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July 28, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:48
833 Propping Up Father - A Dream Analysis

A young man finds his inner lion

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Well I followed her to the station with a suitcase in my hand.
Well I followed her down to the station with a suitcase in my hand.
And it's hard to tell, it's hard to tell, when all your love's in vain.
See, this is my theory.
If I get a song stuck in my head, I'm going to pass it along to you to have that stuck in your head and hopefully free me.
That one's been in my head for a couple of days.
Anyway, I hope that you're doing well.
Let's do another dream, and then we shall, for the gold plus valued members...
Do aesthetics part two.
Rational art.
Which I think is a theory I've been working on for many, many, many years.
So I hope that it has come together in some way that makes sense.
So... Oh yes, my book is out, baby!
It's live! It is now consuming, ravaging through forests like orcs in Fangorn, felling the trees and making the paper.
So, I hope that you will drop past the website www.freedomainradio.com and click on the link.
You can listen to the first few chapters.
It is the podcast previous to this.
Somewhere between 832 and 833, or something like that.
And pick up the book.
I may do an audiobook. The audiobook is recorded, but I don't know how to distribute it without...
MP3s floating all over the place and daddy not getting paid.
So I hope that you will read the book.
And, you know, it's something that I know you're all used to, the audiobooks and so on, or the audio content of Free Domain Radio.
But this is something you need to sit in a chair with no music and read.
I really think that. I think it's a very, very dense book.
And it also, you know, I do lists.
I refer to them later. All of the kind of stuff that you kind of need a handheld device, like a book, to really get into.
So I'd really, really recommend Order the book, make sure I'm not insane, and then order some for your friends and family.
I think it's going to be a better way to introduce them to the value of the philosophy that we do here, rather than saying, go listen to these 12 podcasts and get back to me, right?
I mean, this is a lot of the basics, but applied in new ways.
So that's I've had some questions about the next book.
The next book I've started already.
It's on universally preferable behavior.
I've also booked an editor for August to go over The God of Atheists to get a hard copy of that for the people who've requested it.
And I hope that you will pick those up as well.
And let's move on with the dreams.
Hi, everyone. I'm...
Hello, everybody!
I'm new to the forums and have been listening for a few months.
I've been a market anarchist for years now, but I've only become majorly interested in philosophy early this year.
I live in England. I'm 17 and currently going to my second year of further education.
The subjects I study are music performance, music technology, fine art, and English literature and language.
Well, I can recommend my books, but not my singing.
But I am dropping English for philosophy as a subject next year.
A philosophy teacher is Christian. I hope I can make her an atheist.
Should be fun. May not be.
I live with my mom, dad, and my brother is at university studying architecture.
My parents are surprisingly not market anarchists.
Shocking. I rarely talk to them about my beliefs and never in any real depth because things can easily spiral into a major argument.
I find it easier to talk to my mom rather than my dad.
I think this is because... Maybe my dad paid the bad cop whilst my mom played the good cop in my upbringing.
Not that a bad cop is worse than a good cop because they're both still cops.
My dad is quite strict and can easily turn things into a serious lecture or argument, but over these past few years, I've been finding myself and feel I have a bit more recognition with my parents.
If I bring up politics with my mom, I will get...
Oh, God! My mom is pantheistic and does to go to church occasionally.
Oh, this is the libertarian thing, isn't it?
In a jokey manner. Ha ha.
I will educate her about what I believe, but I know nothing will stick.
I think that they see it as a passing phase.
If I try to bring up politics with my dad...
I can have a more deep but heated conversation.
I... Sorry.
Boy, you glance away for a moment and you lose the whole text.
I try to avoid these conversations to keep the status...
to keep the status...
status queue, sorry.
My mom is a public primary school teacher and my dad is a driving instructor, but before that he was a public primary school teacher as well.
I sometimes feel sorry for my dad when he shouts at me.
I think this is because my dad's dad was really strict and my dad...
Had a bad upbringing, I feel.
His dad served in the Air Force and was some high-racking officer.
