First stab at analysis
This isn't easy for me to do. It's extremely revealing, and I'm not at all confident in my dream analysis skills. But this was one of those dreams that felt immensely important and meaningful, and that you can't help but try to analyze. My life has been strange since my mom died about a year ago, and this dream has made me realize that there are some important things I need to think deeply about. Things that I used to just not look at too closely.
So. On with it then.
Ok, first the easy part - the simple surface reading
At its most basic and superficial, the dream was a comparison between me and my opposite number - the cool people - the "bad kids" who have no problem at all getting laid but who aren't capable of anything deeper. My attempt to build the model kit and do it the right way represented all the positive aspects of art in my life - all the years of practice and learning I've put into it, the self-development, attention to fine detail, and ability to build rather than just to destroy. Most narcissistic people don't really create, they just destroy what other people create. Though that's not always true.
Read on this superficial level the dream was simply saying "I'm really better off than my opposite numbers because I have a soul, an inner life of creativity and self-development that they lack, and the sex they have is empty and meaningless anyway".
But that's only a surface reading, and only covers one part of the dream. It's also bullshit overcompensation. "The bullies who pick on me/the people who get laid all the time are assholes, and I'm such a better person than them blah blah blah". Fuck that. Childish.
Going Deeper
The maternal symbolism can't be ignored. All the rounded forms in human shape - and especially telling the fact that the MeK models contain soft chewy little human inside. The Volkswagen my mom used to drive, that she associated to strongly with as if it symbolized her. It reminds me of my childhood, and the good times I and my sister used to have with her before her narcissism really became too apparent.
I know much of Freud's ideas have been rightfully refuted, but I believe "Tell me about your mother" is still central to most psychology. It's the primary relationship, and if you can't bond properly with her in earliest childhood they say you'll never really have a successful love life. She was always cold and distant, and i once had a revelation the the way she treated a dog we used to have (Dusty) was exactly the way she treated me. Once Dusty came home grievously wounded - his entire rear end had been chewed up pretty bad by another dog. He couldn't lay down, and rather than take him to a vet she set up a little bed for him nestled right in a corner and he'd sleep propped up against the wall. She basically just rubbed ointment on the wounds and waited to see if he was gonna die. Later I suffered a terrible debilitating back injury and as I was laying on the couch (!) for 4 days it occurred to me that she was doing exactly the same thing to me she did to Dusty - she should have taken me to a hospital but instead she unfolded the hideaway couch and laid me on it and told me - I'll never forget these words they're burned into my brain like a brand - "Honey, modern medicine knows nothing about back pain. Chiropractors are just quack physicians. People with back pain just need to learn to live with it". This is typical behavior for a middle-aged narcissist - they see the injury of a victim (usually their child) as a chance to make them completely dependent. But I had developed my self-sacrificing attitude in compensation, and had learned long before to forgive all her transgressions because she was my mom - of course she really loved me and knew what was best, right?
I had a lot of time to think over my relationship with her as I lay there eating the chicken soup she brought me (analogous to the ointment she rubbed on the dog - horrifically inappropriate and nothing more than shoddy deceptive compensation designed to make her feel better). And when I fully accepted that she indeed treated me no better than the dog, I thought back to when we first got Dusty from the pound. It took a week or so for her to housebreak him, and she was terrible at dog training. Didn't understand how it worked. Any time he'd pee on the floor she flew into an insane rage, her face would literally turn bright crimson and her eyes would bulge out and she'd scream like a madwoman and drag him choking outside by his collar. The neighbors would freak out - here was the usually calm and intelligent woman next door shrieking like an insane banshee and terrifying the poor dog who didnt even understand what he had done wrong. And I remembered many incidents where she treated me and my sister exactly the same.
It also occurred to me that she had probably broken me the same way at an age too young for me to remember.
Certainly at the most important moments of my life when I expected support and happiness from her I always got a shocking surprise instead. Twisted anger and seething resentment when she should have been proud.
If any of this strikes a chord with anybody, you might want to look up NPD.
