It is often the case that our dreamtime reactions, as our automatic waking life reactions, are based on assumption and prejudice—conditioning from past experience—rather than on inquiry and curiosity, which would require our disidentified abiding in the present moment. Far from criticizing us, dreammaker offers us the opportunity to objectively observe ourselves.
When we—as the me-in-the-dream—are at the center of the dream story, the dream ego reveals to us our stance, our vulnerabilities, our attitudes, our judgments, reactions, and omissions. It is impatient, wishing for conditions to be different or change. It is concerned with being seen, heard, and taken into account. It is repeatedly inconvenienced. If circumstances do not align with its standards and wishes, the dream ego is hurt, offended, indignant, self-righteous, scheming, tricking, tense, self-conscious, uncomfortable, worried, insecure, concerned with appearances and what others will think and say. Even if duplicitous, it tends to believe it knows better, it knows what is right and is convinced it stands by it unwaveringly. Often the dream ego surprises us with its outrageous, seemingly out of character responses.
The me-in-the-dream, as is generally the case with our habitual waking self, evaluates everything as an effect of something, and so it tirelessly looks for the origin of the perceived effect. If it feels fear, it looks for something to be afraid of. If it feels insecure or threatened, it looks for something or someone to project onto as the source of threat. If its plans have been ignored, changed or ruined, or if its wellbeing has been compromised, it looks for scheming maliciousness around itself.
The dream ego exposes our unconscious strategies that find cause for everything that does not go our way, that find cause outside ourselves for how we feel and for what we sense. In other words, the dream ego, as the representation of our unchecked waking ego, is hung up on a fairness-unfairness duality, actively administering blame, guilt, and shame in its attempts to neutralize the pressure of the antinomous experience.
What function does blame serve? Beyond defending our pride, reclaiming control, and renouncing self-responsibility, blame serves to alleviate discomfort and pain, namely the discomfort and pain of loss—of any kind of loss—in our human experience. And when there is nothing—no specific thing, circumstance, event, person, group, or entity—to blame for whatever purportedly bad thing that has happened, we exert blame in other ways: projected punishment from life, fate, or God, projected evildoing from abstract sources, or internalized punishment through guilt and shame.
Most notably, blame and guilt keep us perceiving experience through the polarity of right and wrong, of good and evil. Only a limited number of possibilities could qualify as good and right, and therefore everything else is bad and wrong, and something or someone must be made responsible for it.
Could it be that we are simply reacting to the unfamiliar, unexpected, and unknown in ourselves and our experience with fear, and this fear makes us unbearably uncomfortable? Could it be that good and evil stand for known and unknown, for loved and not-yet-known-therefore-as-of-yet-unloved?
Just as when in waking life we are stuck in a perspective, we only see—and seek out—proof of exclusively that perspective and miss out on the whole, in dreamtime our dream ego is often stuck in a blatantly displayed limiting perspective we are ready to bring to our conscious awareness. Dreamtime points to our tendency to abide stuck in a perspective, a past conditioning, an inherited narrative or social construct story so we may realize there is a larger whole that we are missing.
To be continued . . .
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