Today's post relates to this entry in my dream journal maboroshi no yume.
I'm honestly not sure of where the actual imagery in the dreams comes from. However, a lot of the occurrences in the dreams remind me a lot of my daily life.
In the first dream I'm acting as a critic of a space. I actually play this role a lot in my waking life -- giving people my opinion about things. It's not usually a space, architecture, etc. It's usually more like art, business strategy, politics, etc.
In the second dream I meet up with one of my friends, an art dealer with whom I haven't spoken in about a year.
When I first met my art dealer friend, back in 2015, she had just started up her gallery after the previous owner passed away. The space the gallery in was small, kind of rundown. The front area lacked heating and air conditioning. And the storage area for the art was a mess.
I helped my friend create a business plan for her gallery. My friend and her team got really serious and in a pretty short time did a lot of incredible stuff to make their gallery successful. They moved to a much nicer space.
The strange "grocery store" in my first dream is probably the first location of that art gallery. The "groceries" are obviously works of art -- not in a bad way. Products are products sometimes. That's all that means.
I stopped talking with my gallerist friend because she treated me in a pretty shady and shaky way after I'd done a lot and devoted a lot of my time and effort toward helping her gallery. But I don't really want to talk about that.
Anyway -- this is kind of the story of my social life. Even in the business world, I've helped a lot of people build their careers, turn around their businesses, build the sales side of their business almost from scratch, and get their businesses sold. But it always seems like people find the most underhanded and passive-aggressive ways to kick me out the door once they've gotten what they want from me. I have a lot of things in life I can feel proud of. But a lot of people other than I have the money to show for it.
Nowadays I'm getting more and more involved in helping people in other social pursuits. And I think some specific things that have happened over the past couple days have seriously gotten me thinking about how involved I want to get in these things. I don't want to walk myself back down the path of helping people out and then getting screwed over in underhanded and passive-aggressive ways.
In the second dream, my gallerist friend carried me for a while over the field we were trying to cross quickly. Then my gallerist friend got tired, and I carried her the rest of the way. I feel like the wish-fulfillment component of my dream was sort of making my relationship with my gallerist friend into more of a give-and-take.
The patience and empathy component at the end of my dream is also something where I realize... a lot of people in the art world, even people who have a lot of fame, don't make a lot of money. And so, while they put on this act of being intelligent, smug, sophisticated -- whatever they think the situation calls for -- it's usually just an act, and there's a lot of struggle underneath it.
Sometimes it is good just to play along with people's acts. Play their game. Not because it helps you at all. But, first of all, because it just lifts them up and gives them hope. If you play their game, it makes them feel like other people will play their game -- i.e. that all of this struggle will end in success. But, second, you might not realize it, but they are probably already playing your game, too. They're buying into whatever your fantasies are. So you should reciprocate and buy into whatever their fantasies are.
Anyway -- these are all ideas I've been struggling with in my waking life. So it's no surprise that I see them pop up in my dreams, too.
The lifting each other up part of the dream definitely reminds me of the old Christian story of "Footprints in the Sand," which I think is ubiquitous nowadays.
And while that's always been a key story for my psychic life, I think I've come to understand that it's more practical for me to think about how human relationships would work in this case. And I don't think it would be that one person would always carry one other person whenever that person has troubles. Instead, the two people have to work at carrying each other. If people don't give back to you, and you're doing all the heavy lifting, you're probably in a shitty relationship.
No comments:
Post a Comment