This is the dream description I sent to the neurofeedback practitioner:
A bad guy (or multiple?) are after me for most of the dream. It gets resolved, and the bad guy gets caught. For some reason, he has hands that are like just flat circles, like the shape of a thick hamburger patty -- like a skin and flesh mitt that has been placed over his hands or that his hands have been burned and deformed intentionally that way by whatever "good guys" got him (cops?). His face is also deformed and scarred. I think his lips have been fused together so he can't talk. I think this is part of his punishment somehow for being bad, that they tried to neutralize his ability to do harm while still allowing him to exist. He doesn't get locked in prison, though, he gets locked in a walk in closet in a master bedroom suite of what sort of looks like my parent's house. I'm also staying there. Some night some time after that, we go to check on the bad guy, but he's not in the closet (we don't realize this at first for some reason, even though the door is open, maybe we think he's hiding). Then I notice bloody footprints from the sliding glass door entrance from the bedroom to the outside -- footprints that go to the closet, and then continue into the house. The other bad guy let this one out and now they're both on the loose. That's about when I wake up.
His interpretation was to ask me what the "bad guys" wanted from me. I told him that it felt like they wanted to make me like them, to disfigure me, so that I wouldn't be fit for a normal life anymore and then I would have to be with them. It reminded me a little of what the protagonist/antagonist in Boxing Helena is trying to do (that film has had such an odd lasting impression with me that I either watched that film either way too young in my development or it struck some chord of truth with me that resonates and haunts still today, I wrote about it a little here). He loves the object of his desire to much that he wants to ruin her for anyone else. Or the Crazy Love documentary, in which a woman whose ex-boyfriend that hired thugs to blind her by throwing lye in her face ends up marrying him because he was the only man “who she knew saw her as stunning rather than blind and disfigured.” I was afraid to become this woman, or to have people attempt to make me become this woman.
The neurofeedback guy suggested that maybe these bad guys were not trying to make me like them so much as they already were parts of me that I (at one time) didn't want to be -- that they were really just aspects of myself that I had disassociated from and they were haunting me because that's still who I am at some level but have chosen not to deal with it. I actually found that to be a pretty compelling interpretation. It felt right to me, and it's odd, the dream was actually a nightmare -- it was hard to fall back asleep from it and it still haunted me a little in the days subsequent. But the moment I saw those bad guys as just these castoff parts of me, it was a light had been flicked on, so quickly did my paradigm shift. Instead of fear and confusion, I felt compassion and sorry that I had done this to myself -- I had mangled my own self. I was sorry for my childhood self and my teenage self and my young adult self and every other self that I have contorted and distorted to fit whatever my purposes were at the time (to appear to fit in, to get something out of a situation, to achieve something or maintain something that society requires a certain degree of conformity for). I sort of resolved then and there to not do that ever again, as much as I could help it. I started to think of the things that day or week that I had been trying to ignore, suppress, or repress about myself. I started doing little things to try to more openly acknowledge and express those aspects -- something as similar as getting in touch with certain friends or acquaintances or reading articles about those worlds.
The whole thing was such a revelation to me that I now wonder if dream interpretation typically has such drastic results, or if this was just a one off? It also made me think of how many other things about myself that I am oblivious too.
I have a few more thoughts about how the neurofeedback guy let me come to my own truths and didn't try to tell me what my truths are that I'll put in the next post.
A bad guy (or multiple?) are after me for most of the dream. It gets resolved, and the bad guy gets caught. For some reason, he has hands that are like just flat circles, like the shape of a thick hamburger patty -- like a skin and flesh mitt that has been placed over his hands or that his hands have been burned and deformed intentionally that way by whatever "good guys" got him (cops?). His face is also deformed and scarred. I think his lips have been fused together so he can't talk. I think this is part of his punishment somehow for being bad, that they tried to neutralize his ability to do harm while still allowing him to exist. He doesn't get locked in prison, though, he gets locked in a walk in closet in a master bedroom suite of what sort of looks like my parent's house. I'm also staying there. Some night some time after that, we go to check on the bad guy, but he's not in the closet (we don't realize this at first for some reason, even though the door is open, maybe we think he's hiding). Then I notice bloody footprints from the sliding glass door entrance from the bedroom to the outside -- footprints that go to the closet, and then continue into the house. The other bad guy let this one out and now they're both on the loose. That's about when I wake up.
His interpretation was to ask me what the "bad guys" wanted from me. I told him that it felt like they wanted to make me like them, to disfigure me, so that I wouldn't be fit for a normal life anymore and then I would have to be with them. It reminded me a little of what the protagonist/antagonist in Boxing Helena is trying to do (that film has had such an odd lasting impression with me that I either watched that film either way too young in my development or it struck some chord of truth with me that resonates and haunts still today, I wrote about it a little here). He loves the object of his desire to much that he wants to ruin her for anyone else. Or the Crazy Love documentary, in which a woman whose ex-boyfriend that hired thugs to blind her by throwing lye in her face ends up marrying him because he was the only man “who she knew saw her as stunning rather than blind and disfigured.” I was afraid to become this woman, or to have people attempt to make me become this woman.
The neurofeedback guy suggested that maybe these bad guys were not trying to make me like them so much as they already were parts of me that I (at one time) didn't want to be -- that they were really just aspects of myself that I had disassociated from and they were haunting me because that's still who I am at some level but have chosen not to deal with it. I actually found that to be a pretty compelling interpretation. It felt right to me, and it's odd, the dream was actually a nightmare -- it was hard to fall back asleep from it and it still haunted me a little in the days subsequent. But the moment I saw those bad guys as just these castoff parts of me, it was a light had been flicked on, so quickly did my paradigm shift. Instead of fear and confusion, I felt compassion and sorry that I had done this to myself -- I had mangled my own self. I was sorry for my childhood self and my teenage self and my young adult self and every other self that I have contorted and distorted to fit whatever my purposes were at the time (to appear to fit in, to get something out of a situation, to achieve something or maintain something that society requires a certain degree of conformity for). I sort of resolved then and there to not do that ever again, as much as I could help it. I started to think of the things that day or week that I had been trying to ignore, suppress, or repress about myself. I started doing little things to try to more openly acknowledge and express those aspects -- something as similar as getting in touch with certain friends or acquaintances or reading articles about those worlds.
The whole thing was such a revelation to me that I now wonder if dream interpretation typically has such drastic results, or if this was just a one off? It also made me think of how many other things about myself that I am oblivious too.
I have a few more thoughts about how the neurofeedback guy let me come to my own truths and didn't try to tell me what my truths are that I'll put in the next post.