Tearing the wings off of beautiful animals. (dream)

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DREAM

I'm taking a tour of a meat factory. Marilyn vos Savant is being overworked in this factory. She's indulging the tour, but she seems really stressed when she describes to the tour guide how she's working to increase the pig factory's efficiency. She doesn't stay for long. 

Then I enter a beautiful, pink room with a pond and path of concrete circles going through the water that mimics giant water lilies. There are large plants in the background. They bring out one of the pigs and take it through the pond. It's the pig is small, and cute, and to my surprise, it spreads, large, beautiful, feathery wings. I realize with a sinking feeling in my stomach that the factory must tear off and destroy those beautiful wings when they kill the pigs for food. I hate to think of the sparkle going out of the curious little pig's eyes. What a waste of life.

INTERPRETATION

This dream is about my capitalism anxiety. 

Marilyn vos Savant is a lady in her 70s who used to have the highest recorded IQ score of anyone in history. (They changed the tests, according to ChatGPT, so now her record isn't "being maintained.") In the dream, she was miserable working in a meat factory. This to me, is what we're doing: we're taking our brightest people and having them work 60 hour weeks to do stuff like sell bacon a little bit better than someone else instead of giving them meaningful, satisfying things to do in a balanced, sustainable fashion. 

What's more, we're systematically destroying beautiful, innocent animals who were meant to live in the forest and fly--just so we can eat them. So the overall goal is highly questionable.

Also, pigs can fly, which is a euphemism for miracles, but that's not what we choose to make happen in this artificially-created nightmare world. 

Iceland floods. (dream)

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DREAM

I've gone on several summer trips to Iceland with my best friend--not mainly to see my parents, but my parents do have a house here. I'm sure my parents' house is horribly cluttered and neglected. They don't really want me hanging out there, and I don't want to be there either. So I always just pass by its exterior. It's gray-green on a grassy hill with some other houses.

But then one day, I look up their house on Google Maps and look inside. It's beautiful. It's clean. It's well-decorated. It almost looks like they hired an interior decorator. I can't believe it.

The next summer though, all of Iceland is completely flooded. I swim to my parents' house. It's underwater. There's a little stoat or a weasel swimming in the flooded grass with me and my best friend. I guess my parents' house is done for.

INTERPRETATION

I think many people's parents change when they move out of their house. To me, it seemed like my parents were happier, and they weren't hurting anybody (me), so in my mind, they took on a cute, harmless old couple quality that they didn't have before. 

But that time has passed for them (the house got flooded) since my father has passed away. 

The next day, I was supposed to wake up early, but I had a series of dreams that attempted to persuade me to stay in bed. There's something a little creepy about your own sleep trying to lure you into staying with it when it's in your best interest to leave. 

How could I be so wrong about making pancakes? (dream)

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DREAM

I watch this freshman college kid give an older woman dictation. He rattles things off quickly, just assuming that she's going to record all of his long, extremely detailed notes for him. She does take some notes, but they're pretty much her own, and at times, she crosses her arms and doesn't do anything. He doesn't notice. He just keeps talking. 

At first, she thinks his arrogance has made him dumb, despite how smart his notes are. Because he's not paying attention to what's going on with her. But when he finishes, the notes the woman took turn into a beautiful stack of strawberry-filled pancakes with whipped cream. The gaps she left in the notes turned into areas where strawberries are. 

Did he plan this? Because he's not at all surprised, while she's shocked.

INTERPRETATION

I think my insecurities about being too dumb to accomplish anything are rising to the surface.

I transferred to a local STEM school after I recovered from my first major schizophrenic episode, and I met the kid in this dream there.

He was the lab assistant. I went up to him with a question about the directions, and he angrily looked up from doing his own homework and said, "I can't read the lab for you--you have to read it yourself!" 

I was very angry, but I realized almost immediately (and I don't know what tipped me off) that this was probably a gifted kid with overexcitabilities and social problems, which I am not used to dealing with except with my dad. I am used to gifted kids being really nice, but I know that "profoundly" gifted kids are rumored to struggle to fit in. 

