Dream Analysis of Win States, Antagonism, Stability and the Astral

**Occipitalred** · 02-10-2021 07:37 PM

The Dream

Spoiler for The Dream:

I'm in a game. As a rule, a game has a win state. A condition for successfully completing a predetermined task. But this is a dream and here, the games I play don't have win states.

I am in a grand fantastical realm, up in a round tower, the top of which has a balcony along its circumference also accessible via a cliff. Inside, I am seeking for some object. An object to win? Or an object to allow my progress towards a win? There are many objects scattered on the tables and shelfs. But nothing seems useful or glorious. I only find objects that I remember from false memories but are now useless. What is my purpose in this game? I am lagging.

The tower owner is coming. I hide outside on the balcony assuming she will be displeased by our trespassing. But my ally is not motivated to hide. From the doorway he tells me to just get back inside and he goes back in, to my surprise. The owner catches him. He is a hedgehog and she wants to pluck each of his quills. On top of that, the game's ultimate villains have located us. The situation is so grave, and this is a dream after all, so I come back in, confident in my own infinite power. I summon chaos. And now the people in the tower are multiplied so the enemies are diluted, and we are now all bird rabbit creatures pointing at each other in slow hand drawn animations. Amidst the chaos and the change in visual aesthetics, I make it out with my ally the hedgehog back into the original graphics of the game, and on that same cliff. We proceed through a cave and into a giant room. The ground is water and the room is scattered with platforming structures. There are many other people competing against us in this game. I want to win! But what is the win state? Where do we go to win? What do we do? We make it across the room and the way out is above. But it's too easy! The room is so big. I go back because I feel dissatisfied. I want to win. So many competitors. So much to explore. I climb back toward the center.

"There are snakes!" Someone warns me. Indeed, snakes are scattered here and there on the platforming structures. Resting and ready to attack. I decide to take the offensive. I am now hanging from a vine and take a bow and arrows. I aim. Miss. The snake has seen me and has taken a woman's form. She calls out at me, defying me and ready to come attack me. Luckily, I am out of harm’s way but another player is now hanging on the vine with me and we sway. No matter, I aim again. This time, I get the woman right in the stomach but she does not care. She says I gained a 10 points bonus but now she is swimming toward me. The vine sways further and much closer to another snake. I aim at it and fail three times. There are only two arrows left. The snake is now a beautiful woman, but her face does not hide she is a predator. The other player with me asks to try so I hand her the bow. Meanwhile, I climb around and come toward the snake woman from behind. My ally fails to get a hit and is now in the woman's clutch. Desperate I take a hold of the snake woman's head and try to snap her neck but I am disgusted by the violence and I am made weak. I don't want to hurt her but she looks at me unphased. Her face tells me she will kill me as soon as she can. I spot a silver fang resting on the platform. Reluctant, but knowing it's her or us, I grab it and stab her in the neck. Her blood starts seeping out but I keep hold of her. Why are we doing this? I fill a salt shaker with her blood, wanting there to be a reason for this violence and hoping her blood will somehow be useful in the future. She dies and falls in the water below.

I make my way back toward the room exit. On the way, I find the hedgehog. He's a boy now. He tells me our other friend is in the next room. I make sure to not lose the salt shaker with the blood. It must have some use. There must be a reason. In the next room, there's a library. What's the game? Floor is lava? We stay off the ground. I climb up and push bookshelfs hidden above. I throw books. Some elderly men who are not players like us are on the floor and looking at me with exhausted surprise in their face. Evidently, the floor is not lava but this is a game. There must be a game. A challenge. A win state. Yet, these men are not playing with us. They must be the enemy. So, I throw books at them and kick them. They shuffle away.

My destruction is stopped to listen to a narrative. This is a dream. But it's isolated and so my destruction does not destroy the dream beyond and does not disrupt its inhabitants. As an example, I am presented with a statue of Voldemort which also attempted to wreak havoc in the dream world. Luckily, he was isolated in his own dream. I get the sense that I have been watched by entities of the dream beyond and they keep those doors closed to me. But maybe not permanently. Gazing at Voldermort’s tormented face, an effigy of my own naïve violence, I wake up.

Discussion

I don’t believe lucid dreaming is cheating. I believe lucidity improves dream exploration. And I believe that in dreams and lucid dreams, we hold a worldview and make many assumptions that impede our exploration. Better clarity and lucidity should help us better explore our dreams.

Win States

Spoiler for Win States:

I’ve been noticing a pattern in my dreams. Games are a recurring theme, except, they don’t have win states (a condition for successfully completing a predetermined task). I think this a structural pattern of dreams (I intentionally say pattern, not rule). Like games, my dream will generate an environment and a semblance of a path forward. But there is no destination. No goal. No win state.

I think this is because a dream does not have an ending. It ends when we wake up, not when we achieve something. I don’t think dreams are manifested with a predetermined conclusion. Instead, I think they are generated much more alike a game like Minecraft or any other randomly generated sandbox game.

This pattern is not restricted to game dreams. When I am in a dream, there is little context, and I often assume my context. I assume I have a goal and that there must be a win state. I am often progressing violently with projecting a purpose on the dream that simply is not there.

