The man in my house telling me I can't do anything. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm in a house with my parents, and we want to travel from our rural area to another location closer to the city. 

We're with a really, really cynical, unpleasant guy who doubts everything we try to do and vocalizes his doubts about us--a lot. 

I forgot that we need to take our cat, and so I bring her from our old, permanent house into the newer house. The cynical man says bringing the cat along will never work. I tell him it will work, and easily too. I bring the cat's litter box into the house. 

A red bowling ball comes down from a chute in the ceiling, and I give it to the cynical man to hold to keep him occupied. 

Then the house breaks off from its foundation and it walks to the city.

I go into a studio where they're teaching comedy. The director adds me to a skit and asks me for ideas for humor with live goat kids. The goats come running from across the room. A black one jumps into my arms. He's pretty big and I rest on the floor to accommodate him.

I come up with a joke, but I don't like it that much, and I leave the troupe, mentally. Then I kick myself as rehearsal goes on, because I have a much better joke, but it's kind of late to add it. The show goes on before an audience, and I wonder if it could've been better, but I'm glad it's been made. 

INTERPRETATION

I think most of us have an annoying man who just stands there in our heads saying that what we do will never work. In the dream, I keep him occupied with a bowling ball. In real life, I think it's a lot harder to visualize the process of keeping him quiet. 

I've been reading about mindfulness for the past several weeks, and I really think it helps to take a step back and label thoughts. Then you either let the thoughts pass or choose to accept them. For example, you can notice that there's a lot of tension in your body, then step back and label a thought or a line of thinking as "worrying about the future," "craving junk food," or "angry thought." But you generally don't have to accept every thought and identify with it and let it change your mood and actions. 

Negative thoughts are just as a quirk of the human brain. They're sometimes realistic but oftentimes not. Maybe identifying with negative thoughts helps you out 1 in 10 times, but the other 9 times, they'll probably just make you miserable. 

I think the end of the dream just points out that it's much better for something imperfect to get made than to endlessly try to perfect something.