I think he fought in part of World War II. My dad was born in Iraq because his parents were traveling over the world at the time, and I think that they traveled for quite a long time.
I feel that my dad was brought up with a firm hand, so that's all he really knows.
When I was little, I was spanked if I did something wrong, and I get a good shout-down about once or twice a year.
A dress-down, I think they call it in the military.
That's me. I don't have much of a social life.
I mainly see all my friends in college.
I see friends outside of college rarely and I spend most of my time in my room practicing guitar on the computer.
I feel very conscious of my friends and I always feel that my friends don't really like me.
I feel that I have a lot of acquaintances and no friends.
I feel I have never had a good enough friendship or relationship with anyone.
I also feel very rejected in my life and I think that I have a low self-esteem, a problem with trusting people, and I lack confidence.
This is maybe because I feel I am overweight and unattractive.
I'm very self-conscious. I also feel very lonely.
I feel I'm always happy with someone around, and I'm very bored of being lonely now, but don't really know what to do about it.
My passions in life are music, guitar, art, market anarchism, music technology, philosophy, psychology, and skepticism.
I really enjoy listening to podcasts and watching psychological illusionists like Darren Brown.
I would really like to study things like that more, as well as wanting to know more about philosophy and psychology.
My dream. Here we go.
In my dream, I'm walking along with three other friends in a big city.
I have the feeling it's New York.
And we all have superpowers.
I am not sure what I have, but I think I can fly.
There is a small skyscraper that's falling down, and we all rush to save it.
I remember standing on the top floor.
It is an office block of some sort.
I don't know how we save it, but we do.
I land with the rest of my friends, and we walk on.
But there are more than three friends now.
There are about eight friends, six that I remember distinctly, and he lists off the people in his life.
I am now walking up a mountain with these friends.
The path is about twelve foot wide, and there are vertical mountain walls on each side.
It is like a corridor. My friends are walking in two groups of four.
I am walking from one group of friends to the next, but I feel like I'm being ignored.
They do not respond to anything I say.
It's like I'm invisible, but I know that I'm not.
I get frustrated and walk on ahead, alone.
I walk for a fair while, thinking about the reasons why I was ignored.
When the path I am walking splits into two paths, I look back and see my friends in the distance.
I decide to follow the left path, and after a while of walking, the path opens out.
One of the mountain walls is now a cliff.
I look out, and it looks like I'm in the Alps.
I peer over the cliff, and the drop is endless.
There is a blizzard, and the path narrows to about two foot wide.
I decide that this looks too dangerous, and I make a decision to walk back to where the path split into so I can go up the path.
Directional, not true, path.
So I go up the right. Directional, not true, path.
On my way down the mountain to the other path, I meet a man and his child.
I warn them that this path will lead to dangerous upper head.
The man ignores me and walks on.
I react where the original path split into.
I react with the original, and I follow the path I decided not to go down at first.
This path leads me to a traditional Chinese-style house, two traditional Chinese-style houses that are each three floors high.
There are four of these houses that surround a large swimming pool.
It looks like it is late at night, and all the houses have no lights on except one of them.
I enter this house.
There is a pillar in the middle of this house with a woman in it serving drinks.
There is a live jazz band playing, and I can see this is a relaxing and friendly environment.
The room is about 400 square feet and has luscious dark brown wooden walls and floor.
I see my friends sitting down on the floor on one side of the room.
I go and greet them, but only X, Y, and Z friends are there.
Subsequently, other friends enter the room from a traditional Chinese paper sliding door.
I introduce them to the rest of my friends, although I know that they have already met.
It feels like the first time they have met.
I sit down with my friends and Joel is naked.
Joel, in reality, is black, but in this dream he is white, but his penis is the only thing that is black.
I leave my friends to explore upstairs.
Upstairs is exactly the same with the pillar and jazz band.
I sit down to watch the band, but loads of people come and sit down next to me.
They are wearing my old school uniform.
I leave because I felt disturbed by the group of people.
