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April, 2020
4 25 284/4/20 - Title: "Oh, Shit!"
I am making a long journey, alone. Have taken a wrong turn which involves being well out of the way I'd intended to be going and so feel I must take short-cuts to get back soon to where I need to be. It seems I am to meet someone - a woman - but this may not be possible if the rendezvous time and place are not kept. I start to cross a marshy area that at first looks so open and in sunlight that I'd be able to see any hazards well ahead of time and avoid them. However, once well into it I find that areas I thought fairly solid are really covered with water plants. They are concealing a lot of water beneath. More ominous still, I see a large, venomous snake partly sunning itself just to my right on one of the quite close floating plants. The snake is large and looks like a king cobra only more yellow, a shade that allows it to blend well with the yellow water plants. I am certain now that there are not just this one but must be many others in the nearby waters. I flap a coat or some such clothing at the visible snake to frighten it away, but this just makes it defensive and angry so that it rears up, evidently about to strike in the next moment. Even if I survive this time, there probably will be other snakes attacking before I can get out of this area and situation.
[I wake up then, saying to myself something like "Oh, shit!"
The snake or snakes here no doubt, as in dreams past, represent suppressed feelings with which I have yet to come to terms, fear, anger, even a sense of desperation that there seems no way out of this. I am far from being ready to die or accepting of potentially dire circumstances.
On the surface, I do not appear distressed, for instance calmly proceeding with arrangements through Neptune Society for contracts covering the dispositions of both my and Fran's bodies, in case either of us dies from this circumstance or later. We are at the beginning of a time of great tension, threat, and loss as the covid-19 pandemic is starting to advance through our country under the leadership of our "very stable genius," Donald Trump, who delayed any serious dealing with the crisis for two months and, even now, publicly undermines the best advice of his health and economic experts. Men my age, if they catch it, have about a 1 in 5 to a 1 in 10 chance of dying from it, the odds more grim still for people with asthma or heart difficulties. Even simply requiring hospitalization from it can be extremely debilitating. Our health care system is already beginning to be overwhelmed. More so than before, there is a not insignificant chance my life will be taken or badly altered in the next several weeks. Already, at least in paper values, our nest egg has also lost about 20% from its highs, as the implications of this pandemic are becoming clearer to stock investors. Our country may be in for its worst healthcare and economic crises since the 1918 pandemic and the Great Depression. I am far from accepting of this new reality, but, of course, other than relatively safe hygienic and social distancing practices, there is nothing I can do to avoid it.]
4/25/20 - Title: "I'm the Greatest!"
I'm with my brother, Horace. He is gloating about how well he's been doing money-wise through his work as a financial consultant/manager of others' portfolios. He points out that, not only has he had 5 wonderful, really smart and talented kids, and that they have also provided he and his wife with many grandkids, the entire larger family all getting along fine and seeing one another and him often, but he has a terrific house and yard, the residence much bigger than mine, and his total worth being now several million dollars. He crows about how his nest egg just keeps going up thanks to commissions and management fees from all his satisfied millionaire clients.
[Of Horace, I'd say he is intelligent, smug, one who loves being a "bad boy," arrogant, and yet has proven to be a good husband and father plus a super grandpa.
Horace is clearly a shadow part of me, there to show aspects of myself I do not generally acknowledge.
5 is a significant number in my psyche, suggesting waiting, patience, creativity, and good integration. I organize things into 5s, and a mantra I learned when beginning a serious meditation program in the early 1970s had 5 names for one's higher power. They represent as well five levels of consciousness above this ordinary plane of existence.
Though we do not tout this in a self-aggrandizing way, like the dream brother, I tend to take pride in my wife's and my portfolio likely being greater than those of my siblings. The dream may be offering an alternative to seeing things in a more narrow, "Is that all there is?" outlook. A large house with many rooms suggests a good metaphorical view of the larger Self, one with more than one story and a number of outlets for growth and fulfillment, rather than the more modest "starter home" version I might be assuming is all of me at present. Similarly, the Horace character's overconfidence might be a good complement to my natural default mode of reticence and little self-assurance.
