07-31-03 @ 10:38 am EDT

I'm in a very poor mood today.

I read some interesting things about dream recall and interpretation in some free online books at iUniverse. I plan to check them out more. One mentioned this thing called roleplaying which had something to do with Gestalt therapy. I know...nothing about Gestalt therapy. I only know the name, and I think "Gestalt" means "all" or something. I never paid much attention to it before. All I can say is I've heard the name.

But anyway according to this school of dream interpretation, you sit and you roleplay yourself as the different characters or important symbols in the dream. As if you are really them. So, for example, in my "The Face On The Hill" dream (??/??/??: 1 Dream), I would roleplay myself from the viewpoints of...my mother, the evil teacher, the hypnotized students, and the face on the hill, not to mention possibly the lake, the hill itself, and maybe the movie screen, if I wanted to go all out. The book gave an example of a woman who had a dream, something like a cute bunny cuddling with a bear and then meeting an Indian brave who turned into an eagle and carried the bunny up into the sky...after roleplaying from all these points of view the dream seemed to be about how she has always been taught to use her femininity to get her way, and to not be assertive (the helpless bunny facing up to the bear, which then fell asleep--the bear was her assertiveness, falling asleep when she used her femininity); I got confused following the text when she got to the Indian, but she found it hard to roleplay his part because he didn't want to use words; he was more telepathic, like animals, which don't need to speak. Bla bla, he turned into the eagle, which was her need to free herself or something...I'm sorry my memory is so lousy and this was just a few hours ago, too... :( ...but anyway, the dream indicated that she needed to find a way to free herself to be more assertive without feeling as if she were being cold and pushy and rude (I remember now that the Indian "brave"--brave being an operative word--was standing atop a pile of rocks, and when she roleplayed the rocks they claimed they were cold and hard--she also roleplayed the bunny, the bear, the Indian, and the forest). All of this goes a little more indepth than I could possibly stand to go but it was very interesting and made much sense to me, without necessarily compromising any Jungian interpretations that might happen to pop up. (I don't know nearly as much about Jung as I should in order to speak about him, but I like his archetype theories. They make sense to me.)

As a fiction writer I like to think I could be good at roleplaying; I do it every time I write from a character's POV. How did I stay in Charmian's POV throughout the entirety of Manitou Island, I was asked? Easy: I pretended I was her. Every time she had to think or do something, I thought it out and performed the action in my head myself. Don't know how useful it was but it got me through 380,000 words. I bet I would feel rather stupid pretending to be an evil teacher or a movie screen, but what the hell, I pretended to be an airplane and a talking puppy once during my psychologist's sessions... O_o (And the puppy was MY idea...)

So I will have to try that sometime and see what happens. Maybe I'll do it here in Skew sometime.

There was also some stuff about making your own dream dictionary, something I've been wanting to do for ages, but it would be a huge task given that I currently have over 800 dreams typed up and proofed, and a LOT more not even transcribed yet...not to mention more that I will of course have in the future. I had an odd one with Tom Berenger and the Mackinac Bridge last night but I think that was because I watched Peacemakers on USA. Why the Mackinac Bridge keeps popping up, I have no clue. I even laughed in my dream because I thought it was so funny how the Bridge should appear in the background in Tom Berenger's period piece--"That is so out of place! They're going to have to edit that out!" The thing is, the filming seemed to be taking place in the old On Cue parking lot in Petoskey...but anyway, Dreamjournal.org already offers a basic symbols service, but they don't have every symbol *I* think is important; plus, they take note of lots of ones that I don't think matter so much. How can I tell which ones are worth including and which ones aren't? Such things as mere direction could be important in a dream, then again, they might not. I can't tell. Plus ALWAYS indicating that the symbol "woman" appears in a dream, for example, could be counterproductive if you happen to just dream about females who are in your daily life so often that they're bound to pop up in your dreams. (I believe I dream about my parents and home so much because hello, I LIVE here all day!) All I would be able to do is read through them yet again and jot down which things stick out for ME because I am the only one who could decide. In the above dream, what pops up from memory would be...camp, abandonment, teacher, glasses?, students, hypnosis/trance, movie screen, mother, dark, night, lake, water, drowning, ears?, face, glowing, evil, hill. Maybe some other things but you get the picture. I would then put these symbols into my own notebook and write down what *I* think of when I think of them. The book didn't really say to do this--it seemed to say to define them in the context of the dream--but I don't see that as useful. I think it would be most useful to jot down what I myself think of when I think of such things as teachers, abandonment, my mother, darkness, water, etc., what they mean to ME and what emotions they conjure up, and then that could help me understand why those particular symbols appeared in the dream. Because they might take on slightly different meanings in different dreams depending on their context, to define them in terms of one dream only would not help me much. I'd have to start out more general, then narrow it down according to dream.

Are you still reading this or am I talking to myself? My last entry got only four hits in the past 24 hours so I must be getting dull.

Anyway, there were other books plus the rest of that one that I wanted to browse through and copy down what journaling techniques they have if any; I remember one had some interesting dream journal format pages that I probably would not use myself (I just type them up as I remember them, without much thought to organization until I post them at DJ), but you know how I love to look through fill-out forms and such.

I wondered if someday I should try to roleplay the part of the darkness falling which bothers me so much--I think I dreamed of it again yesterday--but...what would come out of my mouth?...

"I am the darkness. I come in suddenly and surround everything. I make people afraid, yet they're also curious. I like to be mysterious. I like to hide things..."

Eer, I don't know if I like the way this is going. o_O;

Anyway...Sumi asked me to comment on a dialogue element in here, and I do mean to do that; but I have to get out of here. :/ It's a simple enough answer but you know how I have to give examples, and that could take me a bit...so I hope maybe I can get to that tomorrow. I haven't been going online in the afternoons anymore and today I figured out that I am online about seven hours a day, I think. I THINK but I'm not sure. Seven hours! I know that's a lot but it's a lot less than *I* thought it was...

That's mainly because of the no afternoons thing, and now I've been working on a jigsaw puzzle and reading my book and hurting my legs and proofing Part 10...*sigh*

P., if you see this, would you care to send me your snail-mail address sometime? I realize you're in Canada (NEW BRUNSWICK!--I had to correct myself as I got it wrong last time--the only part of Canada I even remotely know is Ontario ^_^ ) and postage would be more but sometime I think I might like to try writing you an actual letter. Maybe the damn thing would stand a better chance of getting to you at this rate with how I've been with e-mail lately... :)

Unless the postal workers up there are on strike? Thought I heard something about that once...

Well, I think I'm done now. Dreams and stuff beckon. Tar...