Symptoms
Amazing blog by someone who knows what she's talking about
Kathy Krajco really gets it because she spent much of her life as the prey/victim of narcissists and observed their behavior firsthand. And the really fascinating thing bout this malignant narcissism is - nobody sees it except the victims. Narcissists are charming and intelligent people usually - in fact they're often the most charismatic people in a group and nobody would believe they're capable of the things their victims report. That's because they're careful to never expose their monster face to anyone but the victim. They wear a false front the rest of the time. I won't go on about this anymore - the only people who need to know about it are people who are victims themselves - it won;t figure into anyone else's life because if you know a narcissist but aren't their chosen victim, then you've never seen this side of them and never will.
Anyway, Discovering the fact about this terrible condition after my moms death was like a revelation to me. So much finally came into focus, and as I thought deeper about it I came to realize that many of my friends and all my lovers were the same. They do say you always seek out a lover just like dear old mom, right? It's because the way your mom shows her love is what you always equate with love later in life.
I hate writing all this, and as of now I don't think I'll post it publicly. Maybe I will though - it could help some people in the same boat.
I have no idea if all this stuff really belongs properly to an analysis of this one dream, but it certainly dod make me cast my attention back over it all by pointing to a mother figure. Even long before Freud a vessel or pitcher was always understood as a maternal symbol. And look at all the rounded forms in the dream, ironically enough a robot containing a little human figure and the very kind of car my mom used to drive when I was a child. The dream definitely IS pointing me all the way back.
And all the twinning... beginning with an echo. An echo is a single sound plus its own double that distort each other by their proximity. That's what the two volkswagens were too really - there was a sense of them being almost too close together, as if somehow merging or overlapping visually like a double-exposure. And when I think about it, I said RH and I were arrayed like parallel parked cars on the couch - but now i realize - we were also aligned exactly like those two volkswagens. Too close together side by side, almost merging.
The model kit - Two figure entangled in combat that could almost be mistaken for lovemaking. One was definitely a mech battle suit containing a human figure (or soul?). The other one I'm hazy on, but it was dark and monstrous and was either a robot (not human figure inside) or an alien monster (not human).
So, one is me with my happy content little human soul, and the other represents maybe a narcissist with no real human soul inside? Not sure on this, but that seems likely.
Life Analysis
Now I step beyond simply analyzing the dream itself, and taking into consideration all these things it made me remember/think about I'll analyze my life a bit.
In studying modern art I came to realize that it's essentially analysis - which basically means studying. It's the kind of study like dissection that involves cutting something apart to learn what makes it tick. Dissection is incredibly valuable, without it we couldn't have a modern understanding of human anatomy or of medial science, but it's suited more to the lab than to life. To understand anything living, after studying the dissection data, you must then move on to synthesis - which means putting it together again. Study the bones of an animal to learn how to draw it, but you must also stand at the zoo or in its natural habitat and watch the living thing and how it relates to others.
All the various techniques that were so revolutionary in the Modern period were also present in the background of many classical paintings. Look close and you'll see textbook perfect examples of pointillism, cubism, abstract expressionism, all right there in little corners of the great classical paintings. But rather than being foregrounded and removed form context they're part f a living breathing whole.
Understanding the narcissistic component of my mom was incredibly healing. It was n fact a necessary step. I had to realize that I wasn't really to blame for the things she heaped on me, and she really did a lot of damage to me.
But it's been many months now, and I need to also synthesize that information, begin to again remember the fun hippie-mom who drove that orange Beetle. Realize that she couldn't help it - narcissists become the way they are in response to childhood trauma of their own... it's passed on down the line. Their children will either become normal (though rather tough), narcissists themselves, or prey/victims depending on the type of personality they have. We all begin life with what we're given, we can only play the cards we're dealt. Getting a bad hand is nobody's fault, it's just shitty luck.
It's time to begin to transcend these false dichotomies. Expand my awareness beyond medical/psychological descriptors and see the entire person. A narcissist is a person, just as I am. We're both fucked up. Neither of us is going to be able to become a fully integrated human being - but how many people really are?