I walk down the stairs following an employee who works in the building.
He is unaware that I follow him.
He opens a hidden door and leans out to talk to someone.
I gaze over his shoulder and see a plain, bland, white corridor.
I feel that I don't want to know what's down there because it is probably unimportant.
I leave the building and walk through a small gap between the buildings.
I find myself in an African field in the wilderness.
It is daytime and extremely sunny.
I realize that the field has long yellow grass, like a cornfield, but something has rolled over and the grass lies flat, all rolled in the same direction.
I start walking on the grass that has a slight spring to it when I notice that there are animals trapped under the rolled grass.
I keep walking as I see animals like rabbits, zebras, and African goats trying to escape from under the grass.
These animals seem to be getting bigger the further I walk.
First rabbits trying to escape, then goats, then zebras, until there is a lion that is trying to escape right next to me.
I know that it will escape, and I freeze on the spot.
He emerges from the grass and stands next to me, staring at me.
Suddenly, I spot a man on the other side of the field.
I point at the man, so the lion eats him instead of me.
This man is chasing a rabbit with a spear, but his spear is very strange.
The spear is a swordfish.
He throws the swordfish at the rabbit...
And runs to see if he caught anything.
The lion and I laugh at the absurdness of the scene, and we part ways as friends.
I leave the field the way I came, reach the gap between the houses I came through.
I look back at the field, but now it is a Chinese harbor at night with a city in the distance.
I turn back and walk through the gap.
I enter the doorway to the house where my friends were and wake up.
Can anyone shed light on this dream?
A great dream. Great, great, great dream.
I'm glad that you remembered all the details.
It is far too dense and complex a dream to go into every one of you.
You could spend hours on this dream, which I'm not going to do, for the sake of humanity.
But let's go over the major parts of it, if you don't mind.
Well, we'll start.
I'll go through the dream, and we'll talk about your family stuff as it hits the dream.
Walking with a bunch of friends in a big city, and you all have superpowers.
Well, of course, in the real world, you don't have superpowers, right?
So, other than imagination.
So, when you have superpowers in a dream, you are in a dream within a dream.
You don't have superpowers in the real world.
You can't fly. And early in a dream, particularly in a dream like this, where you end up reconciling yourself with a more assertive side of yourself in the sort of lion situation, In a dream like this, which is a journey dream, the beginning of the journey is always the fantasy aspect of things, right?
So the beginning of the journey is always where you're starting from, which is not a situation of great self-development, right?
So a bunch of friends, small skyscraper that's falling down.
You all rush to save it. It's kind of cartoony.
It's comic book-y. And you don't know how you save it.
And so this is a situation where your friends and yourself think that you have superpowers, which is like a dream within a dream.
It's not true. So there's a kind of grandiosity here.
There's a kind of self-importance here.
And this is a very early stage, right?
The children running around pretending that they have superpowers.
There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not true, right?
It's sort of fundamentally not true. So you start embedded in an illusion.
Of grandiosity. And of course, the thing that you connected with your friends is, you know, we all have superpowers and we're a supergroup or whatever, like ABBA, and of course that's not true, right?
I mean, you don't have superpowers in common with your friends, right?
So you're this, I don't know, skyscraper-saving crime-fighting gang, and you have all this stuff in common, which is your superpowers, but since your superpowers don't exist, you're not actually close to your friends.
You're only close to your friends through the fantasy of these superpowers, which don't exist, so...
This is a grandiosity, false...
I mean, in my view, again, whatever works for you, right?
But there's a sort of false connection here, grandiosity, and so on.
So then you're walking up a mountain with these friends.
So here, like from this early time on, which could be your childhood and so on, from this fantasy of connectedness that you have with these people, now you're moving to a situation of more reality, right?
So you're walking up a mountain with these friends.
Of course, earlier you could fly.
Fly, save skyscrapers.
Now you're walking up a mountain, so there's some loss of grandiosity in the second part of the dream and some sort of more reality.
So you're going through a very narrow path.