The references to kids and grandkids bring to mind nurturance for one's inner child or children, the precious and creative parts of us, capable of genuine feeling, joy, curiosity, and living intently in the moment.
As my sister pointed out, when I shared this dream with her earlier today, there is probably envy in me for Horace's success in all the ways he has sought to attain it, including especially his and his wife's loyal and loving family plus their kids and grandkids, all reared affectionately and supportively, in ways as positive for them as ours with Dad were abusive and domineering. It is true Horace is narrow-minded, hypocritically devoted to his fundamentalist Christian church even as he is prejudiced, self-righteous, aggressive, and ridiculing of those who do not agree with his right-wing, gun-toting viewpoints. Since it is my dream shadow, these too are aspects of my consciousness, ones I do not like to admit, yet true enough. Nonetheless, my sister is also right that, within the context of Horace's belief system and values, he has made it in spades. I am jealous of that success, wish it were mine and that I could, like him, celebrate my kids and grandkids as he and his wife so easily and naturally can and with the wealth of experience together as a big family that this entails. Looking at it only in those terms, my life seems by comparison to have been a failure. My sister also points out, however, that I can make real another aspect of the dream's message, that in its different, unique ways my life has abundant riches, my experience its own wealth. What is more, I can cultivate and enhance the positive qualities in my Horace shadow self and do my best to avoid its negative traits, which are there as well.]
4/28/20 - Title: "Avoid Deep Feelings At Your Peril"
I'm in an undeveloped area of an otherwise urban setting. It is vast, like a park, yet is not laid out in an organized way as a park might be, instead being just a tract of land, with some wet, marshy or swampy areas, lots of low, natural vegetation, and with as well almost bare spaces of land between. It is like a place that has been left to nature for a long while despite being right in the city. I do not know how I happened to be in here, but I am far enough from normal urban areas that I feel at the mercy of whatever threats exist in this place. I am way too far in and away from its edges to be able to simply jump out. It soon becomes apparent there are lots and lots of venomous snakes here. Indeed, they are not particularly trying to conceal themselves. They seem to be more or less everywhere I look, and instead of being camouflaged they are often in bright colors, purples, bright reds, deep blue ones, and so on. Most are large, their girth as big as a man's arm and their length several feet. Do not recall specific incidents, yet the impression is of a number of close encounters from which till now I have escaped, but with the odds stacked against my making it back out of here without one or more deadly bites. As I awakened, I was still inside this area, at great risk to my life, a possible deadly attack imminent.
[The context of the dream is the first wave of covid-19 infections and deaths, with so far about 57,000 deaths in the U.S. alone, knowing it will likely be at least a year before a good vaccine against this virus is widely available and that, for my gender, age, and prior conditions, the pandemic's lethality is substantial. It is estimated that, notwithstanding social distancing and the use of masks and gloves by many, roughly half the population is likely to be infected before a vaccine is available, and an initial vaccine may or may not be truly adequate to keep people from getting the disease. Even at only a 1% lethality, this could mean close to a million people die before a good vaccine in the U.S. And if I contract it, my own chances are likely closer to 20% lethality. Thus, while it is not certain I'll die from covid-19, I am objectively in a situation from which I cannot easily escape and which actually could kill me. Also, typically snakes in my dreams represent suppressed negative emotions, perhaps here suggesting the presence of a lot of fear and anger that I have not allowed myself to fully feel.
Later today, I did a kind of meditation session focused on "asking" the dream snakes if they have a message for me, and this was the sense I had of their reply, assuming the dream images were not too primal or pre-verbal to have given voice to their meaning in my dreams:
-we are the terror and rage you learned, in an abusive childhood, it was not safe to express;
-we are the strong feelings you still reject;
-we are the power you give up by excluding your more passionate emotions;
-we are showing you your strong will to live, one you usually do not notice;
-we are there to bite and kill your currently too small ego self, in order that you may discover and open to a larger Self;
-we can be your connection to your intuition, life force, natural healing, and the feelings of your precious inner child, from whom all true motivation, curiosity, and joy derive.
Don't know if that is more than speculation, yet it does resonate as probably true.]