Tag: symbols

The Emperor Has A Scheme

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams1 Comment

Back in 2004 I was living at the Sri Aurobindo Sadhana Peetham Ashram in Lodi California. While I was there we had a weekly dream group, and I remember one meeting very well because both myself, and another resident, Dakshina, had a cold. The dream I shared was one in which a zombie had touched me, and then I woke up ill the next morning. If I remember right Dakshina also had a dream that showed her being attacked and then she came down with the cold, but I don’t recall that for sure. Regardless, all of us there saw the connection between my cold and my dream, viewed it as an attack of a hostile force against me.

Roughly a month ago I had this dream:

It’s the scene from Return of the Jedi when the Emperor shows up in his shuttle at the Death Star. He is talking to Darth Vader telling him some scheme he’s cooked up and wants to show him something that has to do with it. They both board the shuttle and the Emperor shows Vader these two aliens that are basically just heads with tentacles coming off of them. They’re very ugly. I guess they are babies of an alien species, and were kidnapped by the Emperor. Vader thinks this is really cool that they’re going to be watching over these babies.

Now if I remember correctly the day before the dream (Friday) Jana got sick in the afternoon. Then on Saturday, the day of the dream, Dhina caught it too, and Lydia went down a day or two later. Jana and Dhina had it really bad with a fever and body aches, and were spending most of their time in bed. Lydia stayed sick the longest, and had a relapse after initially feeling better. Mugu got it too, and was mildly ill for a couple of days. Donny and I managed to keep it out for days, but then we also came down with symptoms, Donny with chest congestion and myself with a bad runny nose. We were both however only sick for a day. I drank two cups of the Indian version of chicken soup, called rasam, before going to bed and woke up feeling fine the next morning.

Now this dream isn’t as clear cut as the zombie one I had at Lodi, since I myself got sick the very next day, but this illness really lowered the energy of the house and made things difficult since some of the kids weren’t able to give even the grudging help we can normally get out of them. The Mother does say in Questions and Answers that a hostile attack “takes often the form of illness”1, and given the impact it had it seems to me a reasonable hypothesis that this illness, represented by the ugly aliens, was the scheme the hostile forces represented by Vader and the Emperor were hatching. As to why the attack was launched at the particular moment, I would guess it was because it was a few days before a darshan day at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and I suspect the attack was trying to spoil the darshan for us not just on the level of the individuals, but also on the level of the house itself, since it also is an entity in its own way. Unless you already believe in these sorts of things, there’s no way I can convince you the darshan days observed at the ashram are power days like a solstice or an equinox is, a day where there’s a force available to help you make a progress or have a powerful dream or some other kind of inner experience, but if you can at least accept that idea in theory, then I think you could see why forces hostile to spiritual progress would try to sabotage people in the yoga on those sorts of days.

It bears mentioning that the day before the darshan another thing happened that really lowered the energy of the house, which was getting the house sprayed for ants. Now in the USA when we get that done the exterminator will spray a little poison in the corners of your house and maybe put down some poison bait, and that was what I was expecting to happen. Here in India however they went all through the house spraying poison heavily along all the walls, so there were literally puddles of it all along the inner perimeter of the entire house. The stench was horrible and after the first round had dried they came along a few hours later and did it a second time. That second round took a couple of hours to dry, and then we were finally able to mop the floor, but the smell lingered for days. If I had known what they were going to do I would have never had them come and treat the house except for the ground floor, which had to be treated for termites. I’m sure it was even more grueling to endure for the people who were really sick, so it seems to me that the forces attacking us had a hand in seeing to it that the exterminator showed up on that day.

