Dreams by Sulu

It’s always knives.

That’s what I said when I awoke from a dream recently.

Lately I have been dreaming of fighting. It’s not fighting like fighting with your wife or even bar-fighting. Rather, it is epic, all-out, for-your-life kind of fighting against video-game levels of “enemies”, and it is always with knives.

Often I awake emotionally shaken and it takes me a while to recover.

I do not understand why this is happening because I do not want to fight and I have no real fear, which I know of, of dying at the hands of a marauding band of rogue Marine Zombies, sandmen, or dark cartoon characters.

And so I asked myself – Why is this happening?

I looked for reasons in the surface parts of my psyche, the parts I can access by just thinking of them.

No clues there.

And the other morning at around 3 it came to me: it is as if I am in a scripted show and I have no choice but to act out the script.

That is what it feels like, like a script. It feels in the fighting dreams as if I am in a movie scene, perhaps the Shakespearean “All the world is a stage.” I am aware that it is happening, aware enough to perform. But I am not meta-aware, not aware in an objective sense, not self-aware.

I have been thinking that if only I could bring my waking, rational mind with me into my dreams then I could do the only thing that would break the cycle and get me out of the fight – not fight.

The thing is, I never lose a fight. But I never win either. There are always more characters to fight. They never hurt me, but I am always running, hiding, and slashing-out. I am always exhausted when I wake up and emotionally disgruntled.

But I cannot take my waking mind with me into dreams like the lucid dreamers do. Every once in a while I momentarily realize, and even say aloud – Hey, I’m in a dream. Once recently I even shouted “Whoo-hoo.” like Homer Simpson and began to fly around, bouncing off buildings and, in this case, ships. It only lasted a brief while before I lost the bubble and fell back into normal dreaming.

But that notion, that it is scripted, that was the key.

At first I thought it was aliens or Archons making me fight so they could drain energy from me in that certain flavor they seem to prefer – fear.

That made me sort of anxious and afraid because, well, aliens or Archons being in control of my dreams sort of implies a relationship I did not want to consider.

But very quickly something else occurred to me.

During the day, in my waking life, I have been very consciously working on not being afraid, on shedding the programmed fear that seems to be the core aspect of our culture.

 I think I have had some success because I can see material changes in my life. The guns are gone, for example. Well, mostly. I do not spend all day trolling the Internet looking for early warning signs any more. I do not dream of an underground bunker full of dehydrated food way back in the hills.

But I realized there is inside of me an actual Dude, an Aspect of character, who is in charge of security. I think of him like Sulu from Star Trek. He is the guy who is always ready for a fight or disaster. His job is to worry, to plan, and to respond in case something goes berserk. And my daily focus on reducing his influence in my (our) life has been, I imagine, a real challenge to his sense of survival.

And since survival is what he does for a living he has executed a clever plan for making certain I do not fail to recognize his essential character, his influence in my (our) life, and his necessity to the team.

He has moved from being active in my waking life into the realm of dream-scripting. It is Sulu who is writing, producing, and directing my dreams. And it is him (us) who is starring in them every night.

I am allowing that Sulu is a caring member of the team and that he is as necessary as all the other members. And so I am stacking up the emergency supplies in the garage and checking them regularly but not obsessively. I am keeping an eye out for trends and making appropriate conditional plans. And I am not obsessing over them.

And so now my job is to make peace with Sulu, to assure him of his role in our life, and to ask him to allow us to dream something more beneficial and pleasant. And in this way I am integrating Sulu into the team, not trying to kick him off the bus, so that he does not fear for his life.

This also teaches me that all the other Aspects of character are equally necessary. There are probably many of them that I do not recognize.

I am keeping an eye out for quirks of behavior like the fighting dreams, perhaps repetitive irrational acts or thoughts that might signal some other Dude inside of me who is trying to send out a message that he is there, alive, and an important though neglected part of the team.

I am trying to acknowledge and respect all my Aspects, even the Dark Ones (perhaps those most of all) who perform functions for me that I may not like to know about, but which I absolutely need in order to get along in this very challenging world.

After all, sometimes a tiger comes.

So, thank you Sulu. I am happy to have you on the team.

And now perhaps we might let Uhuru work on those dreams a while.

Wink.