i didn’t mean to come here
I am driving and I pass my intended destination. But before I realize it and have the desire to turn around, I have to stop for a lot of cars turning left out of another street onto mine. Not because there is a stop sign, but because they won’t stop and they all seem cartoonishly sad. I realize it is a funeral procession about half way through. There is now a passenger in my car, she seems like one of those oddly sad people from the procession. When we are finally moving again, she tells me her destination is just a little farther. Funny, I don’t remember agreeing to give her a ride. We drive on this road that snakes further and further into the woods, all the while she’s urging me, just a little further. Then, we reach some kind of road construction, or that’s how my brain rationalizes it, a huge pit in the road. She points, past the pit, to an obviously abandoned cafe. “There, I’ll walk,” great, because if you thought this car could magically float over the pit, you were mistaken! I am a little pissed now because I had no intention of coming out here. There is a house nearby the road, which I am trying hard not to look at. I mean, I really didn’t mean to come here. I place a quick phone call to my father who tells me it’s such a shame, because he changed the music, just for me, and it does sound like he’s having a great time. I tell him that I didn’t mean to come here. I end up in the house anyway, either intentionally not looking any further at my surroundings, or somehow knowing that I should not look. The people seem nice enough, and they know that I can’t go home now. So they offer me a bed, which terrifies me. I am lying in it, knowing that my car is gone, that I cannot leave, and that there is something out there. I get up, from some brief nightmare, irrationally intending to walk calmly off the property and back to my safe home, where things are normal. I am met on the porch by the couple’s young daughter, who just happens to have a beautiful face. She tells me not to look, that I won’t like it if I see it, that he’s feeding it. I couldn’t have seen it anyway! I walked out the door with my back toward the outside! I remind her, implore her, I didn’t mean to come here. But I turn anyway, and she guides me past the thing I shouldn’t look at, she takes me to a largish pond, beyond the driveway. It’s man-made, and full of potted water plants which obscure the bags and containers at the bottom of the water. She kneels at the edge of the water, her knees in some gritty, sandy dirt. She tells me she wants to show me something. From the greenish water she pulls a bag, from inside the bag, she pulls a cat, it is black and has white hairs on it’s face. This animal is very happy to see her, it’s purring wildly, kneading her arms and rubbing its face up and down the sleeves of her shirt. I see other things in the water now, moving. A snake larger than I have ever imagined slips around near the surface. Revulsion nearly overcomes me, when I realize that I am in plain view of the thing I shouldn’t see, and I still don’t see it. But I know it is there, too large to be hidden, but hidden somehow, by the sheer impossibility of it. And I wrench my attention back to the beautiful, writhing cat in her arms. “She is so beautiful, isn’t she? Look at her… she likes you.” I am petting the cat and surely, her purr is growing louder and her crazy green eyes are closing lazily. I cannot imagine why she must be hidden, in the water like that. “She really likes you… she has beautiful eyes, look at her eyes,” the girl says, and I do. But not the green eyes I remembered, they were filling with black, inky black that consumed the pupil. I barely have time to react, “she’s leaching you, she really likes you.” My hand is stuck firmly where it was petting the cat’s face, and the vibration from her purr is making it’s way into my chest. It tingles and is intensely pleasurable, like some kind of orgasm. Before long, my entire arm is nothing but black, furry, purring mass.
Invisible monster that you should not/cannot/do not want to see sounds like a repressed memory that is close to surfacing.
Weirdly enough, I had a dream with a cat coming out of a bag last week that I considered blogging about. “Letting the cat out of the bag” — it’s a visual pun, a bad dream joke. That’s a pretty easy one to spot. It’s an echo, too, of your beautiful dream-girl who wants “to show [you] something.” This dream is all about communication, or the pressing need for it. That territory of your dreamworld that you don’t want to go to is exactly where you need to be to receive the message.
Want to add that ‘the cat’ and the growing, un-seeable monster are two symbols for the same thing. This is some memory that your conscious mind views as a threat, and so there’s a sort of buffering process going on. On the one hand, your unconscious wants to just spit it out as this huge, grotesque reality, but your conscious mind is a skilled avoider. You walk backwards to avoid the sight of it, and even when it is in front of you, you are blind to it. And so the monster becomes reduced to something non-threatening — the cat. The cat is brought forth from somewhere deep in your head. Not only is it ‘bagged’ in darkness, it’s also beneath the water. Water is the most common representation of the unconscious we have. It’s universal. The suggestion to look into the cat’s eyes is another ‘push’ from the unconscious to see what needs to be seen (i.e. the monster). The ‘leeching’ you get from the cat is paralleled by the ‘feeding’ of the monster, who is growing bigger and, I imagine, no longer willing to be shoved down into some deep, dark well of your head. The cat is a censored version of the monster, but even this soft, cuddly version of your repressed memory becomes threatening to you, which suggests that your conscious mind is not ready to receive the message. This is a great dream, because we get to see both sides of you essentially having it out. Your unconscious is screaming “SEE! GODDAMN YOU! SEE!” while the waking part of you, the dream-you, is doing everything in its power to avoid it.
This makes sense. yet, I don’t know what to do about that.
I have decided to try to go back there, and see what it is I wasn’t “supposed” to see. If there’s something there, I’m going to start looking for it.
Well, I think you were ’supposed’ to see it, but the conscious mind has this habit of defending itself against information that could be detrimental to its well-being. I can’t guess at the motivations of the unconscious here, if something like that can have motivations. Perhaps its seeking to strike some kind of balance, or perhaps something in your waking world has triggered this memory. It wants to push its way into your consciousness, but it’s finding resistance. Probably just your everyday traumatic childhood experience that was never properly dealt with. This is the time period (late 20s, early 30s) when things of that nature come back to either make peace with the conscious mind or fall back into the unconscious to become fodder for our neuroses.
seems like I’d have blocked out half my childhood if it were just everyday trauma. I can’t even imagine how awful it must be, if I didn’t block out the rest of it, especially my mom and dad holding me down to extract cotton from my sinus with a long tweezer. That was fucking traumatic, yet I remember it clearly. And I was not even 2. Same with all the other fucked up shit that happened to me. Maybe I witnessed a murder or something… I can’t figure it out.