Now as it turns out I myself still had an okay darshan day, felt some calm that day, but nothing really interesting happened, nor did I have any powerful or lucid dreams. I did have a little inner opening and got a short formation of lines from my muse and then another longer formation two days later before things went back to the way they usually are which is a line or two here and there. Neither Donny or I had much luck interpreting those formations though, since it wasn’t clear who or what they were relating to, but it was nice to get that little opening. So what was accomplished by this hostile attack is hard for me to say, but I know that even though I wasn’t sick, when I was sitting in my room in the stifling stench of ant poison, the energy of the house felt very, very low, and that even the house itself as an entity was affected. None of our young people here are trying to follow the yoga of Sri Aurobindo or any other yoga for that matter, but we still have a collective process here. So maybe it was that collective process that lost the chance to make a progress. That’s just speculation however.

A question though this dream brings up in my mind is how do you know when a symbol in dream or vision actually relates to an illness? In the dream I had years ago in Lodi, illness was represented by a zombie, and in this dream, if I’m interpreting it correctly, the illness was represented by the ugly aliens. In addition, I wrote a blog post a while back in which a zombie seemed to represent a vital movement I was trying to throw out, so there doesn’t seem to be one universal symbol that can be pinned down as always being the symbol for an illness. If there is some way to know though when a dream is forecasting an illness, and that dream comes before the illness actually hits you, you could prepare, but like it is so often in dreams you usually don’t know what a dream means until afterwards.

This post is mainly just food for thought, but the knowledge, however, that there really are hostile forces and beings trying to keep us from progressing is important to see, and it’s something that at some point we’re going to wake up to as a species. The fact that it isn’t known or being talked about presently except on a very small scale is aiding the cause of these hostile forces. So if an article like this has helped someone to see that or opened their mind to that possibility or even just validated their beliefs about such things, then it’s served a purpose.

References

  1. The Mother, Questions and Answers 1929-1931, pg 55

Avoiding Trouble With The KKK

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams, Inner Voice and VisionLeave a comment
KKK by Arete13, on Flickr
“KKK” (CC BY-ND 2.0) by Arete13

Two nights ago I had this dream about my guitar teacher Tom:

I’m at Tom’s guitar studio and outside in the parking lot there’s a KKK rally happening. Tom is putting on a KKK robe because he wants them to think he’s one of them in order to avoid any trouble.  Then Tom and I  go and sit outside to practice guitar, and a black man comes up and asks Tom if he can go in the studio to use the bathroom. Tom tells the guy no and points out the klanners and says “Can’t you see who’s here?” Tom’s worried the klanners will give him problems if he lets the guy use the bathroom.  The black man just walks in anyway though, uses the bathroom and leaves without incident.

When I told Tom about the dream he laughed and said that was really funny because just the other day he’d told a friend of his he was going to get a Bass Pro1 sticker and put it on his car to give people the message “Hey everyone! I’m a white working class Republican!”  He then proceeded to tell me that in the past when he was going to a lot of concerts and music festivals and the like he put an american flag in his car and saw that he avoided a lot of trouble with police and security that way.

Now I think Tom may have been half kidding with his friend, but we can see via the dream that I picked up Tom’s apprehension and how he was thinking about how he could avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention in what he feels will become a more openly divided and intolerant America after Trump takes office. As Donny pointed out though the dream is probably also picking up on fears of coming intolerance on the level of the nation itself, fear in people that if they don’t go along with the hating herd they’ll suffer because of it. I can also see something of myself in this dream, how I also can put on a false appearance in order to avoid trouble. As an example of this I actually voted for a third party candidate in the election to avoid having to tell my parents (who I live with and are quite conservative) that I voted for Hillary should they ask who I voted for.  I now regret that because I live in Florida where Trump edged Hillary out by a small margin and to be honest in hindsight I feel like I basically cast a vote for Trump by going that route. Now it’s true that I was in fact put off by both candidates and also that I expected Hillary to win the election handily, but I took the easy way out to avoid any possible discomfort at home and didn’t cast my vote for the person who I felt was clearly the lesser of two evils. Now to be fair I think I should point out here that my parents aren’t neo nazis or the sort of people who would show up at KKK rally.  As I’ve pointed out before, dreams often show things in an exaggerated manner to get their point across.

