I am a soldier because I can't afford my cozy lifestyle. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAMS

I'm a soldier in a slightly different, slightly futuristic world, and I'm being shipped for deployment. I find a place to sit near the rear opening of the truck. One soldier has to hang out of the back, holding on to bars on the door. 

After driving for a while, a woman who's an officer tells us we need to be extra quiet along this stretch of the trip. (We're passing a Walmart and I assume we need to be quiet because it's respectful.) The guy hanging out the back was causing the most noise with his struggles to stay on the truck! Now he has to stay silent on top of it. His feet morph into metal frog feet that attach securely to the bar on the back. 

We switch vehicles. Now we're in an open jeep with a large truck bed. We sit in there. We go into a tunnel. After a while, I see some bullets spraying from further back in the tunnel. A group of rebel hooligans has broken into the troops' transport system with guns. 

The guy who was hanging out of the back of the truck has a gun, and he fires beside me at the advancing group of rebels, but I don't have a weapon. One of the hooligans is clearly targeting me. My guy fires at him, but green, holographic armor blocks each shot. The hooligan shoots me repeatedly in the stomach. I know I won't survive.

There's a nice funeral for me at the house I used to live in before I became a soldier. It's fall, and there are leaves drifting in the yard. There are friends and neighbors visiting inside. It was very cozy and comfortable living the life I did, but I didn't have the finances to stay there forever. I see how I would have paper doll outfits that I would wear, like trout-patterned dresses. I see how I would have grumpily cared for five german shepherds had I survived into old age in that lifestyle.

Then I wake up. I pee and I give the cat a 3 a.m. snackie. 

Then I'm squatting next to a pond. The person in charge of the pond explains that they're going to solve all of their problems with this: a small tube full of tiny snails. I have a good feeling about this.

Time passes, and I'm attending a church service. And the guest speaker is talking about how the greatest danger of our time is the snail. According to her, we think we're solving all our problems with food by breeding these giant snails for meat, but they completely take over ecosystems and destroy all other aquatic life. I have a feeling of correctness about what she's saying.

But I think back to when I was at the pond. I had the same feeling about what they were doing too. And the current warning here at church doesn't make me think the owner of the pond was doing anything bad. They were doing what they had to to survive. But both can be true at the same time: the pond owner needed the meat, and the snails take over aquatic ecosystems. 

INTERPRETATIONS

The first dream is a metaphor for how I feel like I can't afford to live the life I would prefer to live: staying at home cooking and entertaining guests. Wearing my cute little outfits. But instead, I have to prepare for battle with a ruthless world. And I know good people with struggles of their own will try to help me, but the lifestyle will kill me anyway. 

(I'm sure that this metaphor is an exaggeration of my fears.)

In the second dream, it seems to me like that's just the scenario we're constantly finding ourselves in as we navigate social media and even traditional, legacy media like newspapers. One group of people tries to profit off of the message that there's an awesome new technology and it has the power to revolutionize all of our lives. Another group tries to profit off the the message that we must beware this new technology that "they" are all trying to get us to adopt, because there are consequences that "they" aren't talking about. 

Well, isn't the truth almost always somewhere in the middle? We adopt new technology like new medication because we had a problem that needed solving, but there are usually risks, side effects and possible unforeseen consequences. 

There are too many algorithms that reward hyperbolic, grandiose stories instead of thorough, neutral, accurate teaching.

The stern, Halloween photoshoot. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm looking in a thrift store window at some used clothing on mannequins. Some of the clothing is a little too fancy for me, but then I see a Christmas sweater with a kitten on it and it looks comfortable and cozy and it's in good condition and I love it. So I head to the store. 

I go inside the store, and it's a huge warehouse full of racks of clothing. I look through the racks. Some of this stuff looks too big, but then I move to a different size section and see some jeans that look like they're exactly the right size for me. The design is a little bold and quirky. There's a big, black blob sewn onto one side, and there are tears in the legs. But I think they won't look bad on me at my current size. 

If I were larger, my insecurity about being big would just combine with insecurity about the unconventional style and those insecurities would build on top of each other and amplify each other, like matching frequencies on a negative wave. 

