dreams, the crash

I only got like 2 hours sleep. I barely managed to get my ass outta bed and function to start work. Geez this was easier when I wasn't 43 (in 3 days!). Have a break here and wanted to record the dream I was having when I woke up, because I have the feeling it relates to the meditation and/or maybe the card.

Oh, so before I went to sleep, I dug out my Thoth tarot deck. It took awhile to find it. I searched the shelves in my room, then the big shelves in the living, then some storage drawers, then came back and searched the drawers on my bed (it has 12), and I found the deck inside a bag in one of those. That side of my bed has been so close to the wall for 2.5 years since I got this bed--until 2 weeks ago when I moved my bed--I'd forgotten it was there.

Before that I had been working on ideas for the 'mental tools' concept in RV, in 'process' (I'd already worked out some for 'in reporting'). I was in a decent state of mind as a result, though sleepy. Then I found and went through the deck. I found the 'wands' section. I was looking for something with red, a foot (human foot; there was a big double footprint that also had red, like from big boots or something, in my visual flash), and maybe a horse. As it turns out, all the wands have red. And all the 1-10 cards are just wands. That left the queen of wands (an awesome pic, a woman with big twisting horns), the king (a barefoot man in a chariot pulled by some creature), and the knight -- a man with big boots, on a rearing horse. So, that's the only one it could be.

I studied the card a bit. It seems rather dull to be honest. I've no idea what it is supposed to signify, though I can look it up today. I wondered if maybe the knight being a traditional symbol of 'rescue' had anything to do with it. I don't know if that's true or not but I had a major lower-body abreaction right then, so I felt that confirmed that at least was the card for sure. I set it out on my bedside table and asked IG and the 3 guides from the consortium to please help me process this energy (the card and the archetype) in dreams as much as possible.

So when I woke up this morning (barely, with my alarm going off repeatedly), I was having this dream:

I was driving a car. Ry was in the car with me, in the back seat. Some huge 'event' happened that caused my entire body to react with panic, fear, rage, trauma, stress, etc. and I just barely saved us from having some terrible crash. I was tired and wanted to stop but for some reason I couldn't, I had to press on.

Then that same kind of situation happened again. And again. And again. And again. And it kept happening, and every time, I got more trashed on every level, more exhausted, and all the panic-fear-rage-trauma emotions as I tried to get us out of the immediate and deadly situation somehow got more overwhelming.

Eventually I realized that I had been pretty much in a foggy, trauma'd trance for a long time. I was operating on auto-pilot. I literally *expected* the total trauma events to occur now, and maintained pretty much all the emotions they evoked all the time. My physical and emotional and mental exhaustion were so unbelievable that there just weren't even words for it.

And then I found myself steering us out of yet another of those situations, and I... I "broke". My ability to push past the exhaustion just expired, and something inside me collapsed in on itself. I had gotten us out of the immediate driving situation, but the car still affected by it was starting to slide and slowly spiral out of control and into the wrong lane toward the other side of the road. But I couldn't seem to stay fully aware, I could feel myself starting to slip into the darkness of unconscious, and I saw this huge brick wall coming toward us.

I felt a little bit of grief that I couldn't save us, and a very distant, fragment of concern that I was about to be killed, but I was just too exhausted to really care. I felt myself slump against the door, and just as I expected the wall to hit our careening, spinning car and come crashing through the glass and metal at me, we stopped. After a little while of being mostly-unconscious, I finally opened one eye and half-looked. The wall was right against the car. I'd come like two millimeters from it and the car had stopped. I couldn't seem to find the emotion to have any opinion about that, as I passed out fully.

I came to some time later, I didn't know how long I'd been out. In the distance in my sleep I could hear my father calling my name. It got closer. I managed to get halfway alert. He came into my line of vision out the back window. The car had changed. It had been a small car with Ry in the backseat before. Now it was some kind of mini-van with a big hatchback or whatever (and she wasn't there). The door seemed much too far away as if the car was really long and wide. I squinted at the light as my father opened the back.

"Look what you've done," he said to me, clearly annoyed. "Look at all this crap you have in the car now!" he pointed out. I looked. The area where we stopped seemed mostly undeveloped except for the wall, and there had been massive quantities of loose brush and tree limbs and 'nature-trash' so to speak, a real mess. Somehow the process of my semi-crashing, had caused a ton of this stuff to be bundled up in big hefty bags, and they were now stuffed into the back and side of my vehicle. Dad was clearly a bit disgusted that I had so poorly taken care of things that I was now saddled with all this crap to deal with.

Then I woke up.

One thing I'll say for my subconscious: it is merciful. Maybe with guide-help, who knows. But that whole dream, to me, is startlingly obvious symbolism! Man, I wish dreams were always so obvious!!

* Vehicles (bikes, motorcyles, cars, trucks, boats, planes, etc.) are always without exception really obvious analogies to my body in dreams, this is known to me.