Now the black man at the end of the dream would seem to represent things that myself, Tom and others feeling this collective fear wouldn’t want the intolerant or rigidly moral to see. Donny suggested the idea that the fact that the black man uses the bathroom anyway without incident shows that the future may not play out as badly as people are fearing. Let’s hope that turns out to be the case.

Now it’s already implied in what I’ve written but I wanted to explicitly state how this dream shows how we can dream not only about a collective process, but also about what’s going on with people we’re closely involved with such as friends, family, co-workers etc. I’ve been taking lessons from Tom for over two years and we’re of a like mind regarding many things, so we’ve delved a little deeper in conversation than who won the football game last night. Our relationship is to some extent a friendship, and since there’s a connection there I can receive inner communication from him. To see this inner communication is useful if for no other reason than showing our inner connectedness, which Donny discussed at length in a recent blog.

This type of dream or vision can also enable you to see what’s going on with someone in order to try and take some helpful action. That happened recently with me in regards to a friend who’s a recovering alcoholic. I had a vision of her making some objects like large coins out of clay and there was a muse line with the vision that said: Mine was destroyed. At the time I had the vision I was wondering if this person had had a stumble and I was looking online for advice on how to approach someone if you think that’s happened. In my research I came to know of something Alcoholics Anonymous uses called sobriety coins which are tokens showing the amount of time someone has remained sober. After learning that I figured my friend’s sobriety coin had been destroyed figuratively speaking, but the fact that she was making new ones in the vision probably indicated that she was trying to get back on her feet. Having the vision helped me to bring the subject up with my friend and to encourage her not to get down on herself about the stumble, but to just pick herself up and carry on.

This is a pretty vast subject and I’ll probably write more about it in future on this blog, but I think this is a good stopping point. It would be great though to hear other people’s experiences in the comments.

Notes and References

  1. For those who don’t know Bass Pro is a Hunting/Fishing/Camping superstore chain here in the USA.

So You Wanna Get a Hold of Human Evil? – Synchronicities With The Wasp

On By Douglas M.In SynchronicityLeave a comment
Wasp colors by quinet, on Flickr
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License   by  quinet 

Recently I wrote a post on how my dreams used the symbol of the wasp to draw attention to my anger.   Interestingly, the day after posting that article, the wasp entered my life again, but not in a dream. Rather, these were synchronic encounters in waking life that happened in conjunction with strong movements of anger that day.   Events in the waking world can also be our teacher just like a dream can and this example really illustrates that point. Let me tell you what happened.

The daily operations of the chamber of commerce where I work are mainly handled by my co-worker Rhonda and I, and this necessarily involves a lot of collaboration and hashing things out. In general, Rhonda and I get along very well, and I find her very easy to work with overall.   Sometimes though, as in any close relationship, vital reactions come up in both of us that aren’t voiced or shown on the surface. Most of the time I can just drop these reactions, but at other times they’re played out inside in thoughts and emotions that either run their course until they die out or I successfully reject them.

On this particular day Rhonda wanted me to add our business expo to a dropdown list on the chamber’s website. I didn’t say no; I just responded that normally we only have the really big events on there. Then, rather uncharacteristically, she said in a rather snippy way, “It’s becoming a big event and it needs to be up there!” Well my vital didn’t like basically being given an order, and a smoldering resentment opened up like a black hole inside me.  I was able to detach from it, but it got in a bit, so it didn’t subside immediately. My vital wanted to lash back and thoughts on how to do so were coming up. I just tried to ignore them while at the same time acknowledging to myself that she was right.   We are trying to grow that event so it made sense to add it to the drop down list.

Shortly after this I had to leave the office to go and tidy up our mobile welcome center, which had been out of commission for a while. As soon as I got there I encountered a wasp flying around the door of the trailer. I remembered how the anger had risen earlier, but I was more concerned with avoiding getting stung. I got out the can of wasp spray we keep inside, but it flew off and didn’t return. When I got back to the office I noticed a little of the anger reaction still lingered from earlier, but it wasn’t really a problem.