So this indicates a kind of conformity because you don't have options about where you're going.
You go forward or you go back.
As you say, it's a 12-foot wide vertical mountain walls on each side.
You're going through a very narrow canyon, like a corridor.
So you're walking in two groups of four.
You're going from one group to the next, but you feel like you're being ignored.
Well, because everybody's going in a straight line.
They have no choices. They have no right.
You're going back and forth, but everyone's just sort of marching, at least as far as I can see that you say.
So you get frustrated, and you walk on ahead alone.
So you go ahead alone, why I'm ignored, and then it splits into two paths, right?
So you're given your first choice, right?
So from grandiosity, you go to conformity, and then you go ahead of your friends, and you split into two paths.
You follow the left path, and after a while of walking, the path opens out, and one of the mountain walls is now a cliff.
I look out. It looks like I'm in the Alps.
I peer over the cliff, and the drop is endless.
There's a blizzard, and the path narrows to about two foot wide.
I decide that this looks too dangerous, and I make a decision to walk back to where the path splits so that I can go up the other path.
And you meet a man and his child.
I warn them that this path will lead to dangers up ahead.
Ignores me and walks on. I'm not sure what that is.
Honestly, I don't know enough about your associations, what the man looks like, how old the kid is, if it's a boy or a girl, but you can, I'm sure, figure this one out if this works to you.
So then you go to these traditional Chinese-style houses that are each three floors high, four of these houses that surround a large swimming pool.
It looks as if it's late at night and all the houses have no lights on except one of them into this house.
So now this is more of an adult situation, right?
So I get child, teenage, adult because there are drinks, there's a jazz band.
This is sort of an adult situation.
And as you say, it seems like a friendly place, right?
It's relaxed and chatty and so on.
But Joel is there and...
There's a kind of discontinuity in the dream, right?
Or in the environment of the dream, because you're introducing your friends to each other as if...
But you know they've already met. And they go along with it.
They don't say, you don't need to introduce us, we've already met, right?
So, again, this is about a lack of connection between the people around you.
Joel is naked. Joel in reality is black, but in the dream he is white, but his penis is the only thing that is black.
And... I mean, I try not to get overly phallic, but this one's sort of hard to ignore, right?
For some reason, before I started reading this dream, the phrase penis eels came into mind, like a big sort of squirming, greased bucket of penis eels.
But that may not have particular relevance to the dream.
I just thought it was kind of a funny image.
But here, we have a situation where we have a...
A reversal, like something which genetically I think would be impossible, which is a white body with a black penis.
And there is some phallic situations here, right?
I mean, first of all, you have a skyscraper that's falling, which you save through grandiosity.
And I think this goes back to what you say about your dad, that your dad is kind of a, well, not kind of, your dad is a bully, was raised in a military situation, and yells and hits and so on, and you feel kind of sorry for him.
I actually write about this in my book, just how those who abuse children don't know how much pity the children actually have for the abusers deep down, right?
Because we know just how sad it is to bully a child.
It's so pathetic. So you have sympathy for your father, right?
So the fact that there's a small skyscraper which is falling, and this is a foul, I think, again, it works.
You can let me know what you think, of course.
I think it works. It's that you are supporting a falling skyscraper, a small falling skyscraper, which means you're propping up your father's manhood, right?
Because you see so much more clearly what a bully your dad is.
And you are propping him up when you're a kid, right?
By sort of acquiescing, going along, thinking he's the big man on campus and so on.
And here you have a situation wherein if a white guy has a black penis...
That's not good, right?
I mean, that would indicate gangrene or rot or a lack of blood circulation or whatever.
I don't know if the penis is healthy in the dream or not.
But for a black guy to have a black penis, hunky-dory.
But for a white guy to have a black penis, not that good, right?
And it sounds like your dad is pretty macho.
Your mom is also pretty stereotypically feminine, you know, pantheistic, vaguely religious, not interested in politics and using emotional tricks and rolling her eyes and so on.