I'm with a group of newer friends, but I feel comfortable hanging out with them all day. We dress in Halloween clothing like witches' hats, capes, bat and cobweb prints, and black and orange. We go out to eat in LA, then we decide that we want to do a photoshoot with a friend of one of the group leaders. We're running around on the street, having fun. We have fun in the car. I see our car trip being expressed as a toy 3D model. Then we arrive at the photographer's house. It's decorated for Halloween. 

I watch a friend twist her head sideways against a pot of witch's brew. The photographer points his digital SLR at her and sternly tells her to keep her head upright with her chin held low. I'm surprised that he's being that severe with us. We're just doing this for fun. I don't think there's any money being exchanged between the two of our parties. 

I watch his assistant put a purple pie on a Halloween poster on the floor, and I'm surprised she's giving us such a nice, professional experience when I, for one, haven't given her any money. 

INTERPRETATION

This dream is a combination of three experiences I've had. 

My clothes are getting too big and baggy. I reached my arms up to change the sugar water in my hummingbird feeder, and my pants and my underwear both fell down. I ordered some new clothes online and when I received them, they were all way, way too big. So I shipped those back and went to Walmart where I could use the dressing room. I picked up some jeggings and a flannel shirt that  actually fit me. 

Then I had an experience once with a professional cinematographer who was very stern with me. 

And I'm currently having an experience with a new friend group that I like hanging out with, and we do what feels like a lot together in spite of no money being exchanged for participation in this sort of club. I feel lucky because I mean... they have to charge something eventually!

Going dip net fishing in the back yard. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

There's a very artistically-tasteful circus being run on a huge, modern stage by a single mom. Her sons assist (with slightly negative, slightly surly attitudes). But what the circus does is showcase the most beautiful woman in the world. 

The most beautiful woman is very fit, but not overly muscular. She poses on stage in a handstand, demonstrating her strength. She reminds me of Penelope Cruz in terms of the way she looks. 

The single mother is capable of doing exactly the same handstand. And she is just as beautiful and has the same level of fitness. Realistically, she could just as easily be showcased as the most beautiful woman in the world, but she's not. And she's angry and jealous about that while also understanding that it's the other woman that pulls in a crowd and puts dinner on all their tables. So she holds it all in. 

She devises a plan to blow off some steam. She thinks about creating a dip net fishing stream in the back yard. As she wrestles with various ideas, they come to pass. She imagines a deep stream in the yard space between the houses where the rain drips off the roof. She imagines a body of water so large that it's as tall as the ceilings, and we can't see out the windows anymore except to see fish swimming by. She buys a dip net that has a plastic cover over the top--to really seal in those fish. 

A girl who competed on a modeling TV show comes in through the window in hip waders. I wonder if I should buy hip waders when I wake up. The model listens to the jealous mom blow off some steam then says, "I'm going to go now, so I don't stink up the house!" 

I marvel at this sentence, because she dragged a bunch of mud in the house. Does the mud stink? She just seemed to want to leave.

INTERPRETATION

There have been times in my life when I've thought, "Why not me? Why didn't I get selected? Why don't I get a chance to test out what I can really do? Why am I not going far when they are?" This is like the jealousy and anger of the woman who doesn't get to perform on stage in the circus. And I think I compensate for this by... just cruising along, working on projects to amuse and distract myself (the creation of the dip net fishing in the yard). I think I can sense that other people are a little off-put by the negative energy of this kind of jealous mindset (the girl, who is a peer... a model... doesn't want to listen and leaves).

I have more than one opportunity in my real life that brings up these types of feelings right now. I could get my chance to perform and do just as well as the next person, or I could drop the ball. I'm not as confident about my skills in comparison to others in real life. There's often a very good reason why I'm not picked in reality. 

PewDiePie takes care of my cat (and loses him). (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I go across town with my mother. We're traveling together in a strange land. It looks like British Columbia. There are lots of quaint local restaurants, and it's a small to medium-sized town. 

Then I'm on my own. I wind up spending the night at a suburb with a lot of condos with PewDiePie as my neighbor. I go over to his house. He lives in a large house with about four or five other guys. He's about 23 and utterly charming. And very impulsive. Everything he does seems so unpremeditated and and wild. I leave my cat in his care. I have very conflicted feelings about this decision. He seems really trustworthy while also seeming like he just does the first thing that pops into his head.

