I just woke up from a bad dream...

No really, I did just wake up from a bad dream. Sometimes I'm just absolutely appalled by what my subconscious mind can drum up. This was something horrifying about some old woman living in... the Turkish countryside? I mean, I don't even know anything about Turkey except that it struggles to maintain a secular goverment and it was petitioning to join the EU a couple of years ago. I certainly don't know finer points like if it has monkeys, but I'm getting ahead of myself... The old woman lived a basic 3rd world existence. But, let's get back to the beginning.

Anyway, the dream actually starts here in the U.S., in Oregon where I live, in a small town like Woodburn or something. It starts with a call for help on TV to find a mountain lion who would nurse a litter of 9 kits whose mother had never returned for them. I was thinking they should be taken to the zoo, but there was some reason why that wasn't possible (of course, otherwise the horrible, old, monkey lady wouldn't have entered the dream). So, then they cut to footage (except that I'm seeing it as if I were there -- it doesn't appear on a TV screen in the dream), of this horrible old woman who insists that they have to go to the monkeys. I don't know what the monkeys would do with the kits, the dream just forgets about the kits once the monkey lady comes in.

She lives her life with monkeys milking them and harvesting their fur. Did I mention that monkeys freak me out? They scare me. Anyway, the old woman wears those big, dark brown, woven type of robes that cover her from head to toe that my preconceived notions think are so very popular in the region. Oh, and I always dream in color. She sits squatting in a big-tent-like place that has hay covering the dirt floor and she just goes to the bathroom wherever/whenever and claims that this is how the monkeys do it and it is the best way because then you just have a lackey come and clean the hay. This is incidental -- she doesn't explain this in detail, it's just something that I glean from the scenario. I'm just elaborating here to add to the layers of how disturbing this was.

She's got a medium-dog-sized monkey wrapped up in a thick, dingy, white blanket and it's squirming so she keeps having to overpower it and reposition it in between times when she yanks out handfuls of its grayish hair, which causes bloody, hairless spots to appear and then there's another woman (this one also robed, but young) who silently squats across from her and pours a clear liquid from a clear, plastic bottle on the monkey's wounds creating a flood to rinse away the blood into the towel in between bouts of when the old crone rips out another handful of hair. The monkey screams and tries to get free every time this happens. Since this is TV, all I can do is watch in horror and feel impotent and sad for the torture that this poor monkey endures. The crone obviously has no issues with it for she just goes on ripping out handfuls of hair as this is her vocation. Again, this is a dream, people. Not real.

I woke up very distressed and disturbed. I mean, that's fucking sick. My newly awoken self was dwelling on what the liquid in the bottle was. I decided it must just be water because if it were anything else I think the reaction would have been much worse. And then, because I'm me and I analyze and problem-solve by nature, I started thinking about why the hell the old crone had to harvest monkey hair that way. I was vaguely thinking about how much suffering could be spared if she just had the right tools to do the job and how to communicate that and get some shears over there.

And then I really awoke and decided that that dream sucked and that I'd think about my TV character crushes, instead. But I want to talk about them in another post because I don't want to sully them by putting them in this one.

In an attempt to attach meaning to this dream (because I know that Jungian analysis states that everything in the dream is an aspect of one's self, and this was a pretty disturbing dream), I googled around a bit. The best site I found is this dream dictionary and it says (among many other things) that emotions are important. My emotions were/are: disgust, distress, horror, confusion, compassion, impotence, anger. Yikes, that's quite a list.

Symbolic meanings given are (excerpted directly from the site "http://unclesirbobby.110mb.com/dreamdictionaryo.php"):

KITTEN a gut feeling fresh in your mind
KITTEN a strong sense about your direction in life
KITTEN new ideas and confidence in yourself as a woman
KITTEN newly aquired magical and pyschic powers
LION strong and courageous - really standing up to someone
LION very ferocious - intimidating - someone who scares you
LION something or someone you would rather avoid
LIONESS female courage
(I couldn't find Mountain Lion reference and I couldn't find what it means that there were nine kits, although the number 9, as far as I could tell, universally has spirital or prayerful meaning. Whatever, though. The kits resolved themselves and while they started out as a point of interest in the dream, the did not end up as the focus.)

BOTTLE current experiences and thoughts
BOTTLE depends on whats in it - your thoughts
BOTTLE looking for inspiration from some external source - a need for stimulation
BOTTLE your thoughts in a bottle / your courage
DEFACATE purify your thoughts by through bad emotions
HAY hard work
MONKEY devious character
MONKEY monkeying around
OLD LADY feeling old and tired or run down with illness
OLD LADY using your own intuitive experience and gut feeling
POUR flowing freely
ROBE formally dressed
ROBE loose and adaptable image
ROBE mytholigical struggle
TENT new and fresh environment
TENT temporary home
TENT temporary response
WATER BOTTLE emotional thoughts on some remark
WATER emotional resolve - motivation
WATER flows of energy both good and bad - your ability to motivate yourself for something
WATER focus your mind and energy to some creative project or emotional issue
WATER trying to use the power of the unconscious mind to work out some problem
(Uh, duh.)

The end result is I don't know what the hell that was all about, but I must really be working on something in the ol' psyche...

Now about those TV crushes...