So it sounds like your mom and your dad are kind of caricatures of masculinity and femininity, because there's pillars all over the place here, right?
So again, I think this, to me, this indicates a lack of connection between masculinity, like black penis, white body, possible diseased masculinity, and so on, which I think is how you perceive your dad.
And it's completely obvious. That's what the nakedness is, right?
It's completely obvious. We see our parents right through to their very cores.
We will never know any... I will never know Christina as well as I know my mom.
I will never have the same intent to study her.
She won't either be as dangerous or be dangerous to me at all.
The reason that this guy is naked is because you can see your dad all the way through the core and the sort of rotted, diseased masculinity that he has going on and the lack of connection that goes on between his...
Masculinity and his identity.
Well, and reality. Now, when you start exploring, you start going the same upstairs with the pillar and the jazz band.
So you go to watch the jazz band, and again, you seem sort of relaxed and happy, but loads, as you say, loads of people come and sit down next to me.
They're wearing my own high school uniform.
I leave because I felt disturbed by the group of people.
So this starts out as a warm and friendly place, but whenever you sort of relax and start to enjoy yourself, the past arises, right?
So you're past high school, and at least school uniform sounds like high school or junior high.
So then you're past high school, but you sit down and start to relax, and high school returns.
The past returns. And again, there's no connection, right?
You don't say, hey, my old school buddies, what are you doing here?
Which you would in real life, right?
You just feel unsettled and leave.
So again, there's this lack of connection.
And uniformity, right?
The fact that a metaphor of people in uniform...
It comes into your dream, right?
So there's a kind of conformity, a kind of uniformity, like the narrow corridor that you're walking to, right?
And this idea that the mountain pass that leads away from conformity is a metaphor that's very common.
Nietzsche uses it all the time.
And so that idea that it's too risky to go alone at the moment is true.
And I think that it is right that you didn't take that path that led the two-foot-wide path.
I mean, that is too dangerous, right?
You weren't ready yet. And the dream is trying to ready you for that path, right, by giving you more agility and better vision and a more comfortable environment to take that journey.
So you walk down the stairs following an employee who works in the building.
He is unaware that I follow him.
He opens a hidden door and leans out to talk to someone.
I gaze over his shoulder and see a bland white corridor.
I feel that I don't want to know what's down there because it is probably unimportant.
Now that's interesting, right?
I mean, that's a very dense and complex emotion or experience that you look down a corridor into the basement, right?
More into the core, more into the unconscious.
And you say, I don't want to know what's down there.
So you feel like you don't want to know what's down there.
You feel uneasy about it.
But then you say, because it's probably unimportant.
But don't want to know what's down there is different from it probably being unimportant.
So here you have probably the core of your defenses.
An aversion is followed by a shrugging and an indifference, which is how you defend against the aversion.
So you don't have to get to the root of why you're averting from learning what's down there corridor.
You say, I leave the building, we walk through a small gap between the buildings, I found myself in an African field in the wilderness, right?
So this is progress, right?
You've been listening to these, let me just get this right, listening for a few months, right?
So this is part of the progress that you're going through psychologically.
You're in an African field, right?
So this is the first time that you have real mobility, real possibility.
You can go in any direction that you want.
Long yellow grass. Something is rolled over and the glass lies flat all rolled in the same direction.
Again, conformity, right?
Something's being flattened. Some massive, I don't know, roller thing has a massive caterpillar thing has rolled over all of this grass and had it all flattened and pointed in the same direction.
This is the crushing conformity that is inflicted upon us by our parents and by our friends and by our school and by all this kind of stuff, right?
So everything's crushed and flattened, but not dead, right?
Which is great. You don't want to end up in a dead concrete cell, right?
You start walking on the grass that has a slight spring to it, right?
So you enter this, right?
You are now reviewing the conformity, the stifling conformity that was inflicted upon you when you were a child, right?
So now you see this conformity, you have options.
You start walking on it, and look, there's animals alive still under the grass.
So they were flattened. They were flattened.
Their environment was flattened, but they survived.