He drives off (very, very slowly) in a jeep with his friends, and immediately loses the cat. The cat jumps out of the vehicle. PewDiePie doesn't go back for the cat, but the cat voluntarily makes his way back to him. PewDiePie has got some kind of magic to him such that nothing bad happens to him no matter what he does (or doesn't do).

INTERPRETATION

I've been considering trying to make videos for YouTube again. I've tried making book reviews before, and I've also tried making math and physics videos. I recently picked up three ebooks about social media crafting for $0.49-$0.99 each. I've been learning some interesting stuff. 

The Guide to Going Viral by Brendan Kane emphasizes that it's the "effect on viewer" that's one of the most important metrics to evaluate when considering what factors made a video perform better than other videos. What emotion did you intend for the viewer to experience? This is very different from what I've learned in a college about making legacy forms of artistic expression. It doesn't conflict with what I learned, but it just wasn't a part of what I was taught. 

What I learned in theatre classes lets me know why PewDiePie was successful. He's completely in the moment. He's running completely on impulse without going up into his head in his videos. It feels completely natural to watch. It's like we're just watching someone without an agenda in the privacy of their own world. Impulsivity isn't exactly a great trait in real life though. We associate that with reckless choices and irresponsibility (losing the cat). But PewDiePie is more than just unpremeditated on camera. He has a good sense of agreeableness and what is going to be tolerated by a crowd and what isn't. I think that's the sense of magic protection in the dream.

Personally, my favorite videos are by the creators who are fun to watch because they react really impulsively without thinking. I enjoy feeling like I'm playing video games with my best friends and we're having the time of our lives. (I mentioned my penchant for let's plays to a creative writing professor and she asked if they make me feel less lonely. I do think so.) I think that the book I'm reading by Brendan Kane is more about creating videos like Mr. Beast's or Veritasium's, where the effect on the viewer is highly calculated. And that tactic is extremely successful, even though it's not my first preference as a viewer.

So I think this dream is just me trying to process some of the new information I'm getting about why some people get numbers while doing YouTube and some don't. I do think it's more than luck, but I'm not sure everyone has what it takes. (And by "everyone" having what it takes, I mean me.)

Audacious customer asks for a 90% discount... maybe. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm trying to shoot a short film. This is for love. It's not for an assignment. Somehow, I rope a family I don't really know into playing the parts. They're confused about what's happening though. I haven't really sold my project to them, and it's visible in how aimless they feel about playing their parts. There's no drive or ambition. But they do surprisingly well anyway, and I'm thankful to them. I even feel like they're my new friends now. 

Years later, one of the girls in the family finds a job at a pet store. I go into the store and prepare to ask her and her family for another favor. 

I hear the phone ring. The phone is a very old-fashioned landline. It looks like something from the 1940s. I pick up. The person on the other end wants to purchase something for like... around $40. I don't know exactly what she said she wants to buy though, so I just write down my understanding of what she said on a sticky note. I take the message to the manager, who is wrestling an octopus away from a squid in one of the aquariums. The octopus is the aggressor. It looks like it wants to kill and eat the squid. They're about the same size. I note that the octopus is a pinkish color and say, "Oh! I wonder if the person on the phone wanted to buy the octopus!" 

I look up the price of the octopus in the store's price list, and it's something around $200-$400. I cringe. It's yet another unlikable customer trying to garage sale their way through life. Such a lowball offer that would be! Then I see a small box with 6-packs of pink sparkling water and wonder if I've misjudged the situation, and the drinks are what the customer was actually asking for.

The manager gets the octopus untangled from the squid, and puts it on the counter. Then she puts it in a separate aquarium. 

I try to persuade the girl and call her family members on the phone to do another film with me. They are, once again, very neutral. But they seem to feel well enough towards me to indicate that they'd feel good about doing it again. It's a huge relief.

INTERPRETATION

I think this dream deals with rather subtle emotions arising out of situations that I am still not comfortable with even 20 years later. Everyone in the dream was confused. These are emotions that can confuse and stun me and the people I partner with. 

These are the situations the dream simulated:

1) Being the one and only leader of a team for an independent project, like a film crew. In the dream, I was very anxious for everyone to like me. I was also pretty aimless. I have been a manager and a group project leader many times before, but I had the backing of the organization (and I had accountability to the organization). And the desperation to be liked always simmers beneath the surface. The fear of being unable to depend on anyone else to back me up or bounce ideas off of has never left me. 

