Polybook Day 9, Dream, Dream Interpretation, Heaven, Hell, Good Girls, Demons
I want to reproduce the dream I had last night as faithfully as possible. It was an unusually intense and vivid dream, and I usually have unusually vivid and intense dreams! I could not fall asleep until around 5am or 6am. I listened to transcendental meditation videos, which helped a bit, until my phone died. I had a lot of pain in my legs and lower body, and ended up taking 2 Advils, and…now that I think of it, a small white ball in an Olly melatonin bottle that may not actually have been melatonin….it was French sweet anise candies!
Things I remember concretely: 172 Liberty Ave was the name of the place with the bar. A man was in the dream, an ex-lover, but with the soul and personality of a current lover. Neither of these figures appear in my dreams often. This exact setup, of the current lover in the body of the ex-lover, has appeared once, before. I do not remember that dream. He was cuddling with a woman on a couch, after tennis. I did not see the tennis, but saw the cuddling. I had been trying to convince him to play tennis with me. He reached over and stroked her ass. I found this annoying because she was annoying. She was small, with a dark-haired bob. I felt myself jealous and went and stroked her ass too. She didn’t not-like it, but wasn’t fully inviting, as she was enmeshed in my lover and he was enmeshed in her.
I got frustrated and left. I was angry. If they are having a wild adventure with their tennis and public cuddling, I will have one too. But I wanted to do something nice for my lover. I went to this bar. It was advertised as 2 shots for $20. Some kind of fancy shots. I figured I could get those, and bring them back. I am afraid I don’t have my ID, and figured I’d use this as a check to see which of my other IDs work. Maybe my name and credit card, or a photo of my ID. It turns out I do have my ID, so no problem there. It turns out the shots are 2 for $200. I am stunned, but also broke, but also $20 or $200 won’t make too much difference for the anxiety I have about just putting things on my credit card for much too long, and so I pay for them. I do wonder what these $100 shots are, but I do not think about it too much.
They let me into a room that is the most crazy, voodoo, reggae, psychedelic, cross-cultural morass of a green-gold-but warm shades of colors, set of lounges I have ever seen in my life. There is a bar with peacocks feathers everywhere in Hong Kong that it maybe reminds me of. A bar in Le Marais in Paris where I had my first hookup that was covered in green plants. I don’t remember if they were real. In the dream, it was misty, but you could see. There were tons of people laying around on couches. They looked more drugged, than drunk, if you know what I mean. They seemed like they were both in each other’s universe, but also in their own universe. Just walking around them I felt myself feel like my own reality is changing. At some point, somebody gives me a sip of their drink. I realize why these drinks are $100 each. They are obviously some crazy drug potions, not just alcohol mixed up in some complicated way. It feels good and I am enjoying it a lot.
Somehow, I am reasonably able to track the time. No more than 1.5 hours would have passed from my departure. I think about how to get back to the annoying couple, my lover, the girl with the dark bob. I realize I never get my 2 drinks. I imagine it would be hard for me to get a refund, with everybody in this mixed-up state, but I imagine it would not be hard for me to get a coupon to come back later, and get 2 free drinks. I see a buffet. I do not know if it is a free buffet or not. I eat a little bit of it. People do not bother me about it, other than me being in the way a little bit, but I feel my body get nervous. It is some of the most delicious food I’ve had in my life, not in terms of pure quality, but in terms of being fit for the setting and occasion. It is exactly what I wanted to be eating in this situation with this druggy drink. I meander around. It seems like some of the rooms are rustling with energy as if they are getting ready for rituals. There are no signposts about the rituals, and no clear markers. There are no gongs or fires being started, no calligraphy, no dancing, nothing like this. Just some rooms having some energy change that something is happening, and when I walk past them, I feel myself being parsed as an outsider, and I feel my body become uncomfortable with the parsing, such that I do not enter those rooms. I start to look for somebody who might be able to help me with my coupon, and I find a woman. From talking to her and the man next to her, she is indeed somebody who can help me. She is also in a haze. She pulls out her pen and a thin sheet of paper, like a 1/3 of a normal piece of paper, the long way, and it’s brownish, the paper, and she writes down something a bit more complicated than it should be, but to the tune of 2 free drinks, and signs her name.