I would, however, encounter a wasp again later that evening when I was taking our dog Rosie for a walk. During the walk, I saw a plastic grocery bag lying on a neighbor’s lawn, so I picked it up. As I was examining the bag, I suddenly spotted a wasp clinging to it and quickly dropped the bag and crushed the wasp under my shoe. Encountering the wasp again like that struck me as quite synchronic. I wondered how it might apply to my situation at that moment, and I thought about how I often get annoyed and impatient with the way Rosie takes her takes her good sweet time sniffing and investigating things instead of taking going to the bathroom like I want her too. So I tried to be conscious of that and resist that impulse to get irritated with her.

Then when I got home, I noticed some outside lights we have set up on an outdoor timer were switched on almost two hours early.1  I know there’s a button on the timer you can hit to turn it off or on manually and override the programming, and I figured that somehow the timer had been manually switched on. So I hit the button to switch it off, but when I did so the screen flickered erratically back and forth for a second or two between On and Off before it finally turned off.   That didn’t seem right to me and made me wonder if something was wrong with the timer.

I went out back to our lanai as my mom and dad were coming up from sitting on the dock. I mentioned what had happened and told mom I thought the timer might be faulty. Without warning my dad exploded into a short rant about how stupid the timers were, and how nobody sees the lights, etc. He was obviously testy so I tread carefully around him until he’d seemed to settle down later.   I figured the second synchronic encounter with the wasp had been foreshadowing dad’s outburst, and I think it was indeed doing so, but there was one more thing that was going to push my button before the night was over.

Later that evening mom asked me to vacuum and wash her car the next day before she left in the afternoon. Dad almost always handles washing our cars, but for some reason she really wanted it done the next day. Like Rhonda earlier, she was basically giving me an order and also did it in a snippy way. That got my goat, but I still tried to tell her in a nice way that was fine, but I’d just like to use the pressure washer and would need dad’s help to start it. Then she made a comment that all I’d need is a bucket and soap and that ticked me off even more. I have lower back problems, and anyone who does knows how difficult that can make just about anything. The kind of bending over I’d need to do to wash the car with a bucket and soap wouldn’t be easy for me, and she knows that.   The thing is though, in general I just stoically endure the back pain and don’t complain about it. Because of that, sometimes mom forgets my limitations and has even said that she sometimes forgets because I don’t complain.   My mind understands that, but my vital was not happy with her for forgetting.

I went in my room for a few minutes and thought things over. Then I went back out to the kitchen, and though the anger was still kicking around underneath, I was able to calmly explain again that I’d be happy to wash the car, but I wasn’t going to do it without the pressure washer and needed dad’s help to start it.2 Then I explained to her how it’s not easy for me to do it with just a bucket of water and soap, because in order to keep from bending over I have to constantly keep going down on my knees (I’m not flexible enough to squat) and getting back up again. I explained to her I could do it with just the bucket and soap but I’d need a cushion or something to put under my knees. At that point she just said forget it, but I reiterated that I could do it with the pressure washer if not the next day then definitely on Friday. I never did end up washing the car either the next day or Friday, since dad thought it was a waste of time with all the rain in the forecast. I did however vacuum the car the next day.

As I stated at the beginning of this post, this example is interesting because it shows how symbols can meet us through synchronicity in the waking world as well as in dreams. Going farther we can see that these kinds of synchronicities give a glimpse into the intricate interconnectedness and interpenetration of all things. They help us see that there’s a hidden meaning and intelligence in the cosmos, one that informs and presides over its unfolding behind the mask of apparent unconsciousness in the universe’s outward appearance.

