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August, 2020
3 308/3/20 - Title: "Reptilian Rage"
I am on the floor in a room, on my back, holding with both hands the head and neck of a large rattlesnake that's inches from me, from my face. It is trying to strike me, my face, and would, except that I am barely, for now, holding it (but am not at all sure I can much longer). My strength for holding it at bay, just so, is weakening. Yet I must do so, and well, or it will get loose enough and be able to open its mouth enough to complete the strike. It feels as though the snake is powerful and angry and that I cannot hold it enough much longer to avoid being struck. Over and over I yell for help (and wake up).
[Typically, when I dream of snakes, especially venomous ones, it is about suppressed negative feelings, in this case clearly my anger. Apparently I am losing the struggle to avoid feeling rage. Why am I so angry? The candidates are numerous. Regardless of the catalyst, how to genuinely feel and deal with this powerful emotion? Walks, meditation, and journaling may help, or yard work, particularly removal of vines, from an area where most all of them are weeds. And why be so urgently concerned to avoid my own strong feelings? Without their strength perhaps I am relatively passive, running scared. With them, at worst I'd be uncomfortable for awhile. Do I really think I'd go berserk and do serious damage? Perhaps, yet it seems unlikely.]
8/30/20 - Title: "Not Good Enough"
I'm in a big university but in the dream it is blended with a work situation, and a guy who is or reminds me of my last (real) supervisor (at Texas Rehab. Commission) is my boss and keeps riding me, looking for any excuse to fire me. Just talking to another employee, for instance, a sympathetic female coworker, or being in the bathroom too long, could be all it takes for him to let me go. I'm in a really big, nice, spacious part of the university, kind of a combination auditorium-like area, the huge stage-like part of it, and head office suites part, combined, while over on one end, and one or two floors up or down, there is part of a big library collection of books, in this case ones on classical art and history. Meanwhile, I need to pee and cannot find a nearby bathroom. One I try to go to is closed. I've been given an assignment by my overbearing boss who wants any excuse to give me the boot. It involves researching and writing a paper on classicism, but since I'm late getting to this, one attempt after another not working out in a timely way, like the library's classics collection of big old books not being where I thought or not open or with the books in no particular order or none of them that I look at capturing my imagination in a way I can get a handle on for how to write the paper demanded in the assignment, things are getting more stressful, the anticipated and feared firing feeling more imminent.
I am, apart from all that, in a scene or setting in which I am alternately in a canyon or a steep hazardous path or a roadway path in the canyon or partly next to it. Despite feeling much anxiety here too, not sure how to get back to the university workplace or home, yet I am also finding the natural setting at once intimidating and awesome with intricate gorges and waterways, rocks, boulders, or rock slides, and so on.
Then am back in the work setting, kind of, in one of several seats arranged like in a theatre or auditorium, other workers sitting nearby (not socially distancing). They are interested in what I say but also concerned that I'm not enough on top of the assignment to avoid being fired.
[It is a big relief when I wake up, not to be in that stressful setting anymore, yet the underlying feeling of oppression, rejection, that I am not measuring up, and that this domineering boss is going to fire me soon and meanwhile is judging me, finding me unworthy, that I still to an extent am in the same mood of feeling a failure and depressed in my real, waking experience.
Clearly, there is a dichotomy here, with the oppressive supervisor me playing a mean top dog role and getting into his intolerant, critical, domineering, and judgmental attitudes at the expense of the me with whom I identify, one who is relatively ineffectual, putting himself down, not being prepared, and acting out the role of an eternal victim. Somehow these two need to get together for mutual balance or, better yet, integration, so that one more powerful, compassionate, active me, confident in his own agency, might result from the merger. Yet the dichotomy mirrors my feelings in my growing up years, under the thumb of a perfectionist father for whom I was never good enough. Leaving those badly learned lessons behind for a more successful personality may take some doing! It is not, however, out of the bounds of possibility in what time remains to me. We shall see.]