They survived by not moving, by going underground.
This is how our true self survives when this kind of crushing conformity is inflicted on us when we are children.
We go deep, we don't move, we let everything get flattened over us, and then we try to resurrect ourselves later.
Rabbits, zebras, and goats trying to escape from under the grass, right?
So that your true self, your ecosystem, which we've talked about in the premium podcasts, the ecosystem of the self.
The self is not an identity, but an ecosystem of instincts and reason and dreams and passions and emotions and inspiration.
We have an ecosystem to manage when we have a real, free, and true identity.
So here, as you walk through, the animals seem to be getting bigger the further that I walk, right?
First rabbits try to escape, then goats, then zebras, right?
So you're increasing size, increasing vitality.
The environment is coming alive, and that is a beautiful thing, right?
I mean, the animals are coming out from under the crushed grass.
You are developing a stronger and richer and deeper and more varied sense of identity, and that's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
Then out comes the lion.
And I was enormously thrilled to see that you set the lion on a man on the other side of the field.
Now, it would be interesting to me if the grass was pointed in the same direction that the man ends up in, then it would indicate that it was the man, i.e.
your father, who steamrolled you all this conformity and so on, right?
The lion eats him instead of me.
This man is chasing a rabbit with a spear, but his spear is very strange.
The spear is a swordfish.
See, the interesting thing is that you have animals trapped under grass, which is sort of like being underwater, and you have a guy above the grass with a completely inappropriate spear, and again, that may also be considered phallic, right?
That he's throwing a spear, a swordfish at a rabbit.
So your animals are trapped under the grass as if they were underwater, and this guy has taken an underwater creature and is using it as a spear.
And... Now, you say, I point at the man so the lion eats him instead of me.
Well, that's very interesting, right?
So the anger that we have towards those who've inflicted kind of brutal conformity on us, the anger that we have towards these people is entirely naturally healthy.
And we either focus our anger on the objective and just source of the pain or the hurt, or we turn it on ourselves, right?
I mean, in a sense, we never want to encounter our inner lion because it is a great deal of strength, but it is a great deal of hostility, and that destabilizes us, though it is, of course, a very healthy thing.
And, of course, the interesting thing is that when you point...
This is the amazing thing about this dream and what I have experienced and others have experienced.
When you get justly angry at your parents, you don't have to attack them.
You don't have to abuse them.
You don't have to go screaming at them for the rest of your life.
I mean, that is the very interesting thing about this kind of situation, right?
So people always think, well, if I get angry at my parents, I'm just going to scream at them for the rest of my life, and it's going to be horrible, and it's going to be terrible, and so on.
But it's not the case at all.
When you get angry at your parents...
You release your anger.
Your anger finds its just source.
And then you're free of it, right?
I mean, it's not instantaneous, but it's pretty quick.
So then you laugh at the absurdness of the scene, right?
So once you get angry at your dad, you realize how ridiculous he looks.
He's chasing a rabbit with a spear that is a swordfish.
And you, of course, would be the rabbit, right?
And also we get how enslaved the slave masters are, right?
So he's chasing a rabbit with a swordfish and so on.
So then you come back to where your friends are and you wake up.
And our dreams awaken us at particular times, too.
It's not just accidental. They awaken us so that we can remember the dream, but also that you wake up and you're...
So you're going back to your friends and here you say, I want to get back, you know, get closer to my friends and so on.
But the dream is saying that you can't, right?
So you go back. After all of this amazing journey and growth and progress and understanding the conformity and breaking out of the conformity and getting angry at your father unconsciously and...
We're freeing the entire African ecosystem.
The veldt and the animals are struggling free of the constricted and uniform grass.
After all this, you try to go back to your friends, but you've woken up, so you won't ever see them.
So this is the real challenge.
This is the challenge of growth. How do we relate to people who haven't grown?
The answer is we can't. They either grow or we have to find new companions.
So I hope that this is helpful.
It was a fairly rapid one.
I would definitely take some time thinking about your dream.
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