Another thing worth drawing attention to is the way that, in the evening, the anger first manifested in my dad and then later in me. This shows how things like anger are a vibration that’s ‘in the air’, and can invade more than one person or even be passed from person to person. That may have happened also with Rhonda and I earlier, but it’s less obvious.

In closing, I’ll say that I believe these little synchronic glimpses are just the tip of a massive iceberg of interconnectedness that we can only truly appreciate from a higher or cosmic state of consciousness. It’s too stupendous to fit in the littleness of the ego. What would such a consciousness be like? I don’t know, but this passage from Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri casts some light on that, and seems like an appropriate way to end this post:

Interpreting the universe by soul signs
He read from within the text of the without:
The riddle grew plain and lost its catch obscure.
A larger lustre lit the mighty page.
A purpose mingled with the whims of Time,
A meaning met the stumbling pace of Chance
And Fate revealed a chain of seeing Will;
A conscious wideness filled the old dumb Space.
In the Void he saw throned the Omniscience supreme.3

Notes and References

  1. Interestingly this was one of the two timers that were mentioned in my previous post on the wasp.
  2. My back also prevents me from pulling the starter cord, so I need my dad to start the pressure washer for me.
  3. Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo Volume 34 Savitri, pg 76

 

Mad as a Hornet! – The Wasp in Dreams

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams1 Comment
Angry Wasp by L@uReNCiO, on Flickr
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License   by  L@uReNCiO 

Like a lot of people I can be irritable, and while I have a tighter grip on it in public, it comes out at people close to me like my mother.   Even there though I have a pretty good level of control most of the time, but I find I have spans of days or weeks sometimes where I’m more agitated, and the irritation is more difficult to restrain. I had been going through a period like that recently, and the movement was shown in my dreams using the symbol of the wasp.  This makes perfect sense as there are few things as hostile as a wasp, and we’ve all heard the phrase “mad as a hornet.” Here are the two dreams I’ve had during this recent upsurge of irritation which feature the wasp and took place within a week of each other.

Monday Sept 7, 2015

In this dream I’m in Briarcliff Circle in front of Todd Brim’s house. There’s a house being constructed across the street, and at the top of it there’s a huge wasp’s nest with big six inch wasps crawling around on it. I’m talking to RJ Snyder, and he says he’s going to pay $5000 to have it removed. And I say, “Why don’t you just call pest control and have them do it for free?” The street the house is on goes up a hill and RJ and I walk up to the top. I tell him I’ve seen other strange things in this neighborhood, and he tells me that Dhina is running around with my voice recorder and he finds that unnerving.

Sunday Sept 13, 2015

 I’m in the garage and someone there wants me to video him with the GoPro camera. I really can’t though because the piece of plastic that frames the lens is out of place. I look under the workbench and see a wasp’s nest. I go into the house to get away from the danger and then out to the pool. As I’m walking around the pool I encounter a mirror and can see my face in it. I can see it’s really sunburned from the bottom of my eyelids on down, red as a lobster. There are a few small patches of unburnt skin though.

Like many older people my mother struggles with technology, and this is the main thing that pushes my irritation button as far as she goes. This annoyed part of me feels these things really aren’t that hard and she ought to be able to figure them out, or at least be able to remember how to do something after I’ve shown it to her a couple of times, etc. etc. Over the recent Labor Day weekend her questions and requests were coming up more than usual, and as the irritation got worse it started to come up when she would ask me about virtually anything and not just tech questions. It was just like the way some kids or teenagers will get riled when you ask them to do something, acting like you’re really imposing on them. Dhina, who is mentioned in the dream, is an Indian boy I know and is a perfect example of this kind of indignant teenager. The fact that he has my voice recorder I believe represents my speech, since my irritation manifests both as a vibe of annoyance and also comes out of my mouth. So the dream is showing me I’m acting like Dhina. The part about calling pest control I think has to do with calling on the divine for help with the irritation and not just my own resources, which the dream portrays as spending $5000. The house is something under construction in me, though I’m not sure what. That I make it up to the top of the hill is good as it shows an overcoming of the irritation on that day at least.