2) Being the one to have to approach people for partnerships. When I was a child, I loved roping other kids into playing my "let's pretend" type of games. I don't know what happened as an adult. Now, it's scary. I think I've had several bad collaborations since growing older and trying to get more serious about artistic and business projects. That's put some anxiety into me about partnering with others as an adult. 

3) Selling things to people. I absolutely hate when people try to argue with me about pricing to get a discount. There's a type of person who will sell their likability and trustworthiness to argue for a ten percent discount on a $20 meal, and I just find it appalling. 

Those are the main uncomfortable feelings from this dream, but there are a lot of other uncomfortable feelings I haven't resolved in the dream. Talking to someone on the phone and not hearing or understanding what they have to say. Passing along an incorrect message. Getting an order incorrect. The girl in the pet store was someone I asked in real life to stay in contact after our class ended, and she declined. Even sparkling water tastes just a little bit uncomfortable. 

Gen Alpha tears down the existing structure. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm with a friend who's an elementary school teacher. He's sick of what he's been seeing in the world. So he goes into the bowels of the school--narrow passage ways, to protest. I join him. 

After winding through the black curtains and narrow halls, I emerge at a desk that's still in the bowels of the school. A former child is with me. He's a young man now. His education was stunted because of all the political upheaval surrounding undocumented immigrants. So he has to start his education now that a lot of time has been lost. I feel bad for him, and I also think that it's such a waste of potential. How much further along in life would he be if he could've just concentrated on educating himself when he was younger? I start a new round of my education now as well. We write in pencil on black paper. Someone comes to take the papers.

Then I get up to try to find my friend further in the bowels. I hadn't meant to come this far or for so long. For me, this was supposed to be temporary. I'm going to tell my friend that I'm leaving soon. I can't find him, so I follow some other people who are disenfranchised with the system. Suddenly, we're outdoors in a crowd with a ton of Gen Alphas. They're going to tear down a balcony where someone is being oppressed. 

They find the balcony and tear it down with their bare hands. A mother says angrily, "What did you kids do?! When I buy you a house, Ashley..." She says it in warning tones. The kids don't care at all. Their work is done, and they go back to school. A parent in the crowd--a woman who looks like she's from the 1980s says. "I'm a sigma!" Over and over again. "Don't mess with me. I'm a sigma." But she's very sad when she makes this declaration. 

Then, I'm back in the narrow passageway of the school. I could get caught at any time, and being here makes me feel nervous. I decide to take a left turn. It takes me into a pitch black area. Finally, it opens into the music concert stage. Orchestral music plays. I see the head of the music department. I walk, trying to blend in. Trying to hide. My friend is taking the opposite tactic. He's smiling at the head of the music department like he's just seen a celebrity. He wants to be seen and acknowledged, so he can notify her of his protest, but I don't trust that going through her will help anything.

INTERPRETATION

I don't usually like to get political, but this is kind of a political dream. I am very concerned with what I see in my corner of the world (the United States). The "Big, Beautiful Bill" just passed, and I've looked at comments from both the left and the right. I lean left, but I'm willing to listen. Frankly, I do not believe that this is a measure that's going to benefit everyone who works a job--as if that would excuse wishing ill for people who are too sick or elderly to work a job. And I don't believe there's this massive group of people who could work a job, but would rather play video games all day, so they pretend to need disability and live this comfortable, easy life. 1) You're not going to live comfortably on disability. It might not even pay the rent. 2) That's just not human nature. People aren't built to want to do nothing. If you're young and able bodied, yet sit around playing video games all day and don't have some sense of purpose in your day to day life, you probably do have depression or some kind of mental illness.  

Also, people have a bias towards thinking they work harder than average when that's not what objective measures show. 

Also, I don't know if you've noticed, but there just isn't as big of a need for workers as there used to be even when I was young. And advancements in AI will probably only exaggerate this more and more. A lot of Gen Z and new graduates can't even get a foot in the door to entry level jobs. That's one way I can see an able bodied/sound minded person giving up and playing video games all day: if it just becomes very obvious that they're not going to get anywhere no matter what they do to try to break in to the workforce. We're not doing anything to address this issue with our policies, and it's starting to disturb me.