I make it out of there, realize my phone is about to die. I need to get back to where my friends are, or they will worry about me. Worse, they may think I am “too annoyed” at them being together and that I threw a tantrum, stormed off, and their completely normal, natural behavior. My lover is not cheating on me, something about the arrangement is supposed to be kosher. My anger is not supposed to be kosher, but I am angry, because I wanted to be the one playing tennis. Maybe not all of the tennis, but most of the tennis, and why could I not get it, while this other girl could get it so easily? And maybe not even most of the tennis most of the time, but I wanted to be part of that conversation, without it being weird somehow, and more importantly I wanted to be playing tennis today and yesterday when they were playing their tennis. They said I can play some tennis with them today. But what is this about them allowing me to play tennis with them? This is my lover after all and who even is this woman?
I think maybe I need to get back because they might want to watch a movie. I am on 2% battery and need to figure out where to go. Do I look at a map really fast, or try to see if they’d texted me? Even if they want to watch a movie, and I’m running late, even if it starts at 8:45pm, the movie theatre is where they already are, so they would assume that I would just go to the location they are at, and wouldn’t change location. They are responsible in this way. Or at least my partner is. I start walking around. Pass some malls. Realize this is Berkeley, California, as the setting of the dream. I check my lover’s text, he wonders where I am but otherwise there is no information. He is a happy person so sends smiley faces. This is a characteristic of my ex, not my current lover. I check the map. There is an entire bridge I have to cross to get to them — no wonder just walking around I am not seeing where I am supposed to go. I think that I will have to get my phone charged somewhere. I am almost right at the point of being able to cross the entire bridge, and get approximately to where they are, because I know my bearings after the bridge, but don’t actually know how to get to the start of the bridge from where I am, even though it looks like it’s within 15 blocks somehow. I see some hanging wires that are phone chargers, but they are not connected to anything. I walk around and find some real ones.
Before I attach my phone to a charger, my real life lover in real life wakes me up to say he’s leaving for a bit, and has some McDonald’s for me.
This is a long enough post already, that the post I had been planning today I’ll write, but then save for a rainy day if I can’t write due to some emergency. I should have an “emergency day posting buddy” actually. The post can be posted, but for Inkhaven there’s also a form to confirm the posting.
What do I make of this dream? I want to analyze it using Eugene Gendlin’s very short but wonderful book, Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams, which is very helpful for practical dream interpretation.
I think this dream is about accessing hell, and making it fun, probably. Or something of that scale. Or about how people walk around already in hells of their own making, and how that shows up. How that shows up as distinct and different from hell as a “failure of heaven.”
How does this relate to my book.
I had a pretty clear train of thought thinking about it, leaving the bed, walking into the shower, feeling the sensations of hot and cold on my body. (I always take a hot shower, then turn it to the coldest setting before I come out. On net you’re warmer when you make contact with the air around you and it’s good for the immune system).
Where in hell and in heaven people are is something you can track a little bit. You can have these women post these screenshots online, of the texts they send to their man, about their boundaries, about what they expect, about how they are so so so so good and are trying so hard not to be bad, and you see their man just give zero shit about it. You see the self-consciousness of trying really hard to be a good girl. I don’t think it’s bad. I just think that’s what it is. And I think if you’re interacting with some guy who has a ton of devilish energy, that guy isn’t really going to be thinking at that layer about if you’re a good girl or not. He’s going to be seeing a woman who is unsure of himself, unsure of how to direct him, kind of crackling under her own confusion about what she wants and what she is doing and who she is, and he won’t know how to help her. He will probably fuck her again. But whatever she is trying to communicate will be lost on him. Probably they will break up, because whatever is unbearable to her such that she is trying to communicate to him about isn’t going to be getting much better.
Is it strange, to invoke ideas of heaven and hell into a book about polyamory, interpersonal dynamics, feelings?
I think there is a complicated way of thinking about it and a straightforward way.
The straightforward way is this. Most people today are either to some extent following traditional values and traditional religions, or in some way are rejecting or resisting traditional values and traditional religions.
