Between sleep and wakefulness. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

Some of the most interesting moments in my life have been those times between falling asleep and being awake. I might be more on the "being awake" side, or I might be more on the "falling asleep" side, but it's always a strange sensation. We should have a word for that. The closest one I could find is "hypnopompia." Google Gemini defines it as "lingering dream logic." 

But the other night, I was lying in bed, and I was almost asleep, but I was awake, and I found myself suddenly bathed in a bright, gauzy, white light. I was laying down, and I could see a small team of about four people standing over me, scanning me with their smartphones. They were very calm and attentive and tried to look me in the eye.

But I was definitely under the impression that these were aliens, not humans, and the smartphones were not smartphones, but some kind of alien technology disguised. 

I wasn't scared. I felt that what they were doing was either benefitting me, or benefitting them--but no one was going to be hurt by this. 

In particular, I remember the girl closest to me. She was very young (maybe in her very early 20s), blonde, with large, blue eyes. She was wearing a hot pink, velvet hoodie. Her hair was up in a pony tail.

It's a little scary to talk about now, but it felt fine at the time. It was like going to see the doctor for a minor checkup. Maybe it was even more than that. Maybe it was more like feeling the comfort of being taken care of by a medical team, combined with the comfort in knowing that there are forces in the universe looking out for you aside from what we can see on planet Earth.

I'm excited to do the coding for an assault rifle. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

Based on the two dreams I had last night, I think I'm having some kind of crisis about what to do with the remaining 20-30 years of my life. 

Last night, I dreamed that I was at work (not at my real life job and not with my real life coworkers). In this dream, I worked in a windowless bunker. My boss handed me a large, automatic rifle. It looked a little used--a little beat up. The handle looked like it had a rubber grip on it with nicks and scuffs. He said, "I need you to program this. All of this needs to happen..." He hands me a piece of laminated paper. On it is a table that has the descriptive names of various settings for the gun on it. 

I reflexively say, "Sure!" because I'm so excited to be useful to my boss. But I'm even more excited that I'm going to be programming something.

He says, "No one can see you working on it." I nod.

I take the rifle home and I draw the blinds. I start coding right away, excited for the challenge. It's only now, in the quiet and privacy of my own home, that I start to wonder more deeply about why I'm doing this. What's being planned for this rifle?

I woke up, peed, and went back to sleep.

I'm drawing a picture of some love birds with Prismacolor (artist quality) colored pencils. I've been working on two different poses for the love birds, which are green with a light blush of peachy pink and a spot of coral/maroon. Then I realize I've been working on the wrong piece of paper. I have another, larger piece of drawing paper where I've started two other poses for the love birds, with white flowers. 

"That's okay. I'll combine the two so the piece is tall, and there are four love birds instead of two. It'll be twice as nice." If there's one thing the arts will teach you, it's how to put in extra effort without necessarily seeing a payoff.

I'm combing a fringe of yarn in various, neutral shades with my fingers when a man comes up to me, looks at what I'm doing and says, "Oh! Well, you have to do that, don't you!"

Something about the way he said it implies that he doesn't know why someone would waste their time crafting and drawing. But maybe some people just have to be artists, and so... if this is just fun for the artist, it doesn't make sense to pay them to do what they do naturally. 

I'm annoyed, and I say, "No, I don't have to do this!" There are plenty of other things I could do with my time, and I wish someone would be grateful for the time I take to make art.

The dream ended there. 

The thing is, I've always said to myself and others that I do have to be an artist. That I have to write. That I have to express myself creatively. And I do think that in my life, this artistic side is a core component of who I am. I need to balance fun, creative projects with the stuff that actually pays my bills. At this point in my life, it is very clear that my creative work is not the thing that will take care of me, materially. 

But I think the love bird dream highlights two things: I can spend my time doing things other than creating art. The bulk of my time is spent doing non-creative things right now, and I'm surprisingly okay with that. I'm trying to address other parts of my life, like exercise, nutrition, education, and career. 

I think the first dream with the rifle is urging me to take a critical look at the direction my actual bill-paying career is taking me, and not allow myself to unconsciously, reflexively end up somewhere I don't want to be. In the dream, what I was doing was taking me down a path of hurting people. In real life, "the wrong path" could mean a lot of different things. 

And I am trying to avoid hurting people. I had to put aside my ego this week to avoid getting unpleasant with someone. But I felt mad. I've dropped any claim to getting emotionally compensated for that, which is how someone once described forgiveness to me. I like that description, because when I get mad, I often feel like the situation is a power and dominance struggle, there's a winner and a loser, and someone needs to compensate me for the suffering they caused me with suffering of their own.