Ultimately, I think this is a bill that makes life even more difficult for people who were barely hanging on. There is no spiritual justification for allowing this to happen. I don't think that the goodness of God shouldn't work through the government, and should only work through the Christian church. I think the loving nature of the universe can and should express itself through the everyday actions we all take, including what we do collectively as a group. 

I have chronic illness myself, and I depend on a lot of societal support to get by. Trust me, just on a practical level, you do not want a bunch of homeless schizophrenics who cannot get access to their medication or therapists running around. You should want them to sit at home writing silly short stories, cleaning the toilet, and learning new algorithms in Python. It's quite a step up from running around on the streets in a panic accusing random people of doing horrible things to me (which, I'm very sorry to say, was exactly what I was doing before I got help).

In the dream, I'm reeducating myself. I think that because of the way I was raised (and also due to the fact that education is expensive here and there was no health insurance for waitresses when I was young), I wasn't given a good head start in life. It impacts me even into middle age. I can only imagine how much worse it would be for someone whose parents have been detained by ICE and sent to prison in another country. 

I just wonder when some of these barriers to all people having a good quality of life are going to be taken down. Because I don't see a lot of technical reasons for these barriers. I mainly see a beliefs and opinions reason for these barriers. 

I listen to an astrologer on YouTube who goes by Astrolada. I can't remember which of her videos I saw this in, but I remember watching a video in which she thought that Gen Alpha is going to be the generation to fix this mess we've gotten ourselves into in which our core social systems are basically sociopathic. In the dream, the mob of Gen Alpha operates based on humanitarianism. And they don't care what the older generations have to say about it. Something about the Age of Aquarius. 

That would be nice. I am very skeptical of horoscopes while loving to listen to them at the same time though. I listen to them because they're often so optimistic that I wish they were true. It makes me hope that something good is around the corner. So even if they're not true, they motivate me to keep working on my hopes and dreams--even though I so rarely see any kind of payoff. My horoscopes are extremely optimistic this month. So we'll see.

Frustrating.

I don't even want the Declaration of Independence anymore. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I have an actress friend, and she's desperate to land a role. I've written a movie. She wants us to perform the two main roles for a casting director or an agent (someone important she's met). For the audition, I'll play the dumb hot guy/comedic relief, and she wants to play the role she might realistically get: the "everyman" and hot chick. 

Just before this, I was someone completely different. I went to a museum that let me in for free and would give me a free gift because they were having a special Trump promotion that I saw an ad for. I wore a purple Trump shirt and I had a degree while visiting this museum, and that entitled me to free admission and the gift. 

I kept thinking the place would be swarming with MAGA people and that I'd be mocked for having a theatre master's degree if I mentioned it. But no one harassed me--the topic didn't even come up. 

I started from the top of a large Colosseum or Parthenon and descended the very steep, crumbling stone stairs in pairs of 2 or even 3. And there were ants everywhere, crawling up on my bare feet. But I made it down the stairs to my reward. A woman was holding out of a copy of the Declaration of Independence or a similar piece of paper with US history on it for me. But I didn't even want the gift anymore. The experience was enough. 

So this actress puts me in her car and I complain that she didn't even give me time to get dressed up and shave my legs. I'm in a white tee shirt dress with my hairy legs sticking out. She replies that we're all given the same amount of time in a day, and we do what we want with that time. 

"Fair enough," I reply. She's not going to be distracted from getting to the audition promptly.

We rehearse as she drives, and she is surprised when I keep telling her that the character I'm playing (the boy) is a dumb, selfish guy, and nothing will change that, no matter how much hope she has that he's not. And it seems like she, personally has that wish for the script to be written so that he'll change. She's not using that yearning as her motivation for the scenes between us, which I think would be the best thing for her to do, not to rewrite the characters and plot.

INTERPRETATION

The Trump promotional special actually has more to do with my master's degree program than politics. I've ended up not needing the certification (the piece of paper) I got. I've never used it. It's been years now. But perhaps the experience was worthwhile, even though there was pain, effort, and irritation involved (biting ants, worry about politics, and the exertion of going down steep steps). 

With the actress scenario, it seems to me as though the actress and me are both versions of a kind of wisdom that the other needed. The actress can set material goals and accomplish them (shaving the legs and driving us to the audition), but the comedian had wisdom and insight into human nature that the actress needed. She'll only get so far with just taking action without that insight. So it seems like a call to balance those parts of the brain out.