Tuesday, August 31, 2010

A Prolific Month and A Bizarre Nightmare

So the month of August has been a shockingly productive month for me. I was actually anticipating that I would not be producing quite so much. I moved across the country in the middle of this month, I went off in search of jobs hardcore, and managed to find a job.

I was honestly very concerned that my writing was going to take a back seat. I really thought I would be writing less. But no. I wrote more reflective posts than normal, and I also wrote more substantial essays than normal. I produced around 200 pages of essays alone this month. Reallly wild stuff. Finished like 120 pages of the 'Society's Implicit War' series, which was chapters 2-6. I also wrote two smaller essays, one on tacit theory and one on mental modeling and mindfulness. Then yesterday I finished my essay 'The Genealogy of the Modern Mind' which is very exciting to me. I write another middle sized essay called On Creativity, and another one on military history. So I guess I really produced about 4 medium sized essays, 1 big stand alone essay, and the 5 big essays of the SIW series. Jeez. About 10 substantial essays this month. I also produced a smaller essay on mindfulness and thoughts about time.

Basically I have produced a ton of stuff this month. Lots of essays and lots of reflections.

I also wanted to blog about a nightmare that I had last night that was insane. Totally insane. I don't usually have nightmares. And this one woke me up it was totally bizarre. I'm not going to go full blown into it because it was a little bit too strange for full disclosure. But I want to give the gist of it.

Basically I think it started with me and my friend Rob at a monastery of sorts. It was night time when we arrived and I have no idea what we were doing at this place. But then I was sleeping in this monastery and I remember being freaked out because you could see people walking outside. It was night time and the room I was in was a big stone room with large windows with metal frames. The people walking around outside I had identified as 'night porters' but I'm not sure if that is really what they were. They would approach the window and take away the chamber pots. Some trap door would let them take these buckets, these buckets that were bathrooms in this monastery. But that was the general discomfort I first felt, these people, these weird rooms where I was lying down.

Then I ended up meeting up with Rob somehow and we were walking around outside. I think at some point I approached some outdoor bathroom that was a big wood shack of sorts. I opened the door and there were two guys in it. They should have locked the door and I remember thinking why didn't these people lock the door? Then as I was walking away from this place one of the guys in the outhouse, who was a big fat guy, started running after me trying to fight me. Really this guy wanted to attack me. So I fought him. I remember that in this dream I was being verbally aggressive to the max, telling this guy I was gonna wreck him and to stay away from me. I ended up hurting this guy, really hitting him a lot and screaming about him. I won the fight basically. Then me and Rob went inside and were sort of talking about how weird that was and what to do next.

Then while we were preparing to leave the monastery weird things were happening. I think I was bleeding from my nose or mouth or something, and I think Rob did it somehow. I don't remember. But I was pacing or something and was bleeding and we were getting ready to leave this place. We grabbed some brooms that had broken in half because we were expecting to have to fight these guys again on our way out. So we left the monastery together and we did indeed see these guys on our way out. There was a third person with them, and weirdly it was someone from my past, a guy that I don't know well at all. A guy that I had run ins with in middle school. They all had nerf guns. Rob started attacking them and I was like 'Whoa! Rob! We don't need to fight them we just need to get past them!' Cause they weren't attacking us explicitly we were just going past them and they may have let us pass. They did eventually, but this guy from my past shook my hand and said 'Nice to meet you'. Which was totally bizarre because we had met in the past. But I knew what he meant. He meant that in middle school when we fought we were totally different people. That we were effectively meeting each other for the first time because middle school was a totally different time and we were totally different people.

Anyways when we left the monastery I think we ran down some stairs into some garage and we got into my car. The car that I sold, my red Volkswagen. As we were walking towards it all these people started chasing us. They were right on us. I got good ground on them and made it to my door no problem. But Rob had a harder time getting in because his door was slammed directly up against a wall. And I remember thinking 'there is no way Rob will fit in that space'. He started squeezing himself up against this door and the wall and all of a sudden POP was inside the car. It was like magic or something. And at that moment all these people, some of which were friends from the past, slammed against the car. And one of them actually managed to pop inside the car too somehow. But we told him to get out and he did. So me and Rob drove away together.

Then we went to a different place. We went to a tall and weird dilapidated sort of apartment building that had weird spiral stairs. Somewhere on the way or something I saw a weird thing in a window. It was this big cardboard outlet that was a halloween costume of mine from a number of years before. It had a phone number written on it and it was the wrong phone number. It had fallen apart some. Apparently I had given it to Elliott Bay Book Company as my phone number or something. And they were giving me a hard time about 'well why did you give us this thing with the wrong number on it'. It was totally strange to see this paper outlet in a window, peeling and with the wrong number on it.

But anyways then me and Rob were at this big messed up tower apartment building. We were walking up the stairs to buy something. Some of our friends were there, and we talked to them some. My friend told me I owed him 15 dollars but I told him I'd already payed him. There was some cat in this tower too. But we left this place eventually and then we got in Rob's car. I don't know where my car went. Perhaps these were two different dreams. But any way, Rob was making a left turn onto I-95 as we were leaving this tower. He took the turn so wide that we he just side swiped the right wall of the highway. As soon as he hit this wall he just started swerving like crazy all over the road. I said to him hey its okay just even it out. He couldn't stop swerving and he said to me 'Oh man you don't want this, just go home with your parents when we get back.' Which is so weird. Because I knew we weren't going to make it back and I had no idea why he was so out of it or was driving so badly or so insanely, or had accepted his own death so much.

Then he drove off a bridge. Right before he drove off the bridge he said 'This music is so repetitive'. We had been listening to the new Killers album. Even though it doesn't exist, I knew thats what it was. But apparently the music was boring and distracting him. I think he was sickly, had sores on his face or something. I could feel the car moving so fast downward and I knew I was going to die. I knew I wasn't going to be able to go to grad school or do anything I want to do in the future. I said to Rob 'My seatbelt isn't on', and he said 'Neither is mine, but thats okay'. I tried to get my seatbelt on in mid air. I almost got it clicked, but there was a shirt in the way, and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to do it and that I was going to die. I woke up as the car hit the ground, and I woke up reaching for my seatbelt. I was lying in the dark and I reached over my shoulder in the bed and tried to find the seatbelt.

This dream really scared me. All kinds of weird things happened, these fights, these weird places, this weird car crash. Really really scared me. But hey, whatever, what an end to a weird month of living and a weird month of writing. I suspect it has something to do with moving across the country and missing Rob and feeling weird about family and life and habits.

Oh well. I wonder what the future will bring in terms of living and writing. I hope that I will dream more, because I never dream. This is the only dream I remember having in the last years. In all of 2010 I have no idea what dreams I've had.

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About Me

I spend most of my time working as a mental health professional. I have been preoccupied with philosophy, politics, healing, and many other questions for the last 15 years or so. I am currently working on putting together my study of Plato and Aristotle with contemporary work in philosophy, psychology, psychotherapy, and trauma research. I use this place primarily as a workshop for ideas. I welcome conversation with anyone working on similar problems. The major contours of my basic project have been outlined here

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