Later in the semester, I was still pissed off about this incident, and I was in a professor's office in which this kid was a student. The professor just happened to have some of this kid's work on his desk. I looked over and was like, "He better be really fucking gifted. It would be so easy to get him in trouble for that lab thing." 

Perfect scores on a hard quiz. I was like, "Shit, I was right. I can't get this dumb smart kid in trouble for being angry and confused about why he's surrounded by idiots. It's like a disability."

Unfortunately, my brain doesn't really process STEM subjects well. Whereas some people work perfectly well with the gaps in knowledge that textbooks leave (turning into strawberries in the dream) those gaps just inspire dozens and dozens of questions for me, and I often cannot move forward until I answer those questions for myself. I sometimes get unpredictable, out of control moments of insight (whipped cream), but again, I feel as though some people just really work well with these kind of issues. They're not a problem for them, and everything turns out well. It's a surprise for me, but not to them. (The stack of pancakes materializing out of the notes.)

I'm about to take a large STEM exam, so maybe that's why I'm revisiting this experience with this annoying gifted kid who wasn't being helpful with someone slower.

Spiritual experiences while on drugs. (rant)

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I haven't really been having dreams that would be interesting to share, lately, but I watched a Theo Von podcast with author Robert Greene today, and they talked about spiritual experiences with drugs. That got me thinking about a dream-like state I was in while under general anesthesia for a surgery a couple years ago. I would describe it as a spiritual experience. 

A nurse gave me a little cloth pouch with pink roses for my glasses after they wheeled me to the operating area. (I had forgotten to leave the glasses in my room.) I was having my period, and was nervous about this, but they assured me that it was okay. 

I drifted off to sleep and was transported to a world in which I revisited all the major people who had harmed me in life up to that point. I saw what was going on in their lives at the time, and I forgave them, one by one as I observed. I even felt a kind of platonic love for each of them, as fellow beings in this world. 

By the time I woke up, I had to have gone through dozens, and dozens, and dozens of people who I had been really upset at. I definitely felt as though I had left some kind of eternal afterlife and come back to the regular world. 

I wonder if this advanced state of understanding is what death will be like, or if the drugs I took just make some people feel extra generous towards others. But I described what happened to the healthcare workers, and they didn't make it seem like this is a common experience under this drug. 

The Earth will be destroyed. (dream)

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I have a really fortunate, blessed life in many ways. I'm pretty happy, even if things aren't perfect. But not everyone in my life is doing well, and it really saddens me. More than anything, I guess it makes me feel helpless.

My friend's story really isn't mine to tell, but I do think it's okay for me to talk about a dream I had about him. After all, my dreams are my life. 

DREAM

The Earth is about to be annihilated by asteroids showering down on it uncontrollably. We all need to get into rockets to leave the Earth--to go and try something new and different and alien (and very difficult, probably). 

My house is a rocket. It's about to lift off along with everyone else. 

I look out my window, and I see my friend arguing viciously with one of his family members. The family member seems to want him to just stay on the Earth, even though he'll die. 

Time is running out. The ground is shaking. Burning rocks fall from the sky. 

At the last possible moment, I see my friend leave the argument in frustration, get into his car, and drive like hell to what I know must be one of the nearby, publicly available rockets anyone can get into. I know he'll most likely be safe, and I'll see him when we get to the next stage of our lives.

INTERPRETATION

This dream gave me a lot of peace, because I believe it's my intuition telling me that my friend has the will to fight to live. That was really worrying me the night before. A mutual friend of ours also had a dream about the situation, but it was less optimistic.

I just hope my intuition is right. 

You can never blame yourself for someone's deciding to end their life, but I think it's important to remember the members of your community who are suffering, and be there if you can. 

Update to the "Books" page! (news)

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Hi there,

I just wanted to let y'all know that I have added descriptions of each series to the "Books" tab of the blog. 

https://najatau.blogspot.com/p/books.html

How I wrote "Satyr Plays" (in video format)!

Hi, friends!

I made a short video about my artistic process when writing Satyr Plays. It's on YouTube for now. (I keep changing my mind about the value in posting on social media.)