Dreams

I had another amazing dream last night but I will keep that one private. But I was thinking about dreams today. I'm staying at my parents house with satellite TV. When I'm here I watch way more TV than I should. The first thing I did when I woke up was turn on the boob tube. How happy I was to see the Outer Limits on. With over five hundred channels there's a pretty good chance that every show ever made will be on at least once in a day. I'll relate this to dreams eventually.

I have formulated a theory about dreams over the years, although recently, I found out that Jung developed a similar theory 50 years before I was born. I haven't read Jung so maybe I am on to something new but I doubt it. My first memory is a dream. I know I was younger than two because my brother wasn't born yet. In this dream I was a little baby wrapped in swaddle cloth, laying helplessly in a crib. My parents were cave people. I was a cave baby. We lived in a small clay hut in the middle of nowhere. The weather was gray and dreary and time felt new. My mom spent her days cooking over the fire pit inside the hut, in the dirt floor. My dad was a hunter who came home with game for my mom to cook.

While my mom was cooking in this dream and my dad was tending to his tools, a green, goblin-like monster appeared from the mist of the wilderness and attacked our homestead. My dad fought the monster but was slain. The beast then killed my mom-- making me an orphan. It was a nightmare! A nightmare that has stayed with me for all these years. But I've always found it amazing that as a young child, I was able to have such a detailed dream. The narrative and emotions are what I would expect in a child's dream--The parents as caring providers and a "boogie man" threatening to take away that security. It's also odd that my childhood dreams frequently had a caveman theme. I'd dream about dinosaurs and monsters coming from out of the wilderness. Maybe we are born with the memories, instincts, and fears of our primitive ancestor, and as individuals, we live the evolution of humanity, starting as cave people and moving towards modernity (and beyond?).

Maybe today instead of a caveman my unconscious has moved into Greek times, or a 8th century Europe, maybe Babylon...Lately I've seen a lot of bronze in my dreams--and intricately carved water fountains. So my theory is that the individual unconscious and the social unconscious are intertwined perhaps even the same.

How this relates to the Outer Limits is this: I was watching it and I realized "wow! This episode is the same as my caveman dream." A green goblin like alien crashed in the forest and ended up killing a boy's dad in a fight just like in my dream. The same stories are being repeated over and over and over again and I am not sure where they come from. Today we are telling the, goblin-emerging-from-the-wilderness story, except instead of predators or bogeymen bludgeoning us with stone tools, the bad guys are space aliens harming us with space age technology. The stories are never-the-less identical.