• Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views




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    1. #1
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      Yellow VWs, Japanese Robot Model, and Sexual Frustration - a very revealing dream

      Yesterday I worked up the guts to make a rather revealing and uncomfortable post on the Rape Dreams thread that dredged up memories that I haven't thought about for some time now, and as a result I had a sort of breakthrough. I used to have no trouble at all remembering 5 to 7 dreams a night, and when I'd wake up I could easily lay perfectly still with my eyes closed and begin to recall them. I've lost that ability lately and have only at best been able to remember one crappy fragment a night if anything, and the dreams I've been having seem anxiety-ridden and apropos of nothing relevant to my life. I was really getting bummed out over it.

      But last night I woke after about 3 hours remembering a fairly long and very detailed/vivid dream that relates strongly to the rape dreams I posted about yesterday, and that seems to shed some light on a longstanding problem of mine concerning intimacy and sex. It's not really a solution dream, more like as if my subconscious is beginning to mull over the problem and hopefully I can work through it somehow in a series of dreams or by contemplating this dream and my love life extensively.

      Here's an excerpt from an entry I made on the Rape Dreams thread yesterday:


      In dredging up these unpleasant memories, I now remember that one or two of these dreams didn't even involve any kind of penetration... only kissing. I just essentially wrapped my arms around her and started kissing her and she fixed me with that horrified look and died in my arms. I only remember having dreams like this 3 times. But thanks to a screwed up childhood my head has always been filled with negativity about sex and intimacy and I was essentially raised to believe that any sexual contact (hell, any contact at all between man and woman) was rape and that forcible castration was a suitable punishment.

      It's only in recent years that I've started to deal with this screwed-up upbringing and the damage it did to me. As a result of it I've had very little in the way of relationships or sex and have always carried a strong guilt complex about it. I believe those dreams were in part a reflection of that guilt complex.
      And here's a link to the original entry where I described the rape dreams.

      And with no further ado, here is last night's dream in all its f**ed up glory


      Yellow VWs, Japanese Robot Model, and Sexual Frustration


      I was standing on a parking lot next to a building that resembled a sort of alternate dimension version of Main Street Market (most prominent dream sign). Everything was deserted. The building had a bright yellow awning on the front of it and an outdoor speaker aimed across the street so sound from it echoed back from the storefronts across the street strangely doubled and distorted. I don't remember if it was playing music or announcements of some kind. I seemed to be waiting for a bus or something (there is a bus stop there IRL where I've frequently done that) and it was either raining or had just been r was about to, but it was a very pleasant atmosphere at the moment. I was enjoying the solitude and total immersion in this beautiful environment.

      There were no cars or traffic at all, until suddenly I noticed 2 identical bright yellow late-model VW beetles coming down the street ridiculously close together, especially considering they were the only cars on the street. As I watched them approach my vision went into closeup slow-mo as the cars bumped together and I saw there were women driving them both. It was a very harmless accident, just a fews light scrapes and dents, and for some reason I was thinking it would be extremely easy and cheap to fix them because they were identical models and colors. This thought struck me as very pleasant and almost funny - or rather I was just so happy I was almost laughing.

      A voice beside me drew me out of closeup-slow-mo mode to find a girl now standing beside me who hadn't been there before. She was very cute and smiling a lot and instantly likeable, and her smiling/happy mood seemed to parallel my own. It seemed she must have read my thoughts, because I was aware that I hadn't said anything aloud, but she commented that the cars actually weren't quite the exact same shade of yellow.

      I looked again and now they were slightly different, which was annoying because I know they actually were exactly identical a moment ago - it was as if her saying so made it happen. Now her chuckling tone, so pleasant a moment ago, seemed slightly mocking.

      A moment later we were in a long narrow apartment. The rooms were no wider than hallways, but there were no actual walls, rooms were separated only by being offset at different levels, giving it all a very modern Architectural Digest look complimented by chrome-and-smoked-glass furniture and overstuffed beautiful plush sofas everywhere. There were also attractive decorative floor lamps and exotic potted plants everywhere.

      Somehow due to the cramped narrow feel of it I was sitting/laying diagonally across one of the sofas, even though there was no actual wall to force me into that position. Someone was sitting the same way beside me, and we were both sort of half-laying against the back of the couch so we were like a couple of parallel-parked cars nestled side by side at an angle. He was shorter than me, and thanks to the angle we were sitting at this put his head very close next to my abdomen or lower chest. The girl was walking around and I knew it was her apartment. Now she came toward us and when I thought she was going to just walk by instead she suddenly dropped right on top of the guy next to me, who I now recognized as a guy I had grown up with who was a sort of friend but sort of bully - RH. He was a year older than me IRL and was from a broken home, so he was a cool rebel kid with a bad attitude and was always getting in trouble - in fact it was him who first got me high and tried to start me smoking. He's got s sort of lowlife attitude, but although he's far from good looking he always did score with the girls, as long as it was the right kind of girls (sort of lowlife-ish like him).

      She laid on top of him, her upper body propped up on straight arms so her cute face was down-tilted over his with her short black pixyish hair falling and brushing against his face seductively.

      This was definitely turning into an annoying dream now!! I saw her first!!

      And now I was trapped on this couch and because of our cramped positions her hand was pressed against my hip and I found myself intimately close, largely within the field of her body warmth, almost as if she were seducing me. But I was merely collateral damage in her seduction of my bully/friend.

