Dreams: "Dolls"

(Dannika - woman, age 25)

Dream:

"I am walking down the hall of an empty university building. I come inside the room of one man I know from my life (a colleague from work). There are two beds in his room. His own, on the right and another one, that belongs to his roommate is on the left side of the room.

“Let us be elegant or die!” - Louisa May Alcott

The right side is very neat and tidy (my friend who appears in a dream is in fact a kind of OCD person who needs to have everything in order at work), while the roommate's side is a bit messy. The room is L-shaped, and I'm curious to see what's around the corner. To my amazement there is a kind of Barbie altar. They are displayed in the way that it looks like, as if they were in the scenes from normal life. I find it a bit disturbing and some of them are placed in life scenes, they are very individual, as they have their own personalities. I realise that a guy I know must be some kind of a crazy guy who plays with dolls, so I run away before he comes back."

Dream interpretation:

The two men that live in the room are the symbols of the opposite mindsets and both represent the masculine parts of the dreamer’s Self. A space inside is divided; excessive order on the right side, stands in contrast to the mess the dreamer finds on the left side of the room. Such contradiction reveals that two different parts of her personality seem to stand on opposite poles and that Dannika in the parallel of reality may as well have tendencies to frequent mood swings. In the dream, she manages to look deeper into this subconscious affair. In the same room, she discovers the hidden altar with Barbie dolls. The dolls are displayed in a way that seems as if they take part in real life and the whole experience appears somewhat disturbing to her. In fact, what she finds behind the corner is a part of her own personality that calls for her attention. Barbie dolls are toys more than anything else, and nevertheless they seem to represent some individuality, yet are not real. They lack the spark of life that would awaken their soul. A life thrown underneath the plastic skin would free them from being pretty dolls in favour of being real. A dream reveals a part of a personality that, like a pretty doll, is focused on entertaining others. Making others feel better. There is a feminine energy behind the masculine layers of her personality that resonate with the world of men. The dolls arranged in the form of a disturbing altar illustrate a shame about femininity and consequently symbolise repressed energy.

Thoughts: "How did I (not) break Ten Commandments."

Chapter Five

“Honour your father and mother”

“and will serve under his parents, as to masters.” (Syrah Chapter 3)

It's said that when you die, your whole life passes before your eyes. You are given last chance to look at your life in its true shape. When the show is over, the objects in your imagination go silent and let you watch the ending with them. And then, as the saying goes, the last one turns off the lights. If you would die today, who would it be? There is a chance that you could surprise yourself, ous subconscious is more powerful than the thought we have access in everyday life. Well, than there is only one way to find out, and if you wonder, don't worry, you will find out sooner than you think. At this point, we can only say, that our parents are the first to enter our minds. Mom and dad are to us like the first heroes of the movie saga, heroes that cannot be replaced. Love for parents, and especially for mothers, is one of the most important experiences during our relatively very short visit to earth. And throughout this journey this connection, connection with parents, gives us the opportunity to return home at any time and wherever we are. It creates semantic framework for our relationship with ourselves. Parental objects in our mind consist of the space where our consciousness begins and where it all ends. They stay with us for the rest of our life. Not literally (at least not in every case), but symbolically, they are the raw material of our imagination. We constantly relate to their pictures living somewhere in our head. As if we were possessed by them, we subconsciously try to rebuild the same world that is in our head and create the same environment outside.

We are on the constant quest to rearrang the whole world in the way so that we feel comfortable, even if in this context comfort means suffering. We often even look for their replacements outside in the form of a husband or wife. It sounds pretty crazy. So, what are these objects and the world we are so stubbornly trying to recreate? Are these memories we have from childhood? Yes, but only partially. The matter is rooted much deeper than what we can simply bring into our consciousness. The way we live resonates with a parallel reality that lives in the subconscious of our mind. As our personality develops, i.e. very early in life, we give life to the objects in our mind with human attributes such as our parents, family and peers, and internalise the energy formed not only as memories but in a sense as living creations living their own separate lives. In a world that, once driven, takes on its own rules that are independent of us. To understand this, you need to start with a certain role reversal at the start. Although it sounds like science fiction, in fact it is a mechanism that has a huge impact on how we perceive reality and how we perceive ourselves in this reality. All this energy and all these objects form a kind of matrix that lives in a parallel reality, and we are just puppets triggered when the matrix throws it onto the field of reality.

