My Dream
I had a dream last night. In it, my mother, my sister and I, amidst a host of random strangers, were running around an ancient slab of stone. The stone was precariously situated at the edge of a cliff at the edge of an angry and violent ocean. Around the stone seemed to be a shimmering veil that we were crossing and entering each time we ran around the stone. While running in circles around it, the three of us looking frantic, we were attempting to exorcise one or the other. We did this by holding the other’s arm and saying a few words, which I cannot quite recall at this time. It seems funny now when I’m writing about it, because our faces morphed into these gory movie like images every time we were being exorcised, as if there were truly a hundred demons inside each of us that needed to be let out and vanquished. The troubling part of the dream, however, was that it seemed like we each knew of specific demons in the other and were the only ones capable of bringing them out. I suppose if a dream could ever be rational, you could say that it was almost as if the demon was raised by that person and therefore only they could vanquish it.
Much as this was entertaining and helped me sleep through the night undisturbed otherwise, I woke up feeling extremely heavy in my mind. I felt like all my conscious thirty years were finally taking the space they felt they deserved in my head and were demanding answers and retribution. It got me thinking. How many of our demons are truly our own? I always thought that the demons in our head are our own making. Yes, they are definitely the result of some experience or thought process that we had, which we figured we needed to create a monster to handle for us. But I always believed that we create them to help us deal with the emotions we were afraid to handle on our own. Now though, I am beginning to wonder if my belief system may have lacked luster. I am wondering how many of those thoughts or experiences created a demon in us that we had absolutely no control over? In my dream, all I could think about were the moments when I did not do well enough in school, or when the friends I thought I had betrayed me, or the times when the love I thought was eternal was actually just a short phase I would very quickly grow out of. However, in brief but strong flashes, thoughts and judgements cropped up in my mind that I personally felt I did not know but were still, in all fairness, my own. For instance, my hate for cooking. Honestly nothing has ever happened in the kitchen that made me emotionally decide to hate it. But I do and I have no control over it. I could never properly explain to anyone why I hate being in the kitchen. I would simply just pass it off as ‘Argh, I’m too lazy to cook’. The problem is, now that my dream has alerted me to the fact that I have almost never spent more than fifteen minutes in the kitchen without being forced to by an unassuming friend or family member, I cannot seem to get past why I feel so strongly about it.
Is that truly a fear of my own making? Can I control it? If you ask me these questions today, I have no answer for you. This entry is all about the questions that have awakened in me which I think its about time I look into. The weight in my head of all my demons demanding my attention at one go is daunting. But like we resolve to do so many things every new year, this year I would like to look at these things with a wiser and calmer eye. Without the haughtiness of youth, I would like to work on vanquishing these demons ‘Winchester’ style (if they put up a fight) or set them free ‘Ghost-Whisperer’ style.
It is time. I am sure.
