I always wake up around 4:00 AM. It is at this time I need to decide if I will get out of bed or go back to sleep. Recently I’ve been deciding to go back to sleep, so I’ll peruse my phone a bit until I feel sleepy, then catch another hour or two. However, if I sleep again my dreams will be very weird and the dream this morning was no exception.
I was back in high school looking for my locker but it was a dreamland locker room, not at all like the real one. Instead, it was huge, with many different rooms, like it belonged more to a middle class YMCA than a working class high school. The dream evoked feelings of anxiety just like the ones where I’m in college and am stumbling around campus in a panic not knowing where my classes are and on the verge of failure. At first everything was OK, I was surrounded by friends, had found my small locker and even had a female classmate ask me to get together later. However, I was in need of a change of clothes and the locker in front of me was very small, more like a lockbox for valuables. I noticed my (real life) high school guidance councillor was standing next to me and so I asked him.
I was directed to another room and thought to myself I really need to make a map of my locker locations and to write down the MasterLock combinations so I can actually open them. This is when things started getting weird. Everyone was looking at me but I didn’t understand why. I found where my locker was supposed to be but I couldn’t open it. I felt the stare of derision coming from many classmates and looking over my shoulder saw a few of my items on the floor next to a broken locker in a derelict corner of the room. Many of my items had been thrown into it although much was missing, including the change of clothes I was seeking.
I then realized a few of the boys had switched my locker with my real life 3rd grade bully taking over my original one. I was livid but instead of feeling helpless as I did in 3rd grade, I had the confidence to fight derived from my high school wrestling and current karate experience. I went to go knock that bully out but then woke up.
Thinking about this dream, I imagine it comes from two sources in my subconscious. The first is I’ve just written a criticism of NFTs in a NFT community that I love participating in. I’m wondering how that will go but felt the need to express my opinions in a place where the hype and FOMO seem to have taken over any semblance of reason.
The second source is left over feelings from grade school where I did have a bully in the 3rd to 5th grades with nobody to help me. I think this elementary school memory may have been resurrected by attending a 5th grade birthday party yesterday for one of my son’s classmates. I noticed how they all interacted and I think it subconsciously reminded me of the need to fit in in grade school to fill the need of being included as well as a guard against bullying.
Except for the early bullying, I enjoyed elementary school. I was good at sports so if there was a ranking like in The Diary of a Wimpy Kid I would have been in the top 1/4th. For boys in the late 80s and 90s athletic ability was pretty much the main determinant of your popularity. That bulling in the 3rd to 5th grades however definitely left a mark in my subconscious, especially since nobody seemed to ever be on my side when I needed it.
Now at 44 years, having spent half of my life in “short-term individual profit over all else” corporate America, seeing how a con-man like Trump could so quickly and easily destroy familiar bonds, and remembering incidents of my past, I now put much more stock into the Treebeard philosophy.
“Side? I am on nobody’s side, because nobody is on my side, little Orc.”
Treebeard
One thing about my personality is that I am intensely loyal but have learned this trait is extremely rare. There are degrees in the strength of relationships but there is always something out there which can sever the bonds. In the past five years I’ve learned that an orange con-man can easily do it, especially for the less intelligent. I’ve learned that a pandemic which kills people and the resulting vaccines can do it. Religious belief has done it for centuries. Money can do it. Time can even do it as former bonds break down just like everything else.
Well, that is enough for this morning.