Though I fought back well on Labor Day, the problem continued during the week and through the next weekend. The morning after the second dream I once again gathered up my will to try and cast off the irritation’s grip on me. We had recently gotten an Amazon Firestick for our TV, and I had agreed to show mom how to use it, so I knew a test was coming in advance.   I think the dream foreshadows this with the filming with the GoPro, but in the way dreams most often do it, which is analogously and not exactly.

Perhaps though it’s more accurate to say that an event in the inner world (shown or translated by the dream) gives rise to an event in the outer world, and the relationship between those two events is analogous and not exact. Regardless I think we can see the connection here. That I flee the wasp’s nest is a good sign and reflects my effort to get away from the irritation.   I’m not sure what going from the garage to the pool might signify though the garage seems to represent dreams according to the experience of my collaborator Donny and it makes sense to me. I think the sunburn is again showing the problem with the irritation manifesting as speech since it’s mainly on the lower part of my face. And we all know how a person’s face will turn red when they’re really angry. The location of the sunburn also shows that while the irritation had gotten into the speech and action center of the mind (the throat chakra), it hadn’t reached the seat of the intellect and higher reason (the third eye chakra).

While it doesn’t feature the wasp there is one more dream I had in between the other two that also drew my attention to my irritation and merits being shared:

Thursday Sept 10, 2015

I’m sitting on the front porch with Dad and this girl I’ve known for about a year. She’s blond, has a lot of tattoos and is dressed in a crop top and a short skirt. She has a punk look to her. I have a computer and am looking at her Facebook page. Her cover photo is showing her left forearm (I’m pretty sure it was the left) and it has the words “black mamba” tattooed on it. I’m telling her how it doesn’t feel like a year has passed since we’ve met, that it only feels like a couple of months.

The day before this dream I had set up some outdoor timers on the front porch for some decorative lights we have outside.   Then on the day following the dream my dad went out and added a needed extension cord but thought he’d messed up the settings on one of the timers in the process. Mom told me this and muttering something indignant I went out to the porch to see what was wrong. As I was examining the timer (which turned out to be fine) the fact that I was on the porch made me remember my dream and I saw how the irritation strikes like a snake. A snake in my dreams represents some kind of hostile force or lower vital movement, and I think that’s pretty universal, though I believe a snake can represent a positive energy or movement in some cases too. My vital itself is represented in the dream by the girl, and that too seems to be fairly universal symbolism though a woman figure could certainly represent many other things.   For example if you dream about a woman you know it might represent some hallmark characteristic of hers that you’re currently exhibiting. My dad in this dream is this kind of character and represents my irritation since like many men he’s irritable with his spouse.

So what’s the lesson here? I guess for me it’s that things like irritation are hard to get rid of, and uprisings like this are part of the process until the defect is fully integrated or simply disappears by the process of spiritual transformation. There’s a fine line though between recognizing that and giving a vital movement permission to continue. The fact that my dreams stepped in like this tells me it’s no small matter and I have to continue to be vigilant in rejecting it. I do want to be rid of it though (as well as a great many other things) and that’s an important step.

It also never hurts to look at things through the eyes of understanding as Donny reminded me when I related the dreams and the irritation to him.   He reminded me to look at my mom with the eyes of the soul, see her as innocent, like a child. The fact is it’s just hard for her to figure technology out.   And when you also consider the fact that she and my dad let me live with them for free and feed me to boot, a little patience and understanding while serving as house tech support isn’t much to ask.

Notes and References

  1. The reader will probably notice I don’t mention anything about the character of RJ or the significance of Todd Brim’s house while discussing the dream.  Both RJ and Todd Brim are what you’d call “a ladies man.”   The day following the dream I had an uprising of sexual desire, and the dream seems to have woven the two vital movements, the anger and the sex desire, together into one dream. Maybe that speaks to some connection between anger and sexual desire?