can't deal with or haven't chosen to deal with.
So, when we oppose our parents and their unjust treatment of us, what results is a murderous escalation to the point where we really genuinely do fundamentally understand that they would rather kill us than submit to our chastisement or our correction.
They would rather kill us than submit to being corrected.
And this is something which...
We don't like to look at.
I mean, it's a savage, bloody, murderous route.
A family that parents must communicate to the child that they would rather kill the child than to recognize the justice in the child's opposition to their aggression.
So, when you begin to follow this kind of stuff out, these colors are very vivid.
You have the Alamo. The Alamo is associated with self-defense equals destruction.
Self-defense Self-assertion equals destruction.
That's the story of the Alamo, it's the story of Custer, it's the story of even the Titanic, right?
The protection of the hull equals the destruction of the ship.
Self-defense equals destruction is a very, very common theme, unconsciously, for all of us, because that's really the way that the state treats us, right?
If we attempt not to pay our taxes, we will be destroyed, if we resist.
Self-protection equals destruction.
That is what corrupt authority always wants to get people to believe.
That the escalation will continue until you are broken in body and spirit.
That is always the way that things work.
And you can think about school, if you are exiled from school or vanished from school for a day or two and you come back and you don't say no, take no for an answer and you attempt to whatever, right?
I mean, the escalation will always continue.
We don't see this in the state because we don't see this in our family, that the escalation continues until submission is achieved.
And if you look at the escalation of aggression that occurs in the realm of religion, It's off the charts.
It's completely off the page.
It is an eternity of gruesome and brutal torture.
That is how much the murderousness of the impulse to control others is revealed.
So the Alamo may be important in terms of self-protection because we're kind of getting to the core of something here.
Colors are vivid. Lots of bright and beautiful colors.
And that is very interesting.
There is an attractiveness.
To this place.
There is a danger and the air is thick with the acrid smell of electricity, but there is beauty here and there is power here in particular.
And there are flowers. So this, I mean, flowers are very delicate.
This environment is not inimical to life.
It's not inimical to life.
It supports life.
It is a very source of power.
And the fact that flowers are alive and it's not a dead wasteland is very, very important.
You've got trees and there's some man-made stuff here as well, bordered with stone.
It's not a jungle that's completely untamed in any way, shape or form.
So people can come and work there.
There are delicate flowers there, raised garden beds bordered with stone.
Now the sky was dark but no rain.
Instead, what I noticed, you say, was that the corner of each wall of arches were thick redwood telephone poles carrying power lines from one courtyard to the next.
Now, I think, and this is similar to Greg's dream of the plus four landscape, That you are in the realm of collective unconscious, I think, here.
You are in the realm of all of the unconscious communication that passes between individuals that they're not aware of.
All of the status control, all of the subjugation, how is it that governments can control their people so effectively because the unconscious is responding to the governments in the same way that it responded to the parents, and all of it is completely invisible to everyone involved, except perhaps to those at the very top.
Actually, I wouldn't even say that.
Let's not worry about that tempting little alleyway right now.
But the control, the subjugation that occurs within the world is in the realm of everybody's unconscious.
And when we feel fear in the face of somebody who has, as we believe, authority, when we feel The desire to subjugate others or to be subjugated ourselves.
We are in the realm of the collective unconscious.
It's the unconscious that's not just what you would have on a desert island, but the unconscious ecosystem that interacts with everyone else all the time.
The body language, the vocal tones, the impressions, the expressions, the blink rate, everything that is communicated in an unconscious way.
To say 90% or more of communication is non-verbal.
So, in here, the fact that it's not just one walled-in Enclosure or garden that it's a series of gardens in which enormous amounts of energy are passing between to me indicates that you are in the realm of the collective unconscious and you are seeing the neural net or the web of subjugation that occurs below the surface below the subsurface and below the level of individual unconscious between human beings and you're seeing the power grid that keeps authority afloat that keeps these jackals feasting on our jugulars So I think it's a very powerful place to be,
and you should be proud to have survived.
So, each one is spewing bright-colored sparks from the top as arcs of electricity come cascading down towards me like blue and red forked whips.
Now, the bright colors that are in the flowers, which are delicate living organisms, are matched by the colors that are in the sparks spewing out from the top.
of these telephone poles phallic or not, I'm not sure that this is particularly phallic but each one is spewing bright colored sparks hearts of electricity come cascading down so there's beauty in it and there's power in it and there's also a delicate and beautiful kind of life in it as is evidenced by the flowers and there's man-made stuff here as well so this is not pure primitiveness but he says there's nowhere to run when this contained electrical storm began I looked at the courtyard ahead and to the driveway I left far behind.
There were telephone poles in every courtyard doing the same, and only where I stood, near the raised bed and magnolia tree, was safe from the rain of sparks.
And, just very roughly, I would say that this has something to do with the fact that philosophy, which is man-made, it is derived from reality, but it is synthesized by man's mind, that philosophy is the Raise stone border around a tree.
You've got something natural and it's a slave to the natural because the circumference of the stone wall covers or follows the roundness of the tree.
So, in the realm of philosophy you can stand and stay in this area.
In the realm of philosophy you can stand and stay in this area.
And right now, because you're new to visiting this collective unconscious, right now, when you're new to handling this incredible power, Right now, you feel you can't stay.
It's like somebody's holding you underwater.
You struggle and want to leave.
And that's fantastic.
It's fantastic that you're there and that you see this vision.
But it's important to recognize that you want to leave.
And that's understandable because it's the first time that I think you've been here.
And you don't need to leave.
In fact, this is a very powerful place to be.
You recall seeing who you thought of your kissings nearby next to a truck, hiding under an arch.
