I'm in a clean room painted a minty, robin's egg blue and decorated with flowers and Easter wreaths. I'm laying on a plain bed like you'd expect to use when getting a massage, but this bed has a bed sheet over it, and it's pressed up beside a window to a sunny, green yard.
I'm feeling very relaxed, like I'm on a vacation seeing friends.
Jordan Peterson's wife enters the room with a pair of pliers. I open my mouth and she proceeds to yank out one of my back teeth.
"Oh!" she says as she snaps backwards with the tooth. She seems really surprised at how that went.
Unlike one might expect, my mouth doesn't hurt--it feels better.
"My tooth doesn't hurt anymore," I say. There's the start of a second tooth growing in the space left. But I look in the mirror and I'm disappointed that I had to sacrifice some of my attractiveness to relieve the pain. I accept it though. I think this was the best decision I could make at this time.
INTERPRETATION
I bought Dream Dictionary for Dummies, and it really is a mixed bag of helpfulness. I think ChatGPT tends to have better responses for what dream symbols might mean. It says this: losing teeth could symbolize anxiety about how others perceive you. I think my concern as I looked in the mirror "reflects" this.
Personally, I have always read in dream dictionaries that teeth symbolize knowledge or wisdom. And the loosening of teeth means that you have to drop old concepts you've held on to and make room for new ones.
I think this dream symbolizes changing ways of thinking, and some anxiety I'm having about being drawn more and more into the world of comedy. Jordan Peterson is a pretty controversial public figure, and I think his wife symbolizes the subversive and controversial nature of comedy in this dream.
Stuff like hard science and STEM doesn't attract that much controversy, because it weeds out people without expertise, and its key topics are not social or emotional. But comedy is entirely about opinions and emotions, and the topics have to be pre-digested well enough for the majority of a general audience to get it within fractions of a second. That social/emotional concentration scares me, even though I love to find the humor in various things. It's one of the things that gives me the most joy.
To me, comedy is really appealing these days because it's where so much of the authenticity in American society is located right now. But there are and have always been controlling, authoritarian personalities in our world who can't emotionally manage the discomfort they feel when people don't think the way they do. I'm an agreeable person and don't like to see people suffer, even if their reasons for their own suffering are stupid and self-created. But as much as I crave the safety of completely avoiding emotional or social topics, I also crave intimacy.
I think the fact that I feel better when the old tooth is removed is me feeling good about letting this new little wisdom tooth grow underneath the old tooth--the old wisdom that tries harder to play it safe. And I think that I'm worried that other people's perception of me will suffer now that I'm different (now that I have a gap in my smile).
But removing the old tooth (heading in this direction) still feels like the right thing to do, even if this isn't a perfect situation.
I'm an explorer in a large submarine. All of a sudden, the submarine starts to shake and flip upside down and side to side, and we're crashing. One of us has locked the others in a room. We watch in horror as he paces up and down the viewing window, cackling. He explains his evil plan, showing us how he's put some strange chemicals in the tubing we use for air. The tubes are filled with a magenta-colored substance.
Then we're at the surface. It's calm. All of that stuff with the evil scientist is behind us, and we're inspecting the tubes he left behind for us. I hesitantly reach into one tube. I pull out seaweed. It's just algae and kelp in the tube. Maybe we'll be okay.
Now, I'm in a lab with a lot of sophisticated machinery. I check the results of a test. A yellow, gum-like substance is in my magenta, gloved hand.
It's radioactive.
I leave the lab to discuss this with the two men who have been waiting for me at a dining room table. In the dream, it only just dawns on me that this person whose point of view I've had is actually me--I am the scientist. I connect to that identity in thought and emotion.
One man wears a broad smile that spreads deep crow's feet on his boyish face. He's in a brown polo shirt, and he's happy.
The other man seems calm. He's probably in his 50s, with dark hair, a large nose, sun spots, and a kind face. He's dressed like an environmental scientist coming back from the field.
I tell the environmental scientist, "It's radioactive."
His friend, who was chatty only a moment ago, becomes quiet, and sombre.
We all know the implications: this stuff has been in his body. He's in trouble.
He takes it gracefully, but might simply be in denial. He thanks me, and I know he knows this is very bad news, but he avoids the topic and continues to talk about work.
Then, I'm telling my professor that I don't want to do any of the things my boyfriend wants to do. And I'm watching a reality TV show--or at least I think it is. Emilia Clarke is sitting outside in a grass-filled garden eating little tea party confectionary treats that are tinted a pastel blue. She's there for some kind of rehabilitation, and she narrates her inner experiences of suffering and pain over the camera shots. The cameras follow her as she goes out into the city, but everything warps, and bends, and twists. I find it a strange thing to do to have such hard-core special effects on a reality TV show. What are they trying to say by including this?
The camera cuts to an Emo young man wearing braces, who holds out a large rubber band with crystal letters on it. Most of the letters are nonsense, but there is a word there that I can't remember. He talks very conspiratorially with the other cast members about how difficult Emilia was at the start of the show.
INTERPRETATION
I think this dream is about my recovery from fleeing my hometown over 10 years ago.
My thoughts about the nature of evil have changed a lot over the years. When I was 22, I had a part in a play where I played a woman who betrayed her cheating husband to the enemy, who then blinded him, and he killed himself. I played her as though she knew exactly how evil what she was doing was, and she didn't care.
