I have of late, and wherefore I know not, been having some horrific nightmares. They follow a pretty distinct pattern -- threats of terrible bodily violence and pain, but directed at someone that I'm detached from. The above quote was the wake-up scare of a dream where I was following the character of Walter White in Breaking Bad, being threatened with torture. So my subconscious detached me from the threats -- they were being made to a person I was ostensibly watching on television, rather than me. Walter White had been captured by the men with whom he associated, the manifestation of his morally compromised soul, and they were threatening him with torture. The line above was spoken by a man in full asbestos, his face covered with a breathing mask, holding a blow torch in his hand, looking straight at me -- Walter White was no longer there. And then I woke up.
Everyone has their opinions on what dreams mean. And everyone will rush to assure you that nightmares aren't portents of anything bad, they are manifestations of your subconscious working through its fears. Suffice it to say, then, that I am a lot more...communicative...with my subconscious than the average person. We say a lot to each other. A thing you might generally be aware of (because, you know, dreams exist) is that your subconscious generally isn't good with words -- it can't actually, you know, speak to you. What it can do, what it does do, is trigger things -- memories, emotions, whatever patterns are there available to be triggered into consciousness (I should say that this is my own experience with my own mind/body duality, and your mileage may vary. This applies to most everything I write. I have no idea amongst all of the things are true for me are either 1. only true for me versus 2. more universally true, but other humans have yet to interpret or understand them). Essentially the subconscious speaks to us via metaphors. "Remember that thing that happened to you that one time? This is like that," it might say.
I have written some, and will write more some day, about my body's relationship to pain. I was, for most of my adult life, in a lot of it, and a lot of it that I couldn't understand. It manifested as physical pain (my legs burned) but it wasn't until I identified the core issue (a missing hip-stabilizing muscle on my back right-hand side) that I was able to even get to pain that I could understand (i.e. I could tell that specific muscles were torn or warped and that my entire body was torqued into a horrific state because my right hip couldn't support me properly). I was, as Ida P Rolf has called it, at war with gravity.
I have come to understand that some parts of my body are in terrible pain that I can't feel, even now. Imagine a muscle tear that doesn't heal. Eventually the nerves at the source of the injury aren't firing any longer, and you are no longer receiving pain signals. You might get pain signals from other parts of the body that were once supported by this set of torn, never-to-recover muscle, but you will get no signals to your consciousness....oh fuck me nerves are conscious signals. Holy fucking what fuck. They are signals that can be heard by the conscious mind. Fuck me fuck me fuck me that means something what does it mean?
Okay, sorry about that. I write as an exercise, as one does, to find out what I know. You know, like whichever Greek philosopher said that. Sometimes I come to know it really abruptly as I'm writing, and above was one of those cases. The thought that occurred to me (the nerves being a conduit from the physical to the conscious) needs much sorting through. What I was trying there was a technique that I have derived from the body: when something is first discovered, it is twisted up and its true form is undiscernable. So far all I have discovered is that it exists. So I try various techniques to pull it out. I've committed to this one, which you might call "wiggling." It's taken me all over the room over the past 20 minutes or so. I feel like I got some good stuff out of this one. Obviously, probably the superior technique here would be meditation. Probably that's always the good technique.
Anyway.
It's possible we've reached the point my subconscious was after with this dream. It's also possible we've not -- and interesting question that is raised here: is this how I communicate back my subconscious that I've heard you and tried to understand/understood you? i.e. is writing that method? What I did want to record, just in case I'm wrong about any of this, is that it was a strong message and it was also fairly painful to receive. It feels very much like a portent and a threat. That is how a conscious human would receive that thought. It was very dark, and I did not like it. If you need to tell me dark things, that is not the way.
No comments:
Post a Comment