In either scenario, *the traditional values and the traditional religions* are still a useful schelling point.
The default vows in New York City, at city hall, for a secular court wedding, are still just the shortened version of the Catholic vows.
“Oh I don’t really want to get married. I just want to have a relationship with all the intensity of marriage and all the commitment, but I don’t really believe in something like love having a legal connection to the state.”
A marriage that is so powerful it doesn’t need social or legal anything to make it real? Sounds like ultramarriage to me, powered by some deep sense of spirituality.
Oh, a person is just having a normal, non-religious wedding! But hey is their entire family talking about religion, is their husband’s family talking about religion, were they all brought up in a way where they go to a religious service once a week?
Chances are, if somebody isn’t talking about religion, somebody around them is.
I am a big believer that people follow “implicit” religions even when they are not following explicit ones. They have some relationship to god, to themselves, to the sacred, to their own life and prospects and fortune, to their family, to death. They have some way of organizing this, to themselves, even if it is highly disorganized.
Many religions when you get married, first your loyalty is to God, then to your husband or wife, then to your children.
Sometimes this is made explicit in the marriage or afterwards. Sometimes the “loyalty to God” is so ingrained in the culture that it would not need to be repeated. Of course the first loyalty is to God. That is what all the prayers are about and the weekly services and rituals. When you are getting married, this does not need to be repeated.
There are variations on this. Some people really do see their children as God, the source of redemption for their sins. This can get quite ugly.
Some people do see their partner is God, and can’t imagine life without them at all, and don’t have an “exterior third thing” to balance out the relationship when their partner is sick, or is not functioning in a way that he is a good partner and can do all the things for you that you may expect him to do if he was in command of your life and the household in a certain way.
Insofar as people have “levers” to play with to make things work for themselves, this is a big one.
Remember, this is a non-prescriptive book. You may want some things, here are some ways to get them. People are mammals and mammals have evolved on a baseline of care and love for each other, such that a lack of love or psychopathy and sociopathy as seen as strange and aberrant. This is not a “pickup artist book.” Probably the worst that’ll happen with this book is people who should be breaking up might have more hope than they should that they can work on things. But then again, the desire to work on things is itself some sign of love. It can waste some time, energy, and effort, but people tend to hurt each other more when they smash each other up in sudden energy exchanges, rather than trying to untangle or detangle with more fine-tuned levers. The issue would be people using these levers in not very fine-tuned ways, while thinking they are. But then the hope for the book is to direct them to a more granular thing even if they are starting bigger. I would be surprised if people have a big thing that becomes bigger from the book, though that is possible.
Anyway, demons. This is a pretty big lever, and I would be careful with it. But it can actually make you softer and nicer in your interactions, to have a more simple relationship to heaven and hell. To have something higher up, that is good, that you lean on. To have a source of selfishness, from the bottom, that is pure in its intrinsic origin as a part of you, rather than tying up “permission to be selfish” in your tit-for-tat interpersonal dynamics. If you are “intrinsically good” without having to try and “intrinsically selfish” without having to try, then I think that actually creates a lot more freedom to do good things on earth without getting into weird tangles. That’s not to say there isn’t room for examination. That’s just to say that if you’re already in weird tangles and are confused about what you can do, submitting more to god directly (versus to a framework of being good, a parent, a lover, a pet) and feeling that love, security, and peace in your heart directly can be good. Similarly, embracing your already fallen nature (versus negotiating for your right to do what you want, erasing any “want” as deviant, and thus something to eliminate, seeing any “will” you have to affect the world if it’s not “fully good” as potentially evil and thus something to be erased in yourself) can give you the strength to work on yourself and improve your life even when there are very difficult challenges, betrayals, or heartbreaks. You are already *bad,* you already were *the whole time* and one more breakup isn’t going to make you markedly worse than you are. So you don’t have to be “scared” of it.
Working out, reading the book your partner wants you to read, going to therapy, or even confronting your parents or your children isn’t going to “hurt you.” There is just going to be earthly upside, and yes you are allowed to just take that upside without feeling weird and guilty about it.