I think most people are screwed up. It does no good to sit around licking our wounds and saying "I'm better than them because...". That only supports and strengthens the illusion of opposites. I now know that a narcissist will only become a vampire if you become a victim and offer your soft warm neck... refuse to do that and you'll find they're actually really cool people. Just as a victim/prey person can be if they overcome that complex. You don[t have to be a perfect person or fully integrated - some of us can't.
You only have to do the best you can and try to love each other in spite of differences.
A deformed hand won't fit a perfect glove, but if you search in the factory rejects bin you might find your perfect match.
Final thoughts
Wow, did this just go completely cheesy and preachy? Maybe. But I feel like I'm beginning to reconcile some apparent opposites in my world, and it might be another step toward something better.
I don't really know much about dream analysis - as I've said elsewhere my knowledge on the subject comes entirely from Freud and Jung, who were basically inventing it as they went, but their technique was to always remain completely open-minded and let the dream and the analysis go where it will. I don't know if any of this is really what the dream held, but either way it's some important stuff that I needed to reconcile.
*Takes deep breath and hits Submit Reply button*
**edit**
Weird coincidence, but today my back went out on me as it sometimes does, and I wrote this on the Rant and Rave thread. I'm posting the whole story here because it's relevant to the above, but pay particular attention to the bolded statements.
It just does this every so often - it can happen maybe once a month sometimes, or sometimes it doesn't happen for a few months, but sooner or later it will get me. It's been like this since I screwed up my back as a teenager helping a friend carry a huge engine block around his house that was really way too heavy for just the two of us. But we were like 16 and thought we were invincible, and we grunted and heaved and lifted that sucker and halfway around his house I heard something snap really loud, I mean like somebody had clapped their hands or something. I sort of looked around, but couldn't tell where it came from. My friend heard it too and asked what it was, but we couldn't figure it out. My back did feel a little funny, but I had no idea yet what real pain was. (Oh, the something that snapped was in my back, in case that's not clear).
The next day I was going up the back stairs of my house and saw my shoe was untied. I bent down to tie it and basically what I described above happened, but about a hundred times worse. I was utterly unable to move, all my muscles locked up tight as a drum and I could just barely breathe. I had never in my life felt such pain. My ribcage felt like I was being brutally bearhugged by a giant. I was basically paralyzed, and lay there crooked across the stairs for a few hours until my mom got home from work and helped me stand up - leaning really hard on her shoulder because you couldn't really call it standing at all - and she unfolded the couch into a bed in the living room and that's where I spent the next 4 days.
She kept telling me that as soon as I was able to get up and walk around she'd take me to a doctor or a hospital... and at the time it didn't occur to me why she didn't just call an ambulance... but that's getting too deep for this thread. I gotta say it though, and this is a big rant all to itself - but when I finally did roll off the couch and crawl up the stairs and take a shower on my hands and knees and then get dressed still on hands and knees she then looked me in the eye (well more like down at the back of my head I guess) and with a straight face said that I was obviously ok now - no need for a hospital or anything.
Ever since then my back's been all fucked up.
Uhmmmmm .. laying sideways and a couch, and this was one of the formative incidents in my life. Involves my mom's narcissism, in fact this was one of the defining moments when I had to face the fact that she wasn't right. Curiouser and curiouser.
**edit**
The Love Machine Incident
This memory just drifted up and is a perfect fit.
I remember once being at a party at GG's house and a few sheets to the wind when a friend pulled up in the van we called the Love Machine because it had a bed in the back, which got a lot of use. This guy was a bass player in a band and really into coke and cheap sex with loose women, and he walked into the party and said he had a really hot slutty girl out in the van and who wants to go for a ride? I went for it. After a while we pulled over and all 3 climbed into the back where the bass player and I lay side by side on the bed and the girl (who really was incredibly hot) did things to us. But she left us both in the lurch so to speak and we ended up high and dry if you catch my meaning.
This perfectly parallels the laying on a couch next to RH part of the dream. The bass player and RH are both short guys, both have similar attitudes, and both were laying to the left side of me. And the two people I was with in the Love Machine were definitely both narcissists.
|
|
Bookmarks