Let me preface this by saying that I’m not a psychopath or anything. I swear. But I do periodically have really violent dreams. I haven’t had any of those apocalyptic ones in a while now, but the other night I had one that involved something of a bloodbath. Me and some other guy were part of some police unit that focused exclusively on battling some kind of mafia crime-syndicate. Something went haywire in our scheme, and during some kind of sting operation, a huge fight broke out. All I really remember right now is this one part where I put a circular saw through this one guy’s head, and then his face flapped open in a giant slit, and I saw his brain. It was completely nuts. After that, my partner and I went on the run. Because we’d obviously slipped up. But we were running from the cops, and not the mob (even though, theoretically we’d just slayed a bunch of mob guys). Anyway, we stopped at this highway restaurant for a breather. The waiter brings us menus, and penciled into them are instructions on where to go. It seems that the mafia now wanted us to join up with them. Even though we’d killed their guys, now that we stepped over to the other side of the law, they wanted us in their camp.
Anyway, I wouldn’t say that I have violent dreams all the time. More like every few weeks. About as often as I watch violent movies. I read about this British study one time that said the type of fiction people liked generally correlated to the types of dreams they have. It’s a pretty interesting theory. From my personal experience I can definitely back that up. I’ve always liked sci-fi/fantasy type stuff, and my dreams as long as I can remember have used that kind of imagery and logic. It’s probably a chicken-or-egg argument to figure out whether the dreams cause the fictional taste, or vice versa.
I guess I’m curious about other people’s experiences with this. I know that my girlfriend thinks it’s really weird that I have violent dreams now and then. But she also can’t stand to see violence on tv, etc. Whereas for me, it just seems like a natural category of actions, and usually contains a symbolic meaning beyond just the violence.
Oh I just remembered a fragment of a hypnogogic vision I had last night. There were two pillars. I think they were at the entrance to something. Each pillar had a name. The pillar on the left was called “The Foundation of Our Virtues” and the right-hand pillar was called “Guided By Our Shame.” Reminds me of the Masonic pillars Boaz and Jacin, which were said to have flanked the ancient Temple of Solomon.
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10 Comments
i’ve had a few violent dreams, but in my dreams the violence always seems to be some kind of defense mechanism, like it only happens if someone i know is in trouble w/in the dream. here’s a question– does it occur as a nightmare of some kind, or is it just like a regular dream? like, when i have a superviolent dream, i always consider it a nightmare.
the pillars remind me of the pillar of severity (left side) and pillar of mercy (right side) on the tree of life. do you remember what colors they were?
for me, the violence only takes place as part of a fictional story. i am never “myself” in it. im always acting out some scenario, like with the police/mafia thing. there was one other one where i was fighting “grail knights” a while ago. and another one where i was escaping from this dark castle more recently. they are almost never what i would consider nightmares. i don’t normally have nightmares. maybe once or twice a year, if that.
id say the pillars are black and gray. either both included both colors, or the left was black the right one gray. i dont really know anything about the pillars of severity and mercy…
I never thought of this, but it makes sense. In a way. If I remember, I’ll try to collaborate with some friends of mine this week.
The whole question here is, I agree, do the dreams affect our tastes and desires to pursue certain myths, tales, and further explore these worlds in our heads by exploring them in the works of others… or vice versa, where the media we immerse ourselves in opens up the opportunity for the mind to really create more expansive, metaphorical worlds? I lean more towards the latter, though I think it’s definitely a little from column A and a little from column B.
I was raised primarily on Clive Barker and Frank Herbert’s Dune Chronicles, so those really exploded my imagination as a youth. Since then, I’ve had vivid dreams à la David Lynch, a recurring series where I am hunting (or often being hunted) by vampires and ghouls, or just odd pseudo fantasy worlds where persons I know are thrown into weird alternate versions of our world, and events are (seemingly) completely askew and random.
But I’ve also been told my dreams are more peculiar than most anyone I know, when I do remember them and relate them to friends. I also read more than most of my friends, with the exception of a few.
Ultimately, it is a question of how many relations your mind can make and how much of that inner dialogue is going to be streamed from the Great One in the Sky down to our little interpreatations, and how much is gobbledy-gook. Ehh, who knows….
here’s a pretty good basic intro to the pillars. there’s also a middle pillar, which balances the two:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/2795/qb7.html
i’m surprised you’re not as familiar w/the tree of life, considering! you should check out “the mystical qabbalah” by dion fortune– best book written on the subject.
yeah ive been meaning to check out that book. almost bought it recently and its now on my wishlist. ive only ever sort of casually dabbled in the qabbalah stuff.
Fell, the thing is i dont really think its a “cause-effect” relationship. its just a relationship. both probably stem from another deeper source. it makes me wonder all kinds of crazy shit though. say we were in a more or less closed primitive culture (rather than a big melting pot). if we were all raised on exactly the same stories, would we all have really similar dreams? or are there people who are always gonna have really weird ones? people are always telling me mine are weird too.
another thing thats happened to me really recently in the past month or two: is that i’ve started to symbolically decode dreams right while they are happening. im more and more able to reference in other dreams, events and meanings of various things i’ve researched. so something will be happening and i’m like getting closer all the time to really grasping what it is and why.
Your pillars remind me of the pillars often shown in Tarot cards, particularly the major arcana, which represent the left and right paths of the Kaballah — the path of the letter of the law on the left, and the spirit of the law on the right.
Those would be identical to the Masonic/Kabbalistic pair. They also appear in Christian tradition, where they represent the material and divine worlds. (often Christ is shown centrally uniting them). It is a very old concept.
BTW- if you want nutty dreams, take a vicodin before bed! I’ve taken them twice now for dental pain, and had two of the weirdest dreams of my life. (Getting to drive an interdimensional spacecraft was a hoot, even if it was only a dream!)
holy jesus! you’re gonna have to describe that dream in more detail!
It was bizarre, at very least. It was very vivid, and almost entirely silent. I’ve forgotten a lot of detail already, but I was inexplicably travelling in this “ship” with a crowd of yound adult types (college kids?). The ’ship’ as it were, navigate more or less by travelling straight through everything, but to do so, it sort of “morphed” into it’s surroundings. otherwise, it looked like a green ‘flying saucer’ that glowed, or a purple insect-like walking craft. We walked it around inside of a planet for some reason (I forget). It also flew us to an absolutely huge graveyard (!?) inside a gigantic cave. There was also some confusion by the ‘kids’ over the intended use of a few ordinary objects- hard to explain, but basically, they seemed to have scavenged a number of items, but were using them all ‘incorrectly,’ like they’d never seen them before.