I had a heckler in the audience (yes, a heckler for a university play), who shouted out in the middle of my monologue, "Evil!"
Of course. It seemed obvious to me that handing over your husband to a warring people to be murdered, no matter what he'd done, was evil. The character had to know it was evil.
How naive I was about the nature of evil! In reality, I've found that almost all evil is unselfaware. It's usually justified into something righteous by its perpetrators, and they often don't just think they're good people, they think they're better people. And it works because you can kind of justify anything if you don't bother to develop your sense of ethics and let your emotions decide.
That night after the play, the director instructed me to figure out a way to make the character not evil, and it seemed impossible then. She left town the next day, pretty much, so I didn't have to try. But I'm shaking my head now. I think I know exactly how to make the character justify basically killing her husband: just feel victimized so strongly, and have such a powerful belief in your own heroism that you get into delusional territory. People will even feel sorry for you. They must've written her with the thought that she wasn't evil in mind, too, otherwise the directors (who wrote the play) wouldn't be asking me to play her as not evil!
There is a very distinctive feeling that I get about evil being "after" me, like when a Karen complains about me at my minimum wage job, or when my evil ex-roommate goes around the school spreading rumors about me, or when a teacher decides that they're going to use their power to harm me (or someone else--I've been savvy enough to dodge that bullet a couple times, often watching or hearing about it hitting another student). I think this is the same feeling I got when that scientist was cackling through the window about how he'd ruined our air.
Then I think about the guy in the dream who got the news about radioactive substances being in his body. It surprises me when people just have no reaction to horrible things sometimes. I would actually say that it happens a lot. With the evil ex-roommate, I was certainly not the first victim. She ran around harming lots of people. You know what they typically did afterwards? Absolutely nothing. They'd usually do something kind of small and shitty that they were ashamed about, and that usually silenced them from speaking out against her. But it's just not in everyone's nature to cause a bunch of drama when things go wrong in their life.
I noticed that calm people were my colleagues in the dream. Maybe that's because it's so much easier for me to genuinely love non-dramatic people, even though I typically get sucked in by the dramatic ones. I think it's common for our attention to go to the least deserving areas of our lives.
And I think Emilia Clarke in the reality TV show is me writing my way to some kind of healing after pretty much fleeing my hometown and all the awful people I got involved with. (For people in other countries who might not know: reality TV has no relationship to the very, very old tradition in English literature for writing autobiographical material. I think it might not be common in every country for people to write extensively about the unique details of their personal and family lives. But in America, we're doing it pretty much straight from day one in kindergarten, and a lot of our most revered authors do it until they die. Maybe it's part of being in an individualistic culture. I don't know. I'm not well-versed in the literature or educational systems of other countries, so I could be wrong about other countries working really different from ours in these areas.)
I think this is a topic that's been on my mind, because I'm reading a book called How to FAIL at Stand-Up Comedy: Avoiding the Pitfalls that Kill a Comic's Career, and I am stunned to see just how many people in this author's career have started very serious drama. As one example, the author said he's been assaulted either on stage or in the parking lots of his shows twelve times. All the behind-the-scenes drama totally reminds me of the social atmosphere I had to deal with in college in my hometown.
I guess it just surprises me that people can be so different. It's easy to make the mistake of thinking all people will react to things the same way you would. I'd say it's almost a mistake to try to predict what people will say or think or do at all. No one is truly an expert on that, no matter how much they charge for their services. It's going to be anecdotal, or statistical at best.
I also watched this video yesterday that got me thinking about the differences between people:
I take out two half-finished outlines of drawings I started. They're of a young Asian man with a trendy hair cut. I line it up on my desk under a desk lamp and get back to work. He's the character for a new story I've been thinking up.
When I think of who I want this character to be and how I want the other characters to react to him, I think of someone who I was in love with as a teen.
I don't have to think too far back, because I'm staying in a house with him right now! His family and some other people who were/are important in that social circle are all there too. It's thrilling.
But when I come out of the house into my nearby art studio, it feels like recalling a distant memory, even though I'm recalling memories from a day or two ago at most.
I try to remember my emotions and thoughts about this person: the flutters, the single-minded focus, the high of actually talking to him and spending time near him.
I feel very nostalgic as I draw my imaginary universe.
INTERPRETATION
When I write, and the characters are experiencing loving relationships or interactions, I almost always draw on the friendships and experiences I had in high school. I just had really, really good friends back then. It all faded away as we left for college, or the military, or something else, one by one. But it was a really nice time of life. Living with my parents was awful, but I just spent as much time as possible outside of the house.
Having those friends taught me what it is to be a loving person in a community. I'm sure I never would have known without their influence in my life, and I'm very thankful for those experiences.
I really think that people underestimate their influence--either for good or evil. All it took was the good people around me being themselves and including me in their lives to completely transform me, and it concerns me a little that it was such a freak accident. Because everyone should have the kind of love and sense of community I had--at least for a part of their lives. Love really makes a massive difference in who someone develops into.
We usually think of destructive acts as having a lasting effect. And it sometimes seems as though it's so easy to tear down people's growth and creativity that it discourages us to act on those positive impulses to do things like reach out and say something kind and thoughtful, or to just ask how someone is doing and to listen carefully to their answer and not be afraid of their truth. Why bother? But love has a lasting effect too--something I didn't expect when it became clear that our time in high school was over.
But after the pain of that separation left, this sense of fullness and love from that time has been something I've noticed in my heart 20 years later.
