An Essay From Within A Dream

This is a new dream. I am a king on a throne of empty air. Like some castle in the sky I am the teleology of my ego’s wishes. I want to tyrannize. This is only a part of me.

There is a kernel of the will to power that does exist in each person, from what I see. But is this the innermost part? That is the true query. What is the innermost layer of man? What is the innermost layer of a nested narrative? And is that part the main moral of its being?

The missing throne, what does this symbolize? Perhaps obviously, that the power structure of this fantasy does not exist. Even my subconscious cannot believe it.

I nod off in my chair of air. I must go deeper within the dream. My mind is on the subject of the ego, I must peel away its onion skin.

I wake within a dragon’s hoard, although instead of gold there are what I intuit to be philosopher’s stones. The creature’s banking is not just lucre, but the font of all currency.

Also, the metaphor of the philosopher’s stone transforming the soul from leaded animal baseness, to angelic gold. It is hoarding these spiritual catalysts. This is what tyranny looks like. This is avarice of another’s freedom and individuation. It is a western dragon, a symbol of greed and evil. My subconscious is admonishing its previous dream in a more overt image.

I fall within the pile of stones and am buried in them like grains of sand. This is the fear of the tyrannical ego. That the freedom and strangeness of others will destroy the integrity of our self-identity. This is a death of selfhood, chipped away by the many stones of another.

I emerge from a dune of sand. I see a lattice of atoms in the air. An abstraction of a crystal. This is the soul as identity. That coalesced beingness that seems irreducible in us all. Once thrown into the waters of radical others, like a salt crystal it begins to dissolve into individual parts of us. But a diamond won’t dissolve unless in acid. It would seem the self-concept dependent on its hardiness and the solvent it’s immersed in determine the rate of the dissolution of the self. I think I’ve belabored that dream image.

I see a giant crab in the sky clawing away at atoms and deconstructing the perfect lattice. This crab is Cancer. It is unchecked growth, a fault in DNA. That structure of biological identity. This is the enemy from within. The overgrown tyrant. The unchecked ego.

I look past this deconstruction into the sky to a blotchy Rothko painting serving as background. A deconstruction in its own right. It’s rust red and orange. This is the abstraction of the stars, of the heavens. It is the slow dissolution of religious wonder through the acid of rationalism. An abstraction of the sky as just colour. The colours of a crab.

Is self-perceived godhood that outgrowth of the ego? To see the cosmos as a body and ourselves as a tumor to fill it. Through the spiritual. Is pantheism just a way of extending ourselves indefinitely. If we are part of god then god is part of us. The unchecked growth of that type of god is an infinite universe. So the cancer of the soul is a perceived feeling of a lesser infinity. Perhaps this is the impulse of my dreaming. To find a recursive rabbit hole to create a warren of the self within.

A sandstorm washes over me. I emerge onto a flat plane. It is grey and textureless. There is no horizon as the sky matches the colour of the ground. I can hear the whistle of a wind but cannot feel it.

I watch as the sand flies away like a murmuration of locusts, its redness against the grey fades to nothing in the distance. I look down at my body and realize it’s not there. I am a floating head with no frame of reference. This is the self-isolated ego. It is in other words hell. The ego without outward sustenance feeds on itself until there is nothing more. This is a kind of meditation. Again I ask, what lies at the center of a person? An instinct, an ideal, a forward thrust? And what happens when that is frozen in place. It becomes inanimate. It would seem then that inertia is the essence of life and entropy is its end. For even the most complex lifeforms expend energy and move forward.

Then I conclude the center of life’s question is not a feeling, or thought, it is motion. But a motion that is generated from the mental world. There is a wellspring in the mind that sets off our biomechanics like a turbine. There is an energy from within that is converted into the material kind. A type of electrical converter from the esoteric mental substance to the external world. I think this energy is sourced in dreams. It is also bidirectional as thoughts are influenced by the content of the senses. There is a conversion back and forth always happening. Some cell membrane between the mind and brain that ferries all passive experience and impetus through it. I believe to delve into the unconscious is to better understand one side of that barrier.

This can only be studied from within dreams. To use sleep science from outside is to misunderstand and skip upon the surface of the question. Depth psychology is the only way we plumb this abyss. The unconscious generates mental energy which is then fed into the feedback loop of the mind body problem. Was the big bang the material version of this? And now it is an ongoing recursive process somehow interacting with mental life.