Freedomain Radio

Hello everyone, i was awoken this morning buy a strange dream. I dont know if your still interested in doing dream analysis stef but i feel the need to get this down in some form as it is one of the few dreams that i have retained clear memories about after waking. SO here it goes if anyone other than stef has some thoughts id be happy to hear them.

it starts out at my high school. im sitting on a bench around a few of the people i normaly hang around with at school. I brought a gun to school.  two of the people who were with me had them also. I asked one of them if he had brought his. he pulled it out very casualy and showed me. i noticed that the safty was on. this reminded me that i hadent checked the safty on my own, but i did not want to just pull it out and look at it. so i very carfuly looked at it. There were three safty settings on the gun( off, something in the middle wich prevented it from firing and a third, maybe super safe mode?) my gun was already in the middle position but for some reason i moved it to the other safety. while it was still in my jacket pocket i felt it grow warmer. and then it went off a few times. no one around seemed to notice very much though from behind me i heard my physics teacher say something like "who was that. you wont get as badly punished if you confess now. It made me nervous so i got up and walked around. i remember finding it strange that the cops arnt there.

next im at home. i go into my room and hide my gun. when i come out of my room my dad asks me if im alright, but in a diferent way than is normal. i look down at my shirt and there is some blood on it. i reach under the shirt and i feel a great deal of blood and a massive wound. i try and hide this by ging into the bathroom and cleaning it up. i dont feel any pain or get the inclination that my eram self is feeling pain.

and for a few loose ends: there is a japanese exchange student in the group with us but she dosent have a gun. i remember telling her or at least thinking i should tell her to go and tell somone the truth about what she saw so she wouldent get into any trouble. i havent actualy ever talked to this girl but she is in my physics class.

thank you if yuve taken the time to read this. im not sure how relevant it is but wth cant hurt anything to post it. il add more if i remember anything as well as giving some of my own thoughts a little later after i mull them over a bit.

Do you think this has any relevance to the recent shootings in Illinois?

What do you think about this?

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Theres something thats been on my mind lately. Its (I think) partially related to this dream so i see no need to create a new thread. I have been hesitant to post about this experience but meeting my therapist has made my thoughts around this matter more clear, now i think its important that i do share this.

Monday while Stef i and a few other board members were on a skype conversation(i think it was about Nates posts on the gold+ forum but i was having difficulty concentrating) I had a very strong emotional experience. I sort of pictured in my mind Stef telling me that i am in the wrong place and i shouldn't come to FDR any more(in a similar way to some of the trolls that come here). I felt an enormous depression and sadness. I was thinking that if that were to happen i couldn't continue living, that if i couldn't be apart of fdr then my life would be purposeless. i cried.

for a few days before i was feeling depressed. I think that my depression has been centered around the dream posted above. When i posted it i was really hoping for Stef to come in and respond to it. after i posted it i asked him to look it over and give me some feedback and he said he would but still has not gotten around to it. i kept thinking that there must be some reason why. some of the reasons i made up were self attacks ie "you are not as valuable to fdr as everyone else" "your not smart enough for this conversation" "your dream wasn't that important". when i did this i felt sad and angry(im not sure were the anger was directed). My therapist helped me to understand this situation a little better.

when i didn't get the response to my post that i wanted i associated that with being rejected. when i think that im being rejected then something in me causes me to self attack and shift the blame for that rejection onto myself.(this conclusion might be completely wrong  but its what iv got so far and is always subject to revision. ) I arrived at this after a memory of an early incident in my childhood came up. I was in 1st or 2nd grade, and my mom used to drop me off at school. When she was going to leave me i would start screaming and crying to her. i would try to run after her but the teachers would hold me back. this was in front of all the other students. my mother would get agitated at me because i was being "difficult". this is my earliest and strongest memory of parental rejection. I think that i was trying to get stef to act like a replacement parent so that i could get acknowledgment, respect, attention, etc that has been absent from my family. i may even be trying to do that in this post.

I know this is a long post, and i probably have jumped around a little. i want to know if my interpretations of this are correct and if they are how i can stop this tendency to self attack. (i just had the inclination to write "hope this post didn't bore you to much")

thanks for making it to the end.

I don't consider myself to be very good at dream analysis, but I'll share a few observations and thoughts. There certainly is an element of self-attack (shooting yourself) and then nobody seems to notice or care that you've hurt yourself except for the teacher (parent, authority figure) to pin blame on you and punish you. The cops aren't there... perhaps the authorities in your life don't care to protect or help you.

Then your dad notices that something is wrong, but merely asks if you are alright. You try to hide that you are hurt and clean up the massive wound all by yourself. You don't feel pain, or are not connected with your pain.

The Japanese student is like an innocent pacifist bystander, and you don't want her to get into trouble. Don't know exactly where she fits in terms of your life.

It sounds like your understanding of this dream and what it says about your life is pretty accurate: self-attack, rejection, hiding your pain from others and yourself, and being neglected by those in your life who were responsible for protecting and nurturing you. You are bringing some of these same expectations into your interaction with the FDR community, which is perfectly understandable. On an emotional level, you are jumping to the conclusion that a lack of attention here equals rejection and means that people don't think you are "worthy" of the conversation. Of course, you are quite young and will soon be ahead of where many of us were at the same age (if not already). Compared to the people I have met elsewhere, the people I've met at FDR have been truly amazing, and I would be very upset if I felt rejected here. It's easy to jump to conclusions based on scant evidence, especially when most of us come with so much emotional baggage from the past.

Anyway, I think you're very brave to share so much of your inner life and childhood experiences with us in these posts (and I wasn't bored by them at all). You've been vulnerable, and I agree with Stef that with vulnerability comes safety and certainty. I don't think any of us will attack you here (better not!), and if anybody does, you will know with certainty that you don't want to interact with that individual. I think that as you interact with people that don't attack or reject you, you will learn not to self-attack and to accept yourself and your full experience in life, including your pain. Thanks for sharing!