I want to think out loud for a bit about some recurring dreams I’ve been having for a long time. When I look at the scattered notes that I’ve left myself about my dreams, it seems like I’m often dreaming about…
- getting thrown into prison for a crime I didn’t commit
- being a child who gets punished by parents, teachers, other adults or authority figures
I seem to get nightmares when I sleep early. I seem to find myself experiencing “child-like thoughts“.
I want to fix this, and I am very open and agnostic to any method or process to solving this.
I think if I really meditate on it and let the dust settle, the core issue at the heart of it all is my relationship with authority. I’m talking about power, control, autonomy, leadership, decision-making. I’ve had a dysfunctional relationship with authority ever since I went to school, and I think it was compounded by the fact that my girlfriend’s family didn’t approve of our relationship. (We’ve been married 7 years now.)
So, how do I fix this? I don’t have the answers, but I have some ideas. A couple of friends have told me that they’ve experienced some form of progress or development in several ways. Some stopped getting certain kinds of dreams when they made changes in their life. Others have gotten better at making sense of a certain kind of dream as meaning something that’s relevant to the present circumstances. I think I can do both of those things.
So. My hypothesis is that my nightmares are rooted in my relationship with authority. I am the primary authority in my own life, I get to decide what I do.
- I no longer have a school that I have to go to, and I’m no longer beholden to my parents the way I was as a child.
- I don’t even have a boss anymore since I left my job over a year ago – although my relationship with my boss was always great.
- My wife is my partner – I have sometimes in the past fallen into a silly pattern of projecting my anxieties and worries onto her, and seeing her as some sort of naggy authority in my life. (I think this is something that’s also conditioned from mainstream media and wider culture, and I think it’s something to be interrogated and picked apart.)
- I do have military commitments every year or so – and this is a source of anxiety and frustration for me. When I went for reservist training earlier this year, I had to shave and cut my hair, and this made me quite upset. But this is something that I’m not going to be able to change as long as I’m a Singaporean citizen, so I’m going to choose to approach it as a sort of meditative practice. It’s an opportunity for me to practice all of the things I know I need to practice in order to be able to better handle adversity in life.
All of that is just context… the main thing I think is basically this – and I’ve stated this before, but it’s a truth I keep in a box – my relationship with authority was so dysfunctional that I ended up carrying it over to my relationship with myself.
(At this point I switched to tweeting on my alt. I’ll copy paste here:)
I’ve thought about this a lot and spent almost a million words exploring in circles around it, behind it, etc… and I think my core/central challenge in life is this:
my relationship with authority is dysfunctional, and this spills over into my relationship with myself.
I wasn’t sure before if this was really the *main* thing or the *tightest* bottleneck. seemed like it could be a bunch of other things. but I’ve experimented, tested etc and now I am confident when I say it. both my adhd and bad sleep are connected to this, amongst other things.
i’m pretty excited about being clear with myself about this. I think I know what to do to fix this, or at least make substantial progress now that I’m pretty clear about just how foundational, fundamental this is.
I know intellectually that authority isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I don’t know it in my gut I think there are other things that I’ve closed this gap on – things like “we should be kind, not needlessly combative” – that’s something I integrated fairly recently (~5 years).
I’ve written about this before, but even here the angle is slightly off. what I’m not articulating front-and-center is that I have been conditioned to be averse to following anybody’s instruction, including my own.
I used to be a picky eater, and I fixed that. so I know I can fix this too. gotta thank past-visa(s) for that.
So. What’s next? What’s the first thing I have to do to begin to rehabilitate my relationship with myself as an authority? It’s 247am now and it’s tempting to say, quite simply, “I gotta go to bed”. Well, yeah. I’m going to do that. But what else? What next? I think I’ve been wanting to do daily reviews and things like that for a long time, and that’s the thing that I need to do, but I haven’t gotten around to doing it because at some level the idea of having more of a process just seems troubling, painful, upsetting.
But I know that I’ve been doing more pullups because of my pullup project – and so I’m going to do something similar – I’m going to start keeping count of each review that I do. 1000 small acts of self-leadership. And through that I will rehabilitate my relationship with myself and with authority.
It’s strange, I feel excited even though nothing *technically* changes dramatically. I just have a slightly, oh-so-slightly different frame on how to think about this. But I feel like it’s already made a difference to me. We’ll see. I should really go to sleep now. Good night Visa!
Final thought: how will I know that I’m making progress? I don’t actually need to worry about that. Let’s get up to 100 acts first.