Dangerous Jam

Dream snippet

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:43:42 GMT

All I remember about this one was someone solemnly telling me, regarding some important person, "We call him 'the Jung of Irøn Lüng.'" The latter was not a reference to medical equipment, but a place name or possibly a title.

My subconscious may be snarking about the high proportion of untranslated, "foreign" words in Jung's The Pyschology of the Transference via what I presume are the completely nonsensical diacriticals in "Irøn Lüng."

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Horses of the Tide

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 18:58:10 GMT

I dreamed I was on a beach. With each wave coming in, a herd of beautiful pure white or black horses came thundering up out of the ocean.

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Dream: Bulldog Undersea

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 17:40:00 GMT

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Experiment in Lucid Dreaming: Moss and Landscapes

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:22:47 GMT

I got sick of having annoying anxiety dreams about tests, toilets, papers, etc. So before I went to sleep last night, I suggested to myself that should I find myself in any typical anxiety dream situation, I ask myself if I was dreaming...

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Dream: The Third Eye

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 18:55:06 GMT

( Cut for dream. Contains eyes, but not particularly gross. )

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Cheer me on!

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:29:52 GMT

I managed to write three of my four papers due on Monday or Tuesday. I have to write the Trauma paper today. (And then bake a cake and go to dinner with classmates.) Cheer me on!

I had an amazing anxiety dream last night, combining a grand total of 10 separate anxiety-dream elements into a reasonably unified narrative. Well, maybe only 5 if you count all the purely toilet-related stuff as 1.

( Cut for dream and the eternal search for a toilet )

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Dream: Hole in the Earth

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:42:58 GMT

I and some others were watching a martial arts demonstration in the open air, on a plateau - maybe a mountaintop. No buildings anywhere, just flat earth. We were all sitting on the ground. The person sitting beside me scooted back, and I leaned forward to see what he was trying to get away from.

I hadn't noticed it before, but there was a hole in the ground, like a sinkhole, twisting downward like a tornado bored into the earth, lined with jagged rock protrusions. It went down and down, thousands of feet, but I could see all the way to the bottom. The tunnel stopped short, so there was a space of open air with no tunnel walls around it, and beneath that was moving, foam-streaked water, like you'd see through the cracks in a pier. I wasn't certain, but I thought it was the ocean. I felt a sense of awe.

ETA: I feel like certain images have been recurring recently: bodies of water, the ocean, eels and snakes, and horses or horselike things like deer or centaurs. (I haven't written up all my dreams here - some I scribbled into my notebook and never got around to transcribing.)

Before I started the program, or maybe very soon into it, I had a dream which I remember because I wrote it down. (It felt significant.)

I was riding my bicycle along the Pacific Coast Highway between LA and Santa Barbara, where it's a narrow strip between the hills and the ocean. I somehow had gotten off the highway, and was riding on a perilously narrow bike trail on the hills, a long way up. The sea below was an intense, electric blue. I was frightened.

I came upon a group of people, and one of them told me, "If you got up, you can get down the same way."

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Dream: It's a bird! It's plane! It's... an eyeball!

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:27:46 GMT

I dreamed that in a superhero world, one of the caped crusaders had a head completely covered in eyeballs - layers of them, so that his head was about the size of a watermelon and appeared to be entirely made up of eyeballs. His superpower was that he could send his eyeballs, individually or in a swarm, to fly through the air after bad guys and bang into them, with the same force as if he'd picked up his eyeball and thrown it at them. Unsurprisingly, supervillains did not find this to be a strong deterrent.

I suspect that this dream was influenced by my professor last night using the metaphor of billiard balls smacking into each other to describe Melanie Klein's theory of internalized "objects" (representations of relationships), and also by the hilarious This American Life segment describing failed superheroes, which mentions one whose power was to make his own limbs detach from his body.

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Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth, by Robert Johnson

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 20:35:08 GMT

Another school book, this one for Personality 1.

A manual for accessing one’s unconscious via dreams and “active imagination.” Johnson is a Jungian and discusses archetypes, but emphasizes that most dream symbolism is highly personal. Whether one believes that dreams are literal messages from the unconscious, or that one’s interpretation of the largely random matter of dreams is a method for accessing unexplored areas of the psyche, if one has any interest in exploring dreams and the unconscious, Johnson’s methods seem likely to be helpful.

He outlines detailed steps for dream interpretation, as follows:

Associations: Write down all the associations for each element of the dream, one at a time, not censoring oneself. That is, if the dream involves a blue car, all the associations for “blue.” Then all the associations for “car.” Etc.

Dynamics: Connect the images and associations with one’s inner life. Which associations seem intuitively valid? What in one’s inner life might relate to them? He suggests that real people in dreams typically don’t represent the actual people, but characteristics one associates with them.

Interpretations: Search for the central message that seems to be communicated.

Rituals: Do a small but concrete ritual action to cement the meaning of the dream and its message.

He also explains and gives steps for “active imagination.” Basically, this is doing somewhat directed daydreaming while writing down the daydream as it occurs. This sounds potentially interesting, and I will try it. (There’s way too much involved to try to summarize it here, but the book is easily available in the US, if you’re curious.)

Caveat: some mild gender stereotyping, and romanticizing of the past and non-western cultures.

Last night I dreamed that Anthony Bourdain and I were strolling around an indoor-outdoor food court somewhere in Asia, sampling and discussing all the food. We each tried a lamb skewer with different seasonings, his tandoori, mine spice-rubbed, then took a bite of the one we didn't get. He deemed mine "tough but good." I also recall ramen, donburi, and some very fancy wagashi.

Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

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Dream Journal: Obama and a Telepathic Baby

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 19:34:54 GMT

ABSOLUTELY no obligation to read these!

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A Pure White Kitten, Some Gold, and Hitler

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:40:11 GMT

I am supposed to keep a dream journal this quarter. First dream of the quarter below the cut.

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