“He that gives glory to his mother is as one who lays up treasure” (Syrah Chapter 3)

While the Bible promises great things for those who love and respect their parents, the most common cause of adult mental health problems is their relationship with their parents. After all, it's not a secret that parents are never perfect, and those who are parents themselves know it best. So let's not state the obvious focus, but turn the attention to focus on whose side the responsibility for oneself lies. In fact, as we become adults, the same responsibility that was upon our parents when we were children falls over our shoulders. As a consequence, we are often not able to bear it too, and we sabotage ourselves in an equally inept way by suppressing the potential on the way to happiness, as we felt because of our parents. Isn't that how we were raised up after all, in the image of our own parents? The objects that we carry in the subconscious are attached to emotions, which are our ideas about what will happen to us later in life. More specifically, how we approach the things that we have no control over, including the people we meet on our way, or what happens to us in our life resonate with the objects we have created in our imaginations. Depending on the prototype concepts that we have installed upon our Ego during our upbringing, as well as the individual characteristics of our psyche resulting from our peculiarity that we have brought with us into this world, we associate different events with different objects living in a parallel world in our subconscious. As a result, everyone lives out their own individual model of the very same reality that we all share. The individual matrix is something that lies between our Self and the outside world, it's the world of illusion that buddhists call maya. Until we are free from our parents, we will see ourselves as a child. The radicalism that the Ten Commandments impose will never make us free nor bring the answers to the questions that what we know as the walk around world of reality, imposes on us. To be free, we need to allow ourselves mental flexibility and look for an honest point where we can separate our individuality from our parents' image, let go of resentment but one step at a time. While we are bombarded with love from everywhere we end up obsessed with love but to be able to love we must allow ourselves to hate first, and only then can we take control of ourselves and get rid of the guilt. If we were to obey the fifth commandment blindly, we would be on the straight path to come into conflict with ourselves on a deeper level. Negative feelings towards those closest to us are very problematic and inevitable. They often touch upon matters so personal that we prefer to pretend they don't exist. Everything we push down to an unconscious level in this way is an integral part of our personality. Such conflicts show up in our dreams. The following dream of a man in his thirties shows some frustration and a desire to free himself from certain family complexes:

I'm at an art gallery. In the spacious hall, I notice a young woman. She looks great. Dark brown hair, pale skin. Black dress with a deep cleavage, adheres to her slender, girly figure. She is much younger than me. I cannot associate her with anyone I know or recognise from reality, but in the dream I feel a familiar closeness to her. Somehow I know that she likes me, as if the age difference didn't matter in our relationship. In fact, I have the impression that this difference fills up a part of me inside, and that, somehow calms me down. The girl stops by a painting of a bouquet of flowers, made with a thick layer of oil paints. I join her, she asks me a question and I realise that it's actually my painting that we are looking at. The style is a bit abstract, but the flowers themselves are painted very realistically. I take the painting off the wall and give it to the girl. I started to feel anxious, when I realised that the painting with flowers is covered with a previously painted silhouette of another, older woman. I remember that when I painted her silhouette I had to make some adjustments. I thought that otherwise the woman I painted would hold a grudge against me because she would think that her figure was too big. So I adjusted her waist and other parts and as a result the painting looked disproportionate instead of looking better and in addition I could still see the original contours which made it look quite caricatural. It is this inner layer that is like some mystery that makes me uneasy. We can't find our way out of the gallery, when we return to the same place again, I finally notice an open door with a narrow corridor on the other side.

The art gallery represents the psyche of the dreamer. An attractive woman is the embodiment of his inner desires. Meeting in a dream suggests that he wants to fulfil his desires. What it follows resonates with sexual energy, but also with a sense of security and acceptance. And the image he gives to her as a gift represents his individuality. In this way, he symbolically connects his individuality with his inner desire, which can be interpreted as a sense of fulfilment. The figure of the elderly woman who hides the image underneath is actually the figure of the dreamer's mother, and the fact that the dreamer had to correct this figure reveals anxiety resonating with the image of his own mother. He expects criticism in advance, so he makes adjustments to make the image look grotesque. In fact, he tries to look good at the same time, but most likely it does the same thing, killing his creativity and also makes him act unnaturally. Flowers are the inclination of his individuality, as well as the birth of something new. What is painted over is what he is trying to hide, the mother complex that causes him to keep making adjustments in order to fit in.

The corridor turns into a very narrow cave and I struggle to squeeze between the rocks. finally I managed to get to the other side. The girl is not with me any more and I find myself in a very tall room with empty white walls. There is a painting of my parents and a man who looks like a security guard. A very tall and lanky man dressed in a uniform. It turns out that he was waiting for me and I have to hang the painting in place of my parents' painting. The man seems irritated by the fact that he has to change the paintings as if my presence gave him an extra job, but at the same time we both know it's his duty. I am a bit afraid of him, and the fact that he is not angry with me and needs to obey his duty makes me relieved. He looks at the flowers I painted and says that I need to add white paint to my painting before we put it on the wall. Now I feel irritated by his criticism, but I am unable to oppose him. I ask where I get the white paint from. He tells me that I can take it off the painting with my parents. When I point out to a man that there is no white paint in the painting, he says that if I soak the brush around their portrait, the white paint will start to come out from underneath. It annoys me that I have to make corrections, but I feel as if I cannot oppose this man. I do as it says. As I rub the brush deeply into the coat of paint, I notice that some brown and disgusting paint is coming out from under my parents' painting. It's not paint. I realise it's shit.