What this teaches me: Witnessing this pattern in my dreams, my instinctive and violent assumption of an innate objective and win sate, I now realize it’s also present in my waking life. As early as my childhood, I’ve always had this sense. What am I doing? What’s the purpose? How do I win this? The answer to all this seemed to be some sort of enlightenment. And forever, I have been dissatisfied. Because I never found this satisfactory win state. And the more I’ve studied spirituality, the more I have been dissatisfied. The more the concept of enlightenment just seems to be our collective desire for an ultimate spiritual win. Obviously, there are spiritual events of achievement. Sort of aha moments where things click spiritually, and these moments could be described as transient enlightenments but I no longer believe in the ultimate win state of spirituality. Not only that, I think this feeling, this worldview, is blinding me. Because in reality, waking life and dreams don’t come with an ending. They’re more like sandboxes. You make goals for yourself.

How to have more clarity: When feeling the “What’s my purpose?” feeling, when waiting for a bigger purpose, dissatisfied in waking life, I want to take a moment to observe the sand-box nature of reality and ask myself, what do I want to do next in this sandbox. In dreams, when seeking my purpose, when assuming an incoherent context and projecting a goal, I want to observe the sandbox nature of reality and ask myself what I want to do next in this sandbox.

Antagonism

Spoiler for Antagonism:

In the dream, I assumed the tower owner would be mean. My ally was not as scared as me. But then she was mean (but the villain behaviour came after my assumption that she was bad). The snakes were only just resting until after I attacked them. (To be fair though, since I live with a snake, I have had dreams of snakes and they’ve often attacked me first… I have never touched my boyfriend’s snake, but he’s tried to bite me a few times from inside his terrarium, so I think that’s all fair. If I want my snake dreams to change, I would need to interact with the snake and learn to become familiar with it). Finally, the librarians never showed any hints of antagonism.

This is another recurrent pattern I have noticed in my dreams. I often project ill-intentions on strangers in my dreams. Often, baddies will have acted completely indifferent to me until I’ve spent a bit of time assuming they want to harm me. I assume they feel I am trespassing on their territory. Because my dreams are unfamiliar to me, I must not belong.

What this teaches me: I think there is two things here. First, I think I am too fast to feel I don’t belong. In those moments I want to observe that I do belong. I want to observe the space that I take, the effects that I will have. And I want to take responsibility for them. Observe the feeling of belonging. I am here. Observe the feeling of responsibility. I am responsible. I am here. Second, I think I am too fast to feel other people are antagonists. This I think comes from all the bullying as kids. All the judgement. I come to expect it. Someone always has something to say about any thing anyone does and I’m to sensitive to it. I interpret is as antagonism. I want to reinterpret this judgement as a microaggression, to be able to brush it off more easily. If someone makes a judgement or a criticism, doesn’t mean their overall judgement of me is negative. Does not mean they want to harm me. People make judgements to reinforce their own worldview, their own sense of wisdom, individuality, and control. When I feel judged, I want to observe their judgement (and here I am reminded of the 20th Major Arcana of Tarot, Judgement) and observe it in its spiritual nature. As something that belongs to them. And I want also to take a moment to cleanse myself spirituality. Feel clean and pure. Unlike the dirtiness that judgement often leaves me feeling.

How to have more clarity:
In dreams, when I will encounter strangers, I will observe that I belong here, that I am responsible for my effects (this is a dream after all, and by definition, I cannot trespass). Also, I will observe that their judgement belongs to them and that I am clean. Obviously this is a lot to remember to do in a dream, so rather, I will practice this before sleeping and in waking life until I master it better.

Stability

Spoiler for Stability:

Astral

Spoiler for Astral:

I don’t believe that dreams are a forum for different beings to come together and exchange. Because if it were, I’m sure someone would have found a way to make that ability profitable, or useful at least. And we would know. Yet, it would be awesome.

In this dream, as in many others, I feel like an outsider in my own dream. The dream seems stable enough, yet, incongruent with my own intuitions about it. I think the floor is lava and we must stay above it. No, it’s not. People are on the floor. I think they are antagonists. No, they aren’t. They’re just looking at me like “what the hell” is this guy doing climbing over the shelves and making a mess? My interpretation of the dream content is wrong. My expectations are wrong. They aren’t even the opposite of my expectations. We are just not aligned. It’s like I am in another world than my dream world. It’s like I am delirious in my own dream. Disconnected.

Interestingly, while my delirium intensified, I felt present. I was reflecting, trying to understand but failing. And the dream stopped me from further embarrassment by directly telling me I was being wrongly chaotic. And the dream told me not to worry about it because I was in an isolated dream. When the dream told me this, I also heard the insinuation that if I became more lucid in the future, if I showed that I could have a clear mind and not be disruptive, I could be connected to the dream beyond, to others.

In any case, I see why it is a relief that we don’t share dreams nightly; there would be too much accidental harm. Yet, the dream seemed to end with a challenge. “Come back when you’re more civilized. Come back when your mind is clearer. Come back when you are truly lucid.”
My feeling that there was an opportunity to dream with others is as likely another delusion as all my other delusions in that dream so that, I can let go of, even if it was more serene than the others. However, I am not letting go of the challenge. That, I take. I want to tear down my worldview and come back to the dream world with more clarity so that I may dream in alignment with the dream. Not seek win states where there are none but see dream for what it is and find pleasure in it, make my own objectives. Not project antagonisms on neutral dream characters but meet them as they are. I want to believe that dreams have roots (psychological) rather than that they are random non-existent nonsense.

May I listen to my dreams more, project onto them less.