      I got up and started walking around admiring the apartment and noticed there was a Japanese model kit opened up and scattered all across most of the furniture - huge folded-out poster-sized instruction sheets (written in Japanese) and colorful pamphlets and booklets and "trees" of plastic parts scattered on adjoining sofas and tables and counters all across the apartment. Heh, it was a very detailed and complicated model kit!! It seemed like at some point that must have happened between dream scenes she had mentioned this kit and said she wanted help putting it together because she was no good at it and couldn't read the instructions, and she knew I was an artist and sculptor and thought I could do a good job of it for her.

      So as they made out I started taking it all in, getting an overview of all the parts and looking at the drawings showing how they go together. The kit consisted of two figures - one being a cool-looking robot with a tall dome-shaped head and rounded body parts and segmented arms and legs, which looked design-wise very similar to Robby the Robot (a model kit I actually have and have been slowly prepping so as to end up with a really good build) - except the domed head was metal rather than glass and it was all painted bright yellow with red accents - in fact exactly as if the design were based on the Volkswagens that had crashed at the beginning!!

      Absorbed in this. I suddenly noticed they were both standing right in front of me, the girl draped on him and both of them fixing me with mocking evil looks as if they've just decided that making fun of the artist geek would be a great part of their foreplay. And then they proceeded to take the model kit away from me too... my thing (as an artist) and my refuge from their sexual play. RH started crudely twisting off plastic parts with no regard and jamming them together (wrongly) and gobbing glue all over everything so runnels of it dripped everywhere. I couldn't believe it!! And she stood there laughing - at me apparently, as he destroyed her beautiful expensive kit that could have been a thing of great beauty for a lifetime, but was now becoming a lump of ugly garbage.

      At one point he couldn't find the pelvis structure, so he went into the kitchen and came back with a huge butcher knife and a sweet potato - jammed the robot's torso and legs crudely into the potato and carelessly carved it so it somewhat resembled the part it was supposed to look like. Actually, to add injury to insult, it really did come out looking exactly the way it was supposed to, but I knew it was only a matter of days before the potato began to rot.

    2. #2
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      Beginning at an analysis, Notes and supplemental material

      Wanted to sleep on it before I tackled reading any meaning into this thing.

      First just few random images to demonstrate items from the dream:


      This is about how the yellow VWs looked.

      My mom used to have an orange VW and she loved it so much that when it died she got another one just like it.

      This is Robby the Robot - a model kit I actually have that is under construction (but on a rather long hiatus, as is anything creative I'm supposed to be working on):




      Notes

      Doubling
      There's a prominent theme of doubling. Beginning with the echoes from the loudspeaker at the very start of the dream. Then twinned VWs driving so close they're almost one and almost merge into one in the accident. Could RH be a sort of double of me? And the girl - reading my thoughts - are they both aspects of myself? I'll assume this is one level of meaning, though as dreams can do, they probably also represent other things at the same time.

      RH and I were laying/sitting diagonally on the couch side by side - very close, like parallel parked cars.

      He suddenly appeared there during a dream scene shift - same way the girl appeared while my attention was on the accident. Manifesting seems to be the right word.

      Two figures in the model kit - one was the yellow robot, the other I didn't see very well but I think it was dark - it seemed like some kind of alien warrior or something - could have been another robot or mech of some kind? They were fighting. Entangled sort of like two cars in an accident. Two people having sex.

      Robot Model
      It wasn't until after I woke up and thought about the dream that I suddenly realized the robot looked like a bright yellow Robby kit. Later I also remembered these MEK kits that closely resemble it, with a large metal domed head. They're not actually robots - as the pictures show they're mech battle suits with a person inside. Like a driver in a car. Maybe like a soul in a person too? Child inside the mother? Soft chewy center inside the mechanical exterior?

      There's more, but it gets pretty personal and weird - I don't feel right posting it in here. Maybe later, who knows?


      **edit**

      Ok what the hell - decided to throw this in here after all:

      Vampirism/Narcissism
      This dream brings to mind something I said on the How Often do you Watch Porn thread recently, that porn stars like strippers and hookers are often people who were molested or raped as children. Sex addicts. Sex has no meaning to them - they're dead inside and use sex and emotional traps to snare and drain people who aren't dead inside - it's a form of vampirism (this being only the most extreme cases - as always people lie somewhere along the spectrum between the extremes).

      After my mom died my sister and I got into a conversation about her, how narcissistic she was. This led to my seeking information about narcissism and narcissistic parents online (why didn't I ever do that before?) and the effects it has on the children. I won't go into detail, but it's pretty intense stuff, and a child with an easy-going non-confrontational personality is pretty much destined to be the victim of a narcissistic parent and this makes them lifelong victims to narcissists in general. Vampires seek those with warm blood to fill the cold void inside, draining their victims in the process. Soft chewy center - empty hollow inside.

      After learning these harsh truths I began to realize that many of my friends and all the girls I've been with have been narcissists of this type. It's not the same as ordinary garden variety narcissism like many people have, it's called NPD or Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Malignant narcissism. i now understand that I've always been attracted to this type of person, in the case of females because they have sex and "relationships" without ever engaging any real intimacy. Because we have opposing issues (fear of intimacy and sex in my case, using it as a tool or weapon in theirs) it's the only way I've been able to have anything like a relationship.
      Last edited by Darkmatters; 09-30-2011 at 02:38 PM.

    3. #3
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      Time to hammer some meaning out of this thing - even if I have to break it in the process

      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.
      Last edited by Darkmatters; 10-01-2011 at 11:19 PM. Reason: Added more content. And again.

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