I've been doing a yoga teaching certificate which started off as a way to get more knowledge about a Satyr Plays story I wanted to write, but has ended up being really good for me in a variety of ways. One of my favorite things about this certificate program is the section and live Zoom meetings on the philosophy of yoga. There's something in the yogic lifestyle called "Ahimsa" or non-violence, which means avoiding hurting people with either words or actions. This is something I want to put into practice in my own day-to-day life. And I think that the less you involve your ego in frustrating situations, the easier it is to avoid reactively harming people. But for me, I think it's something I need to practice again and again to train the nervous system to stay calm in the face of injury. So I had the opportunity to practice this week. ☺

I think the gun part of the dream might also be cautioning me against agreeing to things without thinking more deeply about them.

Spending a whole day at work not knowing what to do. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

Last night, I dreamed that I was a brand-new receptionist. This is a very basic, entry-level job. I'm dressed well for it in a cheetah print blouse with a nice skirt. I believed that dressing nice like this was a way for me to express my enthusiasm about this job. I look the part! 

Then, right when I get behind the desk, the phone rings. I answer. A customer asks a very, very simple question, but I can't answer it. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I couldn't answer any question that would come across my path. I don't think they trained me to do this, and I'm scared. I'm all by myself at the front desk. There's no one who can help me.

I'm very scared of the scenario in this dream (not knowing what I'm doing and being left alone to fend for myself). I'm scared about other scenarios related to work too, but this one is my main one. 

I can't let this happen!

*Update: A week later, I'm having even more dreams about picking up the phone and being unable to answer people's questions.

Feeding cats to snakes. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm responsible for helping some ladies exit an artistic/spiritual retreat safely. There's one gray haired lady who, before leaving, dumps out her duffel bags with cats into the terrariums of some large snakes. I am shocked and horrified at this. 

Then I look at the cats. They're undernourished. They're too small, even though I know they're adults. They are dirty. They probably won't be adopted. 

And I think to myself, they're part of the food chain just like other animals. If it wasn't these animals who aren't wanted or given a good life, it would be other animals we'd kill. But my gut is telling me that there is more to this situation than what I'm consciously taking into account, and that this is somehow worse than what one would ordinarily feed to a large, pet snake. 

INTERPRETATION

I used to have a lot more nightmares related to vegetarianism than I do now. I think this dream could relate to my concerns about not being a vegetarian or a vegan, but I think it also highlights those times that you have a mismatch between your gut feeling and what your head is telling you. In the dream, I think I was a lot more aware of this divide between head and gut than I am when I'm awake. 

In my opinion, my gut is like an emergency warning system that can put on the breaks or give me the go-ahead before my brain has had a chance to catch up. Because when I woke up, I could think of other reasons why it's worse to feed a cat to a snake. That's an animal that does have a chance at a good life in someone's home. There's probably not a future good life for a chicken or a rabbit bred for food. And we've domesticated cats and dogs to be tame and dependent on us as pets. It's a betrayal of trust to kill an animal that was promised a stable, comfortable life by our society for reasons other than offering them a kind exit from their suffering. It's a betrayal of our stewardship. It may not be a betrayal on an individual, one-on-one contract type of level, but it's a betrayal on a societal contract kind of level. It's true of chickens and cows too (that they're bred by us to be tame and dependent on us), but it's not so common to share as close a bond as the one we develop with cats and dogs. 

On the other hand, shouldn't the bond we've achieved with cats and dogs tell us that we could achieve that kind of a bond with nearly any other kind of animal to some extent--especially tame, domesticated animals like chickens and cows? And even with wild animals, we might not be able to bring them into our lives on a close basis, but we can relate, emotionally, to the experiences of nearly any kind of animal. 

It's just not good that we kill any animals for food. We have a lot in common with animals--similar senses, similar emotions, similar pains and joys. When they sleep, they dream. When they play, they're exercising their imaginations. I'm all for lab-grown meat in the future. With some animals that are true carnivores, like snakes, we might not be able to give them nutritionally complete meals without feeding them whole animals with organ meat and skeletons and all. But humans? Humans are omnivores. Humans can probably live on plant-based diets with occasional supplementation. 

So why am I not a vegetarian or a vegan? It's just too inconvenient not to eat meat. I've already got a lot to worry about with my diet as far as chronic disease goes without worrying about how to get all my nutrients in and how to cook special meals to accommodate a special meat-free diet. But I do think it's more morally correct to not kill animals for human food. And eating meat does contribute to that system. 

I've heard some people decrying the use of lab meats because it's "unnatural" and will likely have toxins in it. But we don't know that. It could be perfectly safe. We'd have to run tests over time. We wouldn't know if it's toxic or not just based on the fact that it's lab grown. I do hope they succeed at mass producing safe, lab grown meats in the future and that the skeptics end up in the minority.