At the beginning of this notebook I am working and I am still operating under the assumption that I am secure at my job. Honestly, at this point in time, nobody was secure at my company. The merger with our company and another company meant that at least half of us were going to lose their jobs. I had already watched one round of people lose their jobs. I didn't know if I would be in the next round. But I was acting as if I wouldn't.
Then, right before the holidays, I, and most of the people at my professional level, were removed from their respective teams and put into some random pool of people who may or may not make the cut. We weren't really asked to do anything in order to make the cut. We were just told that eventually we would be told that we wouldn't make the cut. In addition to this, everybody in the building that my company was in at the time was moved to the building of the company we'd merged with.
In about mid-January, I was told that I, along with about 80% of my professional peers, did not make the cut. We were given a three-month severance package. We were on the payroll for three months, as long as we didn't take a job with any other company, but we didn't have to come into work.
So this notebook begins with me feeling relatively safe at my job, then moves to me being placed in a random pool of workers without any real work to do, then moves to me not having a job at all but being paid as if I did have one.
I think it's actually pretty easy to see how my dreams reflect my different mindsets as I move through these periods. At the beginning, my dreams seem more concerned with other things. The trip home for Christmas, symbolism of books I was reading (I was, as I recall, slowly working my way through Carl Jung's Visions seminar at this time), and so forth. In the middle, I seem to have dreams where I hope that people other than myself, such as my boss and my teammates, will get fired rather than me. At the end, I dream of talking to people about new jobs, having been fired, etc.
My dreams tend to take different views on the financial crisis. In some dreams I see all the people in the finance industry, including myself, as guilty of something tantamount to murder. In other dreams, I'm able, somehow, to exclude myself from the group of people who are really guilty. In other dreams I see the whole thing as a matter of the facts of life -- risk-taking and losing -- while I see the people who look at the whole thing as a series of heinous crimes as being nothing more than leery outsiders looking in.
It's interesting to see how I, so insignificant in all these affairs can magnify myself in my dreams to be an element of any concern in the whole drama of things.
This notebook has pretty large gap between entries: from January 4th to January 27th. I think this gap is what I'd call a transition gap. I was making a transition in my life and I was trying to figure out, consciously, what would happen to me next. At those points in time, my dreams often go dark.
But I also think that I was focusing so much on trying to find what I'd been passionate about when I'd first started working at my job -- so that my passion could help me preserve my job! -- that I'd dropped my focus on my dreams, kind of shunting that extra mental energy into my daily life. But... as I've often found in life... ignoring my dreams often means clogging up, rather than freeing up, my waking energy.
Some dreams in this notebook also reflect the growth of a fetish I had forced into dormancy at a very early age: my fetish for wearing diapers.
I personally believe that seeing my grandfather before he died was one of the main re-activators of my diaper fetish. In November of 2008 my grandfather died. He knew when the end was near. He called all the family back to be with him. I came from New York back home to Denver and spent the days before, and the day after, my grandfather's death with my family.
One of the last memories I have of my grandfather is helping a nurse move him in his bed. I had grabbed my grandfather really awkwardly, somehow managing to pull up the hospital-gown (he was, actually, spending his final days at home, but in a hospital bed and in a hospital gown), revealing the blue medical diaper that my grandfather was wearing.
Of course my grandfather, who had, as long as I could remember, been overweight, had been ravaged by cancer and was now extremely thin by this time. The thinness and weakness of my grandfather -- the most dignified person in my family, also, emotionally, the staunchest -- and the sight of him in a diaper, really upset me, though I don't think I ever told anybody that.
A few months later, I was at one of my favorite local cafes. The cafe had a changing station in the bathroom. The changing station was stocked with diapers and baby wipes -- the cafe owners had babies themselves and were usually among the main ones running the store.
The sight of the diapers made me remember how, even when I was six or seven years old, I would secretly wear diapers, whenever I could get at them. I may even have worn diapers a couple of times when I was eleven and twelve years old. But I had managed, after the age of six or seven, to suppress the desire to wear diapers. I had, in fact, made myself believe that if I wore diapers again, my mentality would decay -- that I'd somehow become mentally impaired.
But seeing the diapers again made me want to wear baby diapers so bad. I didn't want to take the diapers from the changing station. Besides, they were too small. But that very day I went to a local grocery store and bought GoodNites diapers, which I spent the whole rest of the day wearing.
There are a few images of babyfication and of diaper wearing by adults in the dreams in this notebook. Right now I most recall the image of the hound from Fox and the Hound becoming a little baby and the image of a police officer (?) wearing nothing except for a pair of diapers. In notebook 19, however, I also have a dream of the head of the department I'd worked for wearing nothing but a diaper.
I don't think the growth of these images in my mind even registered with me. Nevertheless, the psychic element was developing in my unconscious did, eventually, manifest in my daily, conscious life.
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