The dream reveals an intention to free from the family complexes. The change of paintings on the wall is symbolic and resonates with development of one's individuality in the place of the parental objects. The guard who appears in the dream is the personification of the Superego. The guard causes a feeling of fear, but at the same time his figure also has to perform his duties despite the emotions it brings. We can interpret this as the developing personality of the dreamer and a kind of internal transformation in which the perspective of his superego is changing in a more controllable manner. The superego is that part of the personality that usually makes up the parent characters. It is a kind of inner moral guardian that defines what we can, and cannot do. The dreamer eventually replaces the paintings. But his superego keeps him in check and forces him to adjust the paint to be more like his parents. The shit that comes out from underneath the paint symbolises his rebellion as well as repressed emotions that he feels towards his parents. He unconsciously perceives what they represent, according to the non-pompous saying, as full of shit. Because of his Superego, something like that is not able to be put on the day light and therefore it exists in the subconscious part of mind.

When we put too much effort into behaving in the manner as we were taught from childhood. Things such as we should not think badly or speak badly about our parents, our subconscious mind does not dance according to the rules contained in reality as we know it. On the contrary, it is our subconsciousness that generates a filter through which we perceive reality. And also how we perceive ourselves in this reality. The catch that allows us to penetrate this mechanism is, in a sense, the world of dreams and fairy tales which is full of symbols. This world brings us closer to our own consciousness through stories that directly resonate with what lives in each of us and with what we come into the world with. Our parents are people like us who live next to us, but they are special people because of the unique place they occupy in our imagination. It is extremely difficult to separate their images from our personality, which at some point we want to do in order to free ourselves from the inevitable limitations imposed by the constant gaze we feel on ourselves. Children's fairy tales are full of horrible mothers who, in the actual stories, have been turned into stepmothers, feeling that the multiple instances of mothers who have envied, betrayed and abandoned their daughters would be too gloomy to be accepted publicly. Fortunately, the stepmother could be hated and their possible failure could be celebrated even more. The Bible shows that a disgraced mother is an insult to her children. So all of these feelings that we accumulate in the mother object directly affect how we feel lonely with ourselves, in the mother object, which is an integral part of our personality. Seeing the world in black and white could be disastrous, because the conflict that arises out of modern hatred of the mother object in the subconscious will be reflected in a huge internal catastrophe and will ultimately cause us to hate ourselves. Our parents are only human, so worshipping them as commanded in the Bible is contradictory. Indeed, it's true that parents occupy a special place in our consciousness, but does it really take that much to hate a mother? It was enough that they forbade us to go out to the yard with friends, because we did not clean the room, and as if by magic, our beloved mother turned into a so-called stepmother from a fairy tale. Moreover, parents often did not avoid more serious crimes and many had to deal with emotionally immature parents. As a result, the object that we have built inside on such shaky foundations lives in ourselves and at times terrifies us. And at the same time, it requires you to worship him. This creates a conflict that permeates our body and a feeling of incessant gaze that constantly turns us to stone when we are to feel something. As a result, we feel the need to fill the inner void with feeling and we want closeness while pushing away all feelings. I disagree with this commandment, much less renounce it like fire. I cannot worship someone and look at them objectively at the same time, I prefer to love but look objectively. Because only then can I get to know myself by looking objectively at my story. Break the shackles of religious dogmatism and start building your own and independent life. Such dogmatism is very problematic if it affects emotions that it cannot control.

Worship and blind obedience takes away a place for other feelings. Even compassion in this process, when we want to understand our parents and forgive them the things that were inevitably mistakes. Being compassionate and forgiving requires a dose of being neutral. Assuming we are honouring our parents, we are actually worshipping ourselves as something that lives within us, it's as if we are praising ourselves, and to be honest, that doesn't seem to be an issue at first glance. But on the other side of the coin is what we call the devil. It is when we hate our mother or father we follow the same logic, and the logic in the true sense is that then we would have to hate ourselves. For some reason, we tend to punish ourselves more than praise ourselves and remember failures more than achievements. Like everything that comes from the imagination, it is much stronger than the strength of our intellect, and by example we can say that outside the world in which we live, a parallel Universe of our subconscious lives in our mind. Where we can cover that part of ourselves that unites us to God and allow you to create your own world in this life, metaphorically you could think that Adam and Eve would be your parents and you would give them life and make them perfect and yet they sin.

Our fantasies determine the way we perceive the world, and consequently how the world responds to us. If our fantasies are so intrusive to us that we have to suppress them in this way, we give up our individuality and replace it with symptoms such as anxiety and depression. By obeying the principles of the 10 commandments, we place our own responsibility and freedom in the hands of God. In fact, it works for many. In such an arrangement, we are like sheeps who faithfully respond to the orders of the shepherd. It works on the surface, but underneath causes it to suppress and steam inside.Often it is the "bad" part that knocks on the door of our consciousness. No wonder we often give up on what we fear. And yet something strong demands attention. Our strength is hidden under the blanket of fears and neuroses, which manifests itself in nightmares. Nevertheless, it reveals our darker side, we have to be "bad" sometimes. Otherwise, by relying on our morals, we give signs of good or bad to others by projecting our personality upon them. Good at doing bad is the privilege of the freedom we experience when we break rules that don't fit our own soul. In this way, we take responsibility for ourselves and release others from this burden, isn't it good after all? Surely it is not easy. Thus, the moment we become responsible for our mind and allow ourselves to be angry, we take responsibility for the mess that makes up our personality. The inner force that awakens from evil is necessary to get rid of the compulsions related to the parent's objects in the subconscious. Only after they are gone can you forget about washing the dishes after dinner, but you no longer need to be afraid of the dreams you always had. I am not an advocate of evil in itself, I just think it's better to ignore anything that doesn't really exist and limits us at the same time. It is the privilege of an adult to indulge in this freedom. While on a conscious level we consider ourselves to be good and live along with the Ten Commandments. Parents are, in a sense, considered the architects of our consciousness, and therefore any sin in this sense automatically hits our parents' objects that we carry within us. Any bad thought is automatically relegated to the subconscious mind. However, such a thought does not disappear as we would like it to. And what is happening on the other side, that is in our subconscious, is already beyond our control. Often what we feel in this field is what our dreams relate to. It is our responsibility to take care of this mess, and when the noise stops, someone will call you to meet you, your personal Jesus. Would you answer that call? Imagination, if it is free, is crazy and in life it is important to believe in your own images. But the choice is yours.

Dreams: "Train"

(Vienna - woman, age 28)

Dream:

"I need to get to Gyor (Hungarian city) by bus. For some reason I change my mind and decide that I will travel by train. While I am on the train, I hear a woman's voice behind me. Some elderly woman tries to sell me a ticket, but she can't hear well. I can't communicate with her so I have to get off the train and get back inside through the other door. In order to get in the same room where the lady is, strangely now the train looks more like a normal room.

“We live in a house of mirrors and think we are looking out the windows.” - F. Perls

The old lady couldn't help me, and she asked her friend to help me buy a ticket. There were also two little girls about 5 years old. They were just sitting and chit chatting. The girls are trying to tell me a story or something, and despite the fact that I'm trying to be polite, I feel that I should be in a hurry because my train is about to leave. The second (younger) lady who was now trying to find a ticket for me was also nice but I told her that unfortunately I don't have enough time and I actually have a bus ticket. I asked her where the bus station was, but she wasn't sure. She offered to walk me out for a while and we got to a huge mall that looked like the one in my town. We were going down the spiral stairs and I told her that I didn't take the headphones with me which is a big problem as I hate traveling without them. When we got downstairs, I tried to check the timetable and find my bus, but something made my vision worse. I looked up, but everything on the timetable was blurry and messy. I went to the office to ask for the time but the guy couldn't help but needed the exact address of the bus company. We found it and apparently the place I needed to go to was 20-25 minutes away by foot and my bus was due to depart in 10 minutes. I started running and panicking, and after a while I stopped and called my aunt, whom I was supposed to meet in Gyor. I said that I would not be able to come. I got home to find my aunt and my uncle, sitting in the living room. I felt relieved and it all seemed a bit funny at the end as there was no need to panic.

Dream interpretation:

The place where Vienna travels in her dream symbolises the state of mind that she is heading towards in reality. Her Ego is under pressure to get there, yet at the same time, the inner journey is subconsciously sabotaged by other parts of her Self. First, she can't get a ticket on the train. The older lady symbolises the coming of age for Vienna in her dream and the ticket itself, may be interpreted as a form of a pass to her own growth. And she is unable to obtain such an access at this point. On the other hand, there are two little girls who also appear on her way. The girls are a symbol of her own youth. She leaves them at the station in a haste to catch the train and such a hurry may be illustrating a strong urge to grow. In consequence Vienna seems to be stuck at some point in her life. She can't access the wisdom of her Self and yet she feels as if there is no time for chit chatting; a privilege of youth. The fact that she forgot her headphones can be interpreted as not being fully ready to travel, and the blurry timetable reveals her uncertainty about the future. The ending reveals two things. First, that it was not the right time to go after all, and second, that there was no reason to panic. In the end, she still achieves her destiny, without going anywhere.