* Interesting I'd notice I was in a trance. After years of hypnosis self-study but not a ton of doing it on myself, I was enrolled in an institute to study it during the era when I gained massive weight really fast. The one thing I learned that most helped me in that time was that I'd spent much of my life IN hypnosis (a suggestible partly tranced state)--and I learned how to stay OUT of it.

* I was so exhausted in that era... I would get up for work, take a shower, and sleep for 5 minutes while standing up in an ice-cold shower trying to wake myself up. My biggest trauma was 4.5 hours every day commuting on the 405 in Los Angeles. That highway is a friggin nightmare. A parking lot when you're in a hurry, people nearly killing you constantly to try and get .8 seconds ahead of where they were. I had such rage on the highway there I knew that if I had a gun I would have gone postal and killed people -- I finally understood why you can NOT carry a gun in the car. I had a manual transmission and that's probably the only reason I didn't sleep on the way to work, because it required changing from 1st to 2nd and back again every 30-60 seconds in the 30 minutes between home and work. Yuck. Seriously I could have bicycled there 20x as fast but the city layout made it impossible and I had to go from Culver City where I worked way the hell over to Tarzana for school right after. I used to call it (in a black urban accent) "the 4 o' 5 miles an hour" freeway. Part of it was emotional exhaustion though. I was working through a lot of serious psychological stuff, via hypnosis, and it was as hard core as the physical circumstance at that point.

* I had 'gotten us out of the immediate situation' but my car was starting to spin out of control. That does rather speak to the timeframe (the archetype being about childhood, but the weight gain happening shortly after).

* I thought the part about slipping into unconscious and being too exhausted to really care about my impending doom was an interesting symbol. That really well defines it. I was so trashed during that era that even though I saw my body going nuts and ended up wearing tons of 'broomstick skirts' -- that had no sizing, so I could grow massively with little issue -- I didn't even notice the stretch mark issue until later when I looked like a road map. I was sort of aware but just couldn't seem to care sufficiently.

It's also interesting that for all the years I've been fat, my biggest problem has been really cognitively integrating it. I mean I know it intellectually, how peoples' reaction to me changed was radical and profound (and horrifying), I'd been a fashion zombie performer so you better believe I had a lot of bad feelings about not being able to fit in anything, and not wanting to be seen by anybody let alone anybody who knew me especially from high school or college. Every time I saw a picture of myself or saw myself in a store window, I was so shocked--I mean downright aghast--I just couldn't compute it. I was cool, everyone knew I was talented, smart and funny, so that hideous fat-thing in the window couldn't possibly be me! Despite that I dieted (to zero avail, since diets were high-carb, and carbs were what made me fat of course), despite my misery over my size, despite I nearly put a bullet in my head in my despair over that and that it annihilated my lifetime career plans in music, despite all of that, some part of me just couldn't... get it through the darkness in my head I guess. 17 years later I am still horrified to see a picture of myself, although the last couple of years have seen a great improvement both in my size and in my 'awareness and acceptance'. There is some surreal kind of unconscious state. Much like anorexics see themselves as hideously fat when they are skeletal, I avoided looking at myself, and 'perceived' myself (not my visual-ref but my "residual self-image" as The Matrix might put it) as still like I'd been prior to the weight gain.

* That my car changed from a small car to a minivan with a big hatchback is HILARIOUS! Oh man.

* That symbol -- "nature trash"! Wow. And "Hefty" bags! Wow. And most of it was stored "in my trunk and on the sides" -- LOL -- I am a major pear shape. I mean you just can't get any more obvious than that!

* My father reacted very badly to my coming home from L.A. morbidly obese. He himself is a musician/performer and a rather critical Scorpio. He was really irked about it and he gave me major grief about it, making jokes about me ("hey, pull up a couple'a chairs and siddown, ha-ha-ha!" or "hey I hear the best exercise is push-aways, away from the table ha-ha-ha!" and so on. That I gained weight on one freakin meal a day while pushing myself harder than anybody I know both physically and psychologically is the real irony, obviously. Not a surprise to any metabolism expert, given my conditions, but our society is just really stupid in what they think makes people so fat, mostly because the science-government 'party line', despite being pretty well blown to hell by modern research and theory, is still maintaining the old ignorance [mostly because changing it would hugely impact food sales and resultant medical-drug sales, and the people sponsoring medical societies and edu are all the food and drug corps]). Anyway he had a really bad reaction to it and always pointed it out, and often said his frustration was that he knew what it would do to my life (socially--from music to business to men), that I would have to "deal with" that. So I found it interesting that in the dream it was him that tracked me down and pointed out what had happened.

I can't but think this dream definitely relates to the issue I was working on.

I guess I get the important part of this:

I wondered why on earth I'd get childhood archetype stuff when the weight gain came in early adulthood. The dream, and thinking of how it relates, clears that up. Yes, I was just past the real survival-threats, but I was still reacting to them and starting to spin out of control. If nothing else, this does fill in the blanks for me on that, because I've always wondered.