I couldn't move to hide with them.
So there's a solitariness here as well.
Once you first see the collective unconscious, the invisible webs of power and subjugation and control and humiliation that run the world and maintain hegemonic power structures, it's incredibly isolating.
You feel very much alone.
You feel very much alone.
Instead of switching the lights on and off, you're down there flying through the wires of the electrical grid.
It's a very solitary place to be.
And you think you see some other people who are hiding as well.
You can't move to hide with them.
I had nowhere to run, you say, but ran anyways, back towards the house where my family was.
So, let me tell you what I think the end of this dream means, and you can let me know what you think.
Naturally, when you begin to individuate, and you begin to understand not only your own unconscious, but you begin to understand the unconscious of those around you, You get to the real humming, hissing, thunderous power at the root of the human mind, the power that creates symphonies and raises cities and gets men to the moon and back and sadly is all too thwarted in our social circumstances.
You get down to this root, to this power, and you want to run back to your family because it feels dangerous where you are.
It feels unmanageable. It feels like the air is too thick with energy to be able to live, to be able to survive.
There's no place that you can have a home.
The power is overwhelming.
Now, of course, that's understandable because it's your first time there, but when you go back, you will have some capacities, some different capacities.
You will be able to fly, you will be able to become electricity, you will be able to walk through showers and sparks and be unscathed, and you will find companions in this power, as I think you're finding on the board and through the chats that you're having as part of this conversation.
So when you're in there, when you first get a glimpse of the power of the human mind at the base, And particularly the power that we all share in the common similarities of our unconscious.
You wish to flee back towards your family.
You wish to flee back towards your family, and that makes perfect sense.
Once you see this power, you want to go and share it with others, and it's scary.
You want to retreat back to mere social habit, to historical conformity, to a smaller, a lesser, and almost non-existent life.
Because it's kind of an impossible situation.
You can't stay where you are, and you can't leave.
But don't worry about it.
You'll get the hang of it. So you have nowhere to run, but you run anyway.
Back towards the house, not deeper into this garden where you may have found some more peace, peaceful pools and weeping willows and slow swans, whatever.
You run back towards your family, and what happens?
Bang! You get hit.
Two of them, red and blue, struck from behind over the head.
In other words, don't run back to nothing once you have seen Once you've seen the reality, if your mind's working in relation to reality, once you have gotten into your own unconscious, to the collective unconscious, to the power that is central to all of us, if you run back to your family, you will be struck down.
Now, why are you struck down?
You are not struck down because the electricity is angry at you or anything like that.
You are struck down as a gift.
You are struck down as a gift, and it is a wonderful, amazing, powerful gift that your essential humanity is giving to you.
Your gift is that you are struck with electricity.
It jolts, but you don't mention any particular agony or pain.
You make it back to the house, partially blinded, stunned, You're probably coughing up acrid fumes at this point.
Your sight is growing dim. You can barely breathe.
And the gift that your soul is giving to you is that it is sending you back stumbling and dazed to your family who notice what?
Who notice what?
Who notice nothing.
Who notice nothing.
When you connect with the elemental power of the mind, you are sent reeling.
We all are. It is an absolutely unexpected wonder and terror and grandeur.
And it is the real root of the confidence that we can have relative to reality and relative to our fellow men.
Your true self is saying, we have all this power down here.
I understand it's unsettling.
I understand it's alarming. It's the first time that you're seeing it.
So if you want to run back to this empty, nonsensical, false self family, no problem.
Boom! Here's your gift.
Your gift is I'm going to send you back days so that you can see that nobody notices, nobody cares, that you are not with anyone when you are with your family.
That you are not with anyone when you are with your family.
There is solitude but power in one's first brush with one's true self, soul.
There is solitude with the illusion of companionship and no power at all.
When you are with false selves, when you are with those who reject any sort of depth or truth or reality, with those who are anti-philosophical, with those who consciously ignore.
They can't not notice that your hair's sticking up and you're coughing up some fumes and, you know, you're stumbling around.
They can't not notice it.
The dream is very clear about that.
The dream doesn't give you a vision that you then try and communicate to people who can't see anything different, which you can't do.
The dream is very clear. The dream says, now that you have been scorched by your first contact with elemental power, the elemental power within your personality, the true roots of self-esteem and pride and efficacy, now that you have had contact with that, I'm going to send you back stumbling, dazed, half-blind, So that you can see that nobody will acknowledge it, that nobody will see it, that nobody will talk to you about it, that nobody will even notice it.
Or, I mean, since it's an external change, they can't help but notice it, but that they will actively ignore it.
And that again is part of self-protection.
That again is part of self-protection, to recognize that you cannot bring depth back to people.
It's sort of like you're trying to live underwater.
You're trying to live in the beauty and glory and depths of the ocean.
And you go down and then you come up and yeah, you've got the bends and you try and get people to understand, but they can't swim down there with you.
There is an initial solitariness.
It's crossing the chasm in the software model.
There is an initial isolation in gaining depth before you find other people.
Oh, I know that one so well.
Years of it. And You can't bring your depth to people.
You can't share, I think, with us, yes, with people on the board, with others that you can find that will understand it, that won't look at you like you just sprouted a squid head.
You can share it with those people, but you cannot share it with your family.
Your family will endlessly oppose it, and that's part of self-protection.
Now that you've got a sense of the depth and power, not just of who you are, But of who everyone is and how much everybody rejects the seat of their very strength and essence, I think that it's important to understand that you cannot bring your truth back to people.
You cannot. You must go on.
You must go on. You must go deeper into that garden.
You must go deeper into the electricity.
There is no going back.
There is only solitariness and dazedness and half-blindness in going back.
Going on, you will join the tribe.
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