I feel like every time I start to write about the time periods of my notebooks, I want to say that they are transition periods. Yet I think this notebook is more like a transition period than any of my other notebooks.
In my personal life, this notebook starts two months after I had broken off my communication, for what would be about two years, with my best friend R. It also starts a few months after I stopped working for one of my bosses, a person I looked to as a mentor. And it starts a few months into the work I began with my psychiatrist A. The notebook ends only a month or so before I met H, the first girl I ever had a sexual relationship with, and a person who has remained one of my best friends.
I think most people would have felt lonely after having stopped communicating with their best friend. I didn't, unfortunately -- probably because I'm not very normal. Instead, I seemed to feel like I was back to having a certain amount of freedom. I'm not sure what this freedom entailed -- or, rather, I wouldn't say I used this freedom very well at all. But I'd say that whenever I've been granted freedom in my life, I've used it poorly.
What strikes me as kind of interesting regarding R, in this notebook, are the dreams in which I'm involved in sexual, or sexual/addictive, scenarios with R and his then fiancee L. I don't even think I accepted the idea that I could have been sexually attracted to R, or to both R and L, while I was speaking with them. I'm sure they would have been aghast at the idea.
What I'd also say, though, is that I probably would never have had a sexual relationship (pathetic though it was -- all the pathetic parts due to me, and not to H) if I had not stopped communicating with R. Not that R was purposely keeping me from having sexual relationships with people. But I kind of allowed my attachment to R to allow me to have any fulfilling romantic relationship of my own. And I think some of the dreams toward the end of this notebook preview my emotions opening up for my relationship with H.
I think a lot of my dreams regarding my relationship with my psychiatrist A reflect a lot of my frustrations with A. The dreams show me exercising spiritual or paranormal powers, which I think I associated at that time with the Jungian archetypal forces of the unconscious. I see that A sees me using these powers and fear that she, jealous or afraid of them, wishes to subdue them or detain me somehow. So I try to hide my powers.
This was very much how I felt whenever I shared my dreams with A. What I really felt, all the time, from A, was that she could never accept that my unconscious was... whatever it is. She seemed to me to be afraid of, or at least extremely annoyed by, it. Eventually, in about 2009 or so, I just stopped sharing my dreams altogether with A.
But one of the many good things about my relationship with A -- and there were plenty of really good things about my relationship with A -- was that she introduced me to a lot of great Jungian authors. In this dream notebook, I can definitely see a lot of influence from Erich Neumann. I'm pretty sure that at this time I was reading Neumann's The Great Mother and The Origins and History of Consciousness.
I was surprised to see that there were so many dreams in this notebook that seemed to address the financial crisis. I'm pretty sure that this notebook started about a month after my company's CEO made a somewhat publicized, though not well-thought-out, statement regarding my company's operations that led the people in my division to believe that we were all going to get fired any day now. A round of firings, resulting in about 25% of my department being cut, was, in fact, around the corner, not long after the end of this notebook.
So maybe it isn't so surprising, after all, that I was having dreams so obviously reflecting concerns regarding the financial crisis. What I think is kind of interesting about those dreams is that they often use the idea of a power outage. There's a power outage in